The best Anki settings for language learning

For a vocabulary deck, Anki's defaults are close to right. Set new cards/day to 10 to 20 depending on how much time you have, keep maximum reviews/day at about ten times that, leave the learning steps at 1m 10m and the relearning step at 10m, turn on FSRS with desired retention at 90%, and if your notes make cards in both directions, turn on sibling burying. The choice that matters most isn't a number: it's whether your cards test recognition or production.

The settings at a glance

All of these are in Deck Options. They belong to a preset, so every deck using that preset shares them.

New cards per day

This sets your workload more than any other setting, because each new card turns into about ten reviews a day later on. Start from the minutes you can spend on a bad day. Languages with a new script or many characters, such as Japanese and Chinese, usually need the lower end. How many new cards per day in Anki has the table and the reasoning.

Maximum reviews per day

Leave it at the default 200, or about ten times your new cards. Hitting it also stops new cards for the day, which keeps a backlog from growing. Don't lower it to make a backlog look smaller: the held-back cards wait and become overdue. See Anki maximum reviews per day, and what to do when reviews pile up if you're already behind.

Learning and relearning steps

Keep the defaults: 1m 10m for new cards and 10m after you forget one. If many new words fail at their first 1-day review, add one more same-day step, such as 1m 10m 1h. With FSRS, keep every step under a day. Anki learning steps and Anki relearning steps cover what each button does on these cards.

FSRS and desired retention

FSRS is Anki's newer scheduler, built in since version 23.10. It estimates how likely you are to remember each card and schedules it for the day that chance drops to your desired retention. Turn it on, press Optimize, and leave desired retention at 90% unless you have a reason to move it. Going much above 90% costs a lot more reviews for each point gained.

• What is FSRS in Anki?
• How to turn on FSRS in Anki
• Anki desired retention
• Anki FSRS settings explained

If you stay on SM-2, the old scheduler, the main things to know are ease, ease hell and the interval modifier. SM-2 vs FSRS compares the two.

Card direction: recognition or production

A recognition card shows the word in the language you're learning and asks for the meaning. A production card shows the meaning and asks for the word. Recognition is what reading and listening need, and it's quicker to review. Production is what speaking and writing need, and it's harder.

Anki's built-in note types handle this:

• Basic makes one card, front to back.
• Basic (and reversed card) makes two cards from every note, one in each direction.
• Basic (optional reversed card) makes the reverse card only for notes where you fill in the Add Reverse field.

Each direction is its own card with its own schedule, so studying both roughly doubles your reviews. A common approach is recognition for everything and production only for words you want to use, or practising production with sentence cards that show English and ask for the whole sentence. Sentence cards vs word cards and how to write good flashcards cover card design.

Bury siblings for two-way cards

Cards made from the same note are siblings, like perro → dog and dog → perro. Without burying, you can answer the second a few minutes after the first, from short-term memory, and learn nothing from it. Turn on Bury new siblings and Bury review siblings under Burying, and Anki hides a card's siblings until the next day once you've answered it. The same applies to cloze notes with more than one blank. Bury vs suspend in Anki explains all three switches.

Keep the deck's order

Frequency decks introduce the most common words first on purpose. Leave the new-card order settings in the Display Order section at their defaults so new cards come in the deck's order, rather than at random.

Leeches

A card that reaches 8 lapses is tagged as a leech. In a vocabulary deck it's usually a word that looks like another word, or a card with more than one possible answer. Rewriting it works better than drilling it again. See what is a leech in Anki.

How you rate matters too

Press Again when you've forgotten, even if the answer looks familiar once you see it. Hard counts as a pass, and with FSRS especially, using Hard for misses makes your intervals too long. See Hard vs Again and Again, Hard, Good, Easy explained.

Settings to leave alone

The easy bonus, the interval modifier and the maximum interval rarely need changing for a vocabulary deck; Anki easy bonus and interval modifier explains them. Anki's day starts at 4am rather than midnight, which you can change if you study late; see why Anki's day starts at 4am.

One language, one preset

If you study more than one language, give each its own preset so you can set its new cards separately. A kanji or character deck often deserves a lower new-card limit than a vocabulary deck in the same language. For language-specific setup, see Anki for Japanese and Anki for Spanish.

In Decks

Decks uses SM-2 with Anki's default steps (1m 10m to learn, 10m to relearn), and they can't be changed. It has no FSRS, bury or suspend. New cards per day is 20 by default and can be set from 5 to 100, or no limit, as one limit across all your decks. How spaced repetition works in Decks has the full schedule.