Whenever I’m looking at new tools and learning methods (pitch training, SRS, sentence mining etc.) Anki is always the recommended go-to tool, I just didn’t personally get on with Anki. Any alternatives for effective learning that give similar features to Anki but without the (personally) mind-numbing UX?
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Anki is unfortunately pretty unique and there aren’t many applications (none that I know of in fact) that come even close in functionality and customisability. It’s still the de facto memorisation app for a reason. If you want something for free, I would recommend just biting the bullet and getting over the UX. I disliked it in the beginning too but it’s better than one thinks after you get used to it.
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Anki is really good but you have to spend time to understand how it works and how to customize it to your needs. I wish somebody would take the bones of Anki and write a good frontend for it. Under the hood it’s vastly better than basically everything else: the scheduling algo is better, the stats are better, it’s extremely configurable, it deals with leeches properly etc…
The only problem is that the UI is clunky and many of the defaults make no sense. Which admittedly is a pretty big problem.
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What about
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By now there is quite a range of alternatives, e.g. Torii, or some SRS built into other platforms like bunpro (which is mainly a grammar learning site) or JPDB (which provides you with the sets of words that you need to read a given book). You can find a bunch of information regarding these sites here in the forums as well. I haven’t tried any of them but if you hate Anki they might be worth a try. They all require some sort of payment though, afaik.
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My personal favorite is https://jpdb.io/
It’s got 2 advantages that make it (for me) better than the alternatives:
- Built in decks are linked to the book / manga / anime I want to understand, with words in order of appearance, so I don’t have to sentence mine and can focus on reading / watching. I think sentence mining is effective, but find doing it properly very time consuming. Being able to say “I want to learn every word in this book that appears at least twice and is in the 20,000 most common words” is exactly what I want.
- Will give you short intervals if you need them - I’ve never managed to set up Anki’s intervals to my liking. Whatever the backend algorithm is it does a good job of showing me stuff at the right intervals.
It does importing of Anki decks and other stuff but I’ve never used any of that…
The big downside is that it’s web based (including the app) so you need an internet connection to use it.
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Another 1+ for kitsun.io, by far my most useful Japanese study tool. Goes beyond just vocabulary study, as it can be used for grammar, reading, writing, listening, and speech and you have full access to design templates much like Anki within their platform to make that possible (and can import Anki decks too). The UI is great, a native phone app and deck edits are done in real time globally. You can do your own decks on MaruMori.io as well, which is more course-oriented like WK but integrates a lot more features (same developer as Kitsun), I think they have a goal to fully integrate known words between the two systems. Anki still has the best full customization if you want to invest time into it (which to me, does not make it free), but if you want an out-of-the-box polished interface/content with autonomy, I think Kitsun strikes the balance well.
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I’m really enjoying https://mochi.cards — it’s built around the Markdown format so it’s quick to create and edit cards with just enough flexibility. It’s also multi-platform, well-designed and really snappy.