Best Practice for Structuring Flashcards for Long-Term Retention (Language Learning)

Hi everyone!

I’m currently using Anki for language learning (primarily Spanish and Japanese) and I’d love to hear how others structure their cards for maximum long-term retention, especially when juggling vocabulary, grammar, and context-based usage.

A few questions I have:

  • Do you recommend using cloze deletions or Q/A formats for grammar rules?

  • What’s your approach to incorporating audio or example sentences for vocab cards?

  • Do you separate decks by topic (e.g. verbs, adjectives, idioms), or keep one master deck with tags?

I’m looking to refine my system to avoid burnout and reduce daily review time while keeping my retention high.

IN

Thanks in advance :folded_hands:
— jhonnmick

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. For me, almost all of them are Q/A notes. I find myself applying the same rules here as anywhere else – is the purpose of your card to memorize the rule, or to practice recognizing the rule, or to practice applying the rule?

In my collection I only have a handful of truly memorize-the-rule notes/cards[1] – which work as Basic Q/A notes. The majority of my grammar cards are structures that I want to recognize[2] – which are generally Basic+reversed.

But I don’t personally find much use in Anki for grammar “practice” cards. They might be better as cloze, but exactly what will fit into that category is probably language-specific.

For audio – native speaker recorded audio is the very best option. It’s also the very hardest to get and incorporate into Anki! TTS (either a “reader” or pre-generated audio clips) can be good, but as a learner, you have to find a service/voice that is reliable for your language. You might be able to find that using built-in TTS. Otherwise, I recommend the HyperTTS add-on for accessing other service/voices – and it’s the best option for pre-generating audio clips. Pro-tip – whatever you do, put the audio file in a separate field from the text. You’ll have much more flexibility later on in designing cards.

I only use example sentences on the back of my cards – just to make sure I understand how this word might function when I use it. [But I acknowledge there can be a great rationale for having them be hidden as hints on the front of the card.]

Just one deck is good. You can use Tags for part-of-speech and categories of words. Ask yourself – will I almost always want to study this grouping of cards on their own? Then that’s a deck/subdeck. Otherwise, Tags are more flexible. Adding/Editing - Anki Manual


  1. Ex: How is “-ler” [“onlar” için kişi eki] different than other person markers? For verbs? For nominals? ↩︎

  2. Ex: __ bir şekilde || __ bir biçimde || __ bir hâlde
    [these turn adjectives into adverbs] ↩︎

I separate my cards into decks based on what I am learning.

  1. Vocabulary deck, which has cards that can be reversed and contains words and special phrases and their meaning in your native language.
  2. Grammar deck. This one has two types of cards. Rules which are articulated as simply, but completely, as possible. Some of the rules might consist of a table of Cloze options for e.g. the complete table of possible forms of the Latin word for “this”. Second type of cards (often using a different Note Type) has examples of grammar points in use in sentences. These sentences either have to be translated completely, or there may be some Cloze options depending on the form of the verb or the declension of the noun.
  3. Exercises from a text book that I am using. These cards can often be reversed and consist of the sentences in the exercises and their translations.
  4. Sometimes I create permanent filtered dicks (i.e. create a custom deck and change its name): one for all the new cards expected for the day, and one for all the cards being learnt or reviewed. Thus I ony have two decks to study, even though each has several other decks “inside” it. I just rebuild those custom decks each morning, then study them. NB I add some special characters to the beginning or end of the name of these custom decks, so they stand apart from the rest.
  5. Lastly, if you are studying more than one language at once, you must set up some differentiation between your learning of those decks, otherwise there will be cross-contamination between the decks and you’ll forever be using the Spanish word for ‘grapefruit’ in Japanse, for example. I’d study them at a separate time, in a separate location, and perhaps with some different background music that belongs to each locale. You want your brain to remember what you are learning, but you want it to be stored separately.