It’s just a small thing. The intervals during review are inconsistent in German. Months are right, there is a space between the number and “Mo.” for “Monat”. But the minutes and days are wrong. It should be “20spaceMin.” and “17spaceT.” (Min. for Minuten and T. for Tage).
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I agree that it’s currently inconsistent and would look better with spaces, but as far as I know the official abbreviations are s, min, h, d, m and a. However, especially d and a are not that commonly used. So maybe something more intuitive would be more inclusive?
Let’s see what people think and then we can fix it on German (de).
How should units of time be abbreviated in the German localisation of Anki?
- Official: s, min, h, d, m, a
- More readable: Sek., Min., St., Ta., Mo., J. (or something similar; leave your suggestion)
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But with a space! And y instead of a
I’ve never seen this in German. You can argue for the formular symbol “a” or a regular abbreviation like “J.”.
But y “y”? 
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I vote for “Sek. Min. Std. T. W. Mon. J.”
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Yeah in German it’s not y, but the official abbreviations are in English. So:
- seconds: s
- minutes: min
- hours: h
- days: d
- weeks: w
- months: m
- years: y
The German abbreviations are strange, because they don’t exist in this way. Nobody uses “St.” for “Stunden”.
No, they’re derived from Latin. That’s why “a” stands for year and “w” doesn’t exist.
Yes, @hengiesel is right that it should be “Std.”.
“Std.” actually stands for “Stunde”. “Stunden” is abbreviated “Stdn.”.
These abbreviations are common in continuous text. A random example from Google Books:
Die Suspension wird bei Raumtemperatur fünf Stdn. langsam gerührt.
I’d use the Latin counterparts – they are standard and more concise.
Traditionally (if I remember well), no space was written between numeral and abbreviation; but Duden now seems to write them with spaces – e.g. “29 d 12 h 44 min 3 s”:
https://www.formel-sammlung.de/formel-Einheiten-für-Zeit-und-Länge-5-35-198.html
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I don’t care about the type of abbreviations as long as there is a space between the number and the abbreviations - this is scientific standard at university.
12h always gets me, when I’m learning, and I think it’s a number over 100 
Eight days later, we have a tie, so I’ve taken the liberty to implement the second option. Apart from what’s already been said, it’s much closer to the English strings in terms of length.
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Shouldn’t we turn to ISO-8601 instead of personal preference or even polling?
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Can you given an example of what this would mean? ISO-8601 specifies a numeric notation.
Besides, no German-speaking pupil uses ISO-8601 when they study elementary physics – see e.g. Zeiteinheiten umrechnen | www.gut-erklärt.de - YouTube. Cf. also Zeiteinheit – Wikipedia.
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That would mean that “in 12 hours” is PT12H. Not sure anybody would understand this. However I also doubt that many non university-educated people understand what 1 a means.
Talking about standards, I’d also like to mention DIN 1355-1, which was overhauled more than 40 years ago, but still has the most widely understood shortcuts: Sek., Min., Std., Tg., Wo., Mon. und J. .
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Darstellung
Hier verwendete Variablen, stets gegebenenfalls mit führenden Nullen:
J: Jahr (kann auch negativ oder Null sein)
…
M: Monat
…
W: Woche
…
T: Tag
…
h: Stunde
…
m: Minute
…
s: Sekunde
…
f = dezimale Bruchteile, in der Regel von Sekunden beliebiger Genauigkeit
Quelle: ISO 8601
Okay, then I misunderstood @ferophila’s idea. Still, these symbols are quite easy to understand (altough not fully german).
DIN 1355-1 is a great format in my opinion (just a bit more complex) 
My personal thinking is: Anki is supposed to target a general audience, which includes children and senior folk.
Polling in this thread is going to be heavily skewed. I assume at least of half of the voters are Anki contributors, and the rest are people who are deep enough into Anki to be spending their free time on the forum 
ISO 8601 is great, but it is intended for international communication, not for common usage. E.g. as a German I’d typically write my dates: “26.11.2021”, not 2021-11-26, or even 20211126.
That’s why I’d agree with @kleinerpirat, just in reverse order: J certainly beats a, but for general understandability I’d favor a bit more verbosity.
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I agree with you, but I think the letter count should also be taken into account. There’ve already been reports of German translations being cut off on Ankimobile because they’re too long. And if someone initially doesn’t know what “a” means, they should be able to figure it out in a matter of s. 
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