FWIW, I learned JP to a really good level over the last 5 years using Anki. Of course, immersion helped a lot too.
I have deleted a lot of cards time to time. At some point, things just stick so well you never forget them. So, what you’re trying to do isn’t impossible.
By the way, I also know people who did what I did in like a year using Anki + outside input. (I don’t have enough time so it took me longer).
Are you using a deck someone else created? Unless your deck is made to match a textbook or something you are using, quit it and create your own cards based on whatever you are learning from (textbook, videos, whatever). Take words/sentences/whatever straight from your books/movies/whatever and look at the relevant parts of the books/movies/whatever regularly, not just once.
The fact that you are having trouble remembering new cards suggests that you aren’t getting enough exposure to the new material outside of Anki. If you have cards based on whatever you are studying outside of Anki, you will already be familiar with the material once it comes up as a new card in Anki, and it will be easier to remember.
Do you find it easy to remember your relearning cards after 10 min? If not, consider changing your relearning step to something less than 10 minutes.
If you have to spend minutes per new card, more learning steps will likely also help you; you might even need an insane number of learning steps. I for example have 15 learning steps for new Chinese flashcards, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes to several hours.
There is no rule of thumb with Anki reviews; your number of reviews depends on your personal factors: your memory, your familiarity with the material, etc.
So, at the risk of diverting this conversation to “how hard is Anki to use”, this sounds a lot like “you actually, even with FSRS can’t just use Anki, you need to spend a lot of time tweaking it and feeling bad about not remembering things until you get it to work for you”.
(Also: I don’t think I’ve had necessarily 10 min gaps between relearning cards always - the last card, for example, is always shown repeatedly until you get it right, yes? I’ve tried “working around” that by going away from Anki when there’s only a few left and coming back in 10 mins, but…)
The thing is: using Anki eats into the total language learning time I have per day. So, by definition, it means that I’m not getting as much exposure to material outside of Anki - indeed, having to spend approaching an hour on Anki each day recently means I am getting (almost) no exposure to material outside of Anki, since I don’t have infinite time for language learning.
If it turns out that I need to spend an hour of exposure to the target language and 30 mins with Anki for the 30 mins to be useful… then that’s already blown my time budget and I might as well not use Anki [as I was before…]… which suggests I should just give up trying to learn this language too.
I’m also not just having problems remembering new cards - I’ve lapsed on words I am pretty sure I should know (which resets them) a few times, and it usually takes one or two iterations to remember them properly again at that point.
Broadly, as with the last time I tried using Anki (about a decade ago, when I stuck with it for 2 years of trying to use it to help learn Japanese grammar and vocab and retained nothing), mostly what this experience is doing is making me incredibly demoralised and convinced that I can’t learn anything.
Increasing your exposure outside of Anki should decrease the amount of time you need to use Anki.
The outside exposure is more important than Anki, so, if you really did need to quit Anki to focus on that, then you should do it (or you could just decrease the number of new cards per day).
Anki is just a memorization tool; it cannot be the primary study tool. You could binge books, movies, music, TV, etc. in your target language and you’d still be doing SRS even without Anki.
FSRS is just another algorithm, nothing special. No tool can help you remember something you see/hear only rarely.
If you don’t have enough study time, put podcasts or shows on your smartphone, audio player, whatever and listen during your commute, exercise time, etc. Make sticky notes, posters, or giant flashcards and hang them up around your home or office to learn passively. Make your desktop background a list of vocab.
In my experience, the most efficient study method is to get a textbook that comes with a huge amount of audio and examples and binge the audio while doing other stuff.
I tried the “binge audio” last time when I tried to learn Japanese, and I didn’t find it worked, to be honest.
And of course, I can’t reduce the number of new cards per day to a “sustainable” level, because then [as I discussed above] apparently take 3 years to finish the deck, which is too long.
Sorry everyone, but trying Anki again has just completely burst any remaining enthusiasm I had for learning this language, like it did last time.
I don’t think you need to do a lot of tweaking. Many people also use shared decks and they can work just fine if you understand the cards.
It’s a setting called learn ahead limit. Set it to 0 and Anki won’t behave like that.
I think you might need some specific advice and I’ll mention everything that made my experience much smoother:
prop:d>0.9) if you use FSRS which you do. You can always unsuspend these cards later and learn when you’re at a higher level and you’ll find them much easier than before.One last thing. Do you setence mine? Getting your cards from things you strongly relate to helps. So, if you saw a word in a novel and you can imagine the context of it vividly everytime the card comes up you’ll never forget it. FYI there are tools that automate this process for you so it’s not really hard to do.
Okay, but given it’s clearly negative to have Anki ignore it’s own retention spacing rules… why is this a toggle that defaults to off? There can’t be that many people who are using Anki for sessions that are long enough to allow all new cards a proper 1m → 10m → ?? progression.
So, I want to be clear that I’m mostly depressed and upset at myself - Anki is just exposing that I can’t learn languages like it did last time (the last time a decade ago, after 2 years of trying to use Anki to help with vocab retention I got to having to grind through 2 hour sessions a day with it - yes, with less than 20 new cards a day - and still wasn’t retaining anything).
But since you’re offering suggestions, some comments numbered to match your suggestions:
5 and 7. The thing is, again, some of the hard cards are also pretty useful and important cards! Plus, I have so many of them that I’m going to basically be throwing away 50% of the cards I’m trying to learn each day…
A lot of the outside of Anki things are just displaced by the Anki thing - as I mentioned above, once I ended up now in this situation where Anki reviews take 45-60 minutes a day already, I don’t have any time to do anything non-Anki.
Yesterday I was so down about the entire thing that I quit Anki after only about 24 minutes and couldn’t bring myself to do anything else in the language at all - when I say Anki is demoralising me, this is what I mean.
Here it from the main dev (I suggested setting this to 0 before):
So yeah…
Doesn’t matter. Suspend them. Or come with a mnemonic if that works for you.
I don’t think you should suspend new cards like that, new cards do take more time and effort than others but sometimes they get pretty easier later on.
Anki clearly isn’t for everyone. If you feel it doesn’t work for you, you can try with other methods. You can find a lot of different methods online. Find one that suits you. And of course, you probably have some idea what works for you or what doesn’t right?
By the way, here’s a nice guide for language learning that shows the way (and it talks about Anki too): Simplified Roadmaps Archive - Refold
With all due respect – this seems like the problem. You sound like you’re stuck in a Anki-will-never-work loop.
Anki is useful for what it’s useful for – memorizing things. For language learners, that mostly means expanding your vocabulary, or learning grammar rules. If you are expecting something different out of Anki, you will be very disappointed.
Anki is also not magic. You need to put in the work if you want to use it. If you’re already overwhelmed by the cards you’re studying, (as I said a couple days ago) you need to back way off on how many cards you’re seeing a day so you can focus on mastering this skill. That doesn’t mean you’ll be stuck at that pace forever, it just means that’s what works for you now.
But also – no one is forcing you to use Anki. If you’re not interested in devoting some of your daily language time to Anki – then don’t! 
There are lots of ways to learn, and you should use the ones that work for you!
Almost! I’ve tried and failed to learn multiple languages (5 in fact) over the past 20 years, via many different methods. What I have is incredibly low confidence in language acquisition, driven by basically every approach I’ve tried not really seeming to work for me - at best, I learn a technical understanding of the language, but fail to internalise vocabulary (via any method - Anki, active immersion, passive immersion, whatever) despite having in some cases put in consistently >1hr per day for months.
No, I’m expecting it to expand my vocabulary! Despite, again, being on this language for > 1 year, my vocabulary is clearly not sufficient - I can’t do any kind of immersion usefully - so I was hoping Anki would help.
Mostly, it’s just demonstrated to me how bad my vocabulary is… which isn’t Anki’s fault.
Right, but again: it’s been more than a year that I’ve been trying to learn this language. I shouldn’t be overwhelmed by these cards, since I should already know them since they’re not uncommon, and most languages (including the one I’m learning) have a pretty core central set of words.
This is a long thread so I only skimmed it. My wifedis Portuguese so I have been working on the language for the last 25 or so years. I only recently started making headway.
One que tion I have is for the new cards and learining steps, are you saying you know it after 10 minutes? Maybe adding another step an hour later would help. I even tried four hours after that. But I didn’t find that the extra step helped a whole lot.
I get the impression you are no learning the words initially.
With respect, if I take 25 years to make headway then I will be long past all the things I wanted to do with the language 
It’s frustrating that a lot of the language learning resources on the internet suggest 6 month - 2 year timelines for some kind of useful ability in (to be honest, most languages), and I’ve never found that to be even close to the case, even when putting in huge amounts of daily effort. [I don’t have the energy left to put in huge amounts of daily effort anymore, since it didn’t work the time I tried that for 2 years.]
I haven’t changed the learning steps - is there anything about learning step “best practice” anywhere? (I am going to file this along with the “Learn Ahead limit” problem as “Anki has unhelpful defaults” if this turns out to be a common issue.) I have tried to manually force some additional spacing by splitting the Anki session in two for each day, so there’s a longer delay for recall…
Honestly, though, I’ve also not been able to bring myself to think about learning my target language at all for the last 2 days, and I feel a lot better just giving up.
Learning a foreign language – especially on your own, with a self-determined curriculum, without a well-defined destination, and/or when you’re not in a full-immersion situation – is hard work. If that’s not something you enjoy doing, then by all means, you should stop!
If you’re talking about things like the FSI difficulty rankings/timelines – you should note that those come from the US State Department’s language school, so they are based on full-time study, like it’s your job (because it is your job – at least 23h of class-time per week plus outside study), with a focused language curriculum and a dedicated instructor. That’s not what you’re doing, so you shouldn’t expect those results.
If you’re talking about something else, I think you’ve just been lied to.
The default steps are set in such a way that they effectively demonstrate the system – there isn’t much science behind them. They won’t hurt you, but if they don’t work for you, you should change them.
The FSRS team has done the most examination of step data, and they’ve found that steps have little impact on long-term retention. One short step (maybe 2) is usually enough – how long a delay that should be mostly comes down to personal preference. You can add more, but keep in mind it will increase your workload.
There is one tool that can crunch all of your review history and help you figure out what step delays have worked well for you – it’s included in the FSRS Helper add-on.
I’m sorry you are having such a tough time. For me, my breakthrough started when I decided to stop ‘trying to learn’ Portuguese, and to really LEARN the language. I starting using multiple resources, and using anki to solidify the material. as mentioned above, Anki is designed to remember things, and learning things initially is much more difficult. For me, the most frustrating part about Portuguese (at least European Portuguese) is it’s often hard to understand the words. To make matters worse, I get frustrated too easily trying to listen to stuff I don’t understand. To help with this I found a few addons to make things easier. Not sure it would work with Japanese (I think that’s what you said your language is), but each note has 3 or 4 fields, and generates 5 cards. So I start by hearing the audio and then writing the text in Portuguese on the answer. I don’t see any of the other cards on the note until it’s mature. the translation is on the answer side, but that’s not what I’m testing. So if I don’t know it, I look at the translation. By the time the first card on the note is mature, the other cards are easier.
I’ve started tagging the cards with exactly where i learned them. So if I’m struggling, I can refer back to the lesson that taught me the word. for instance, ‘apenas’ is a word I keep forgetting. But it’s easier for me to remember when I think about the story of the boy ‘only’ watching guests from the stairs.
In any case, I wish you well. If you are not enjoying the process, then I think better to find a different program.
To be clear, I don’t mean “fluency”, I mean “some useful ability in the language”. There’s quite a few language learning websites that claim that - with an hour a day - you can get to “basic conversational fluency” or some other term that means “not really fluent but can get by” within a year - something like B1.
The more ambitious ones tend to make claims like “in less than 3 months” which absolutely does sound like they’re lying.
(It does look like some of them are just scaling the FSI numbers - which work out to 4.6 hrs a day if you assume they’re Mon-Fri classes - to “1 hr a day” and then assuming that the FSI is aiming for C1 or C2 so you’ll take less time to get to the low-B area. Others claim to be working from their personal experience.)
I would estimate that currently after 1 year, I am not even above A1.
Totally normal.