Using Anki to Learn a Foreign Language: What Actually Matters

Reading a language and understanding it at speed are completely different skills. Here's how SRS and Anki bridge that gap — and how to use them without burning out.

There’s a gap that almost everyone hits when learning a foreign language.

You can read it, slowly. Given enough time and a dictionary, you follow the meaning. But when someone speaks at normal speed, or when you try to listen without pausing — nothing. The words disappear before your brain can process them.

That gap isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a retrieval speed problem.

Reading lets you look things up. Listening doesn’t wait. To understand a language in real time, words need to surface automatically — not after searching, not after a moment’s thought. Immediately.

This is where Anki and spaced repetition become essential.

Why SRS works for language learning specifically

Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is the practice of reviewing information at increasing intervals — right before you’d forget it. Ebbinghaus mapped this out with his forgetting curve: most of what we learn disappears quickly unless it’s reinforced at the right moments.

Anki automates this timing. Cards you know well get pushed further out. Cards you’re shaky on come back sooner. The result is that each review session is efficiently targeted: maximum memory reinforcement per minute spent.

For language learning, SRS has a particular advantage. Vocabulary and expressions aren’t just “known” or “unknown” — they exist on a spectrum of accessibility. You might recognize a word when you see it, but not produce it under pressure. Repeated retrieval practice, which is what Anki enforces, moves knowledge from “I can look it up” to “it surfaces automatically.”

That’s the shift that makes real-time listening possible.

Start with frequency lists

When you open Anki for language learning, the first question is: what goes in?

Not everything is equally worth your time. Before chasing interesting vocabulary, it’s worth front-loading the most common words — the ones that appear everywhere and unlock comprehension across contexts.

For English learners, the NGSL (New General Service List) covers around 2,800 high-frequency words that account for roughly 90% of general English text. Most major languages have equivalents. Starting here means your early investment pays off broadly rather than deeply in one niche.

Thirty minutes of daily Anki practice is sustainable. At that pace, covering a frequency list in a year is realistic. The key isn’t session length — it’s consistency. Anki is designed for this: the daily review load stays manageable because completed cards don’t come back until they need to.

Connecting Anki to your notes

One friction point with Anki is the separation between where you encounter things and where you review them. You read something interesting, mean to add it to Anki, and don’t.

I solved this by connecting Obsidian to Anki via the Obsidian_to_Anki plugin. When writing notes, I wrap anything I want to remember with == marks. That syntax automatically converts to a cloze deletion card in Anki.

For example: SRS stands for ==Spaced Repetition System== becomes a card where the term is blanked out.

The result is that note-taking and memory work happen simultaneously. The “I’ll add this to Anki later” step disappears because there is no later — it happens as you write.

What’s worth putting in

Not everything belongs in Anki. My filter is roughly: would I benefit from seeing this more than once?

Vocabulary, pronunciation, idiomatic expressions, grammar patterns that don’t stick intuitively — these are worth it. A fact you only needed once isn’t. Keeping this filter sharp prevents deck bloat, which is one of the main reasons Anki habits collapse. When daily reviews take 45 minutes, people stop doing them.

On deck structure: I’ve found that one large deck outperforms many small themed decks. Mixed-context review — a vocabulary card, then a grammar card, then something from a completely different domain — strengthens recall better than blocked practice. Random interleaving is harder, and that difficulty is the point.

Adding audio

Reading and writing get you part of the way. Listening requires something more.

Anki supports audio attachments on cards. Adding pronunciation recordings — especially for tonal languages or languages with sounds absent from your native tongue — means you’re training auditory recognition alongside visual. Obsidian has text-to-speech plugins that let you listen to notes read aloud, which is useful for reviewing longer passages.

The gap between reading comprehension and listening comprehension doesn’t close on its own. It closes through repeated exposure to the sound of the language, at speed, until recognition becomes automatic.