What is great about Anki, and what wears people down
Anki earned its cult status honestly: it is powerful, free on most platforms, endlessly configurable, and now schedules with FSRS. If you have the patience to run it, it works. The friction is the setup and the upkeep:
- Building cards is slow. Good language cards want a sentence, a translation, audio, maybe an image. Hand-made, that is minutes per word.
- Shared decks are a gamble. Someone else's 5,000-card deck is full of words you don't need and formatting you didn't choose.
- Configuration is a rabbit hole. Note types, card templates, intervals, add-ons: powerful, but a lot to learn before you learn any Swedish.
- Bare word lists lack context. A card that's just word → translation is exactly the kind that's hardest to keep.
Same engine, no busywork
Smisli runs the same modern FSRS scheduling, so the memory science is identical: reviews land the moment a word is about to fade. What changes is everything around it. You don't build cards; you read. Tap a word in a Swedish text and Smisli captures it with the sentence it came from, a translation, pronunciation audio, and an AI example. The card is made, in context, in one tap.
Recalling a word strengthens it far more than re-reading it, and a word saved inside its sentence is easier to recall than one stripped to a bare gloss.
Roediger & Karpicke (2006); Webb (2008)Side by side
| Anki | Smisli | |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduler | FSRS | FSRS (same science) |
| Making cards | You build each one | Tap a word, card makes itself |
| Context | Whatever you type in | The real sentence you read it in |
| Audio & examples | Add-ons / manual | Built in, automatic |
| Setup | Note types, templates, add-ons | None. Open and read |
| Where words come from | Decks you find or make | Text you actually want to read |
| Install | Desktop / mobile apps | Adds to home screen in a tap |
When to keep Anki, when to switch
If you love tuning your own system, or you're memorising something that is not a language (anatomy, law, capital cities), Anki is still the right tool. But if you're learning a language and you'd rather spend your minutes reading and reviewing than designing note templates, Smisli gives you the same scheduling with none of the maintenance. Many people use both: read and capture in Smisli, and reserve Anki for the handful of decks they genuinely want to hand-craft.
Start with the method, or see how many words you actually need.