Ibiza coast. August 2025.
I went through a phase where I Anki’d every useful-seeming Japanese word I came across as well as all of the standard 2,136 kanji. I was teaching English in Japan at the time, which meant I was thinking about language learning all day. I’d arrived with no knowledge of the language and a resolve to be able to read a contemporary fiction novel on my flight home, so I felt I needed all the help I could get. That’s when I found Anki.
Fig. 1: My idea of a good time. Reviewing Anki cards.
Anki is a spaced-repetition flashcard app that makes you review things just before you’d forget them. As of today I have 98,005 reviews in Anki, enough to understand its power and to distill a few learning principles. All this set me up well to understand that the future of learning would change when in late 2022 the LLM kicked down the door, tracked mud across the carpet, ate everything in the fridge, and demanded more snacks.
Some Learning Principles I Picked Up and How I Applied Them
What I discovered through my somewhat obsessive Japanese experiment isn’t really about Japanese at all; these principles apply to almost any kind of learning. Anki put them to work in one way, as I’ll show next, but the real story is that they can now be pushed far beyond what Anki made possible.
Rule 1: If you are having fun, you learn faster
If you are having fun, you are engaged, which means you are focused and you will automatically retain things better. Fun might come from novelty, frequent progress, and an alignment of direction with where you want to go. Things like frustration, stagnation, and repetition are boring, and should be avoided at all costs.
Anki here succeeds with direction and progress. Making relevant cards and applying them immediately made the process of learning very enjoyable because I was quickly rewarded with the feeling of progress.
Rule 2: You need to be challenged but not too challenged
... continue reading