I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting to take my coding hobby more seriously at the time and hacking on Anki was a big part of that too. Thanks for all the hard work Damien and David Allison. I'm so grateful for the software you've worked on.
Agreed, Anki has really helped me with learning new languages. The creation of cards was always a slog though, so recently I've been playing with an Anki MCP server hooked up to Claude. I can dump my iTalki lessons in, or ask Claude to make cards based on a song I've been listening to, etc and get a bunch of relevant cards generated for me. It's honestly been kind of magic.
I've definitely hit walls with Anki over the years, and while the community decks help a lot, it's really nice to just tell Claude "can you take this assignment my tutor gave me, extract all the infinitive verbs, and then make cloze style cards for conjugations at an A1/A2 level?" and get it all done in a couple minutes.
In a way making the cards helps a ton to learn the content and decide what's really important to retain. On the other hand, it's such a slog that I usually end up relying on community cards, or skipping it altogether. The MCP idea may be a nice middle ground. Will give it a try for an upcoming exam.
Same for me. I was doing my PhD in another country and was just overwhelmed and disoriented at the sheer scale of information I suddenly had to remember and digest. Anki was on again/off again for me at first, but once I learned to edit and update the cards and add my own, I really began to understand how to boil concepts down into something I could remember, i.e. I could structure it to my own personal chaotic mode of thinking, and I've flourished with it since then
I've been barely keeping my head above water (ok, much better than that honestly) for 35 years intellectually due to lack of more methodical learning. Your post might convince me of trying Anki...
I've just started using Anki and I'm almost grieving. If I had had this 15 years ago I probably would have done so much better in school. I've always struggled with memorizing, but Anki has made this much easier for me. I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I'm baffled by how much I've retained in that period. Now I'm playing with using it to learn the rules for the OneRing TTPRG.
Same for me. I discovered spaced repetition through Anki.
It helped me study Japanese, Agile, and countless other topics, and the Android and macOS apps work perfectly together. A friend used it so much that he ended up contributing to the Android app as OSS.
> with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
True. It should however be noted that the most active maintainer of AnkiDroid will be joining the new entity:
> We’re currently talking to David Allison, a long-time core contributor to AnkiDroid, about working together on exactly these questions. His experience with AnkiDroid’s collaborative development is invaluable, and we’re grateful he’s willing to help us get this right. We’re incredibly excited to have him join us full-time to help propel Anki into the future.
Yeah, and while they say AnkiDroid is going to be maintained by the original creator separate from AnkiHub, we won't be privy to any employment contract language that makes any work done by the employee as being property of AnkiHub. Which would be an issue.
anki has so much potential and has such a big and unique audience, it is incomprehensible to me how it has managed to be so neglected.
and then now why, of all times, when a solo developer is never more productive, would the lead maintainer cede ownership? the antidote for programming burnout has just been invented, just take it haha
My experience using AI is that it wildly increases burnout, not decreases it.
Writing code is fun. Solving interesting problems is fun.
Debugging deep problems is fun.
Debugging slop code is a painful suffering experience, having to constantly double check that the AI agent didn't just change the unit tests to "return true" and lie to you is tiring, and the feeling that you can't significantly improve the tool burns me out hard.
That last one can't be overstated. When I find a weird behavior that looks like a bug in the linux kernel or rustc or such, I find it exhilarating to read code and understand what the bug is, how it got there, and to feel like I can fix it and never see it again.
When claude code gives me a "wrong" output for my prompt, I don't feel like there's any possible way I can go and find what part of the Opus 4.5 model resulted in it not being able to give better output.
I feel helpless to debug what went wrong when claude code spirals into the deep end.
I can add more initial context, add skills, but those are tiny heuristic tweaks around the giant mass of incomprehensible weights and biases that no human understands.
The antidote for programming burnout is not to replace all the fun parts of programming with painful probabilistic suffering.
I've been using Anki for a few years and have never experienced it as neglected. There are regular updates and a big community contributing knowledge, add-ins, etc.
What’s so bad about the paid iOS client? I remember it being expensive when I got it but it works fine for my use case (mix of getting me through part of med school, all of law school, and the just general shit I’d like to remember and learn). There’s definitely never been anything jarring about using it vs the Mac or windows clients but I’m happy for somebody to point out the problems I’ve been missing!
I paid 30€ for Anki on iOS. I remember being a bit upset because the Android and the macOS version (Qt based) are completely free. Even the iOS version is open-source. In the end, I did not want to create my own build and sideload Anki for iOS via Developer certificates, so I just paid the 30€. I think it is too expensive especially since I can easily afford that having a job and all, but I remember at uni I would struggle to afford this. But then again, when I was at uni there were no smartphones, and my computer cost less than an iPhone. So I'd probably have cheap android anyway.
To amend, I got way more than 30€ of value out of it. I learn a new language, and vocab training with Anki works better than anything else.
I also use it every day. It does its job, but it has many usability issues that make it less than ideal.
For example, copy and paste retains the text color (probably by design). So, sometimes I get black text on a black background, when the app is in dark mode.
The editing process to remove the formatting is pretty annoying.
It takes me time to find the edit button, which is buried in the menu but prominent in the desktop version. Then, I have to toggle the HTML mode and delete the retained tags, which on a phone takes time. The desktop version, instead, has a button to remove all formatting.
The App uses the Mac Text element rather than a custom one, so it'll have the same shortcuts as all of them; `⇧ Shift ⌥ Option ⌘ Command V` to paste and match the formatting of the current field (in the case of a blank field, remove formatting).
iOS one is fine, pretty good. I use it daily too. Ankidroid is much better, which I would attribute to being open source with lots of eyeballs on it and making improvements for the love of it.
I do too, and I hate it. Some of my pet peeves from the top of my head (there would be more most likely if I'd think a bit, but maybe later):
> I keep pressing the second button to OK a card, I rarely use the 3rd and 4th. But if I fail a card, that button becomes a NOK, and I keep pressing it out of reflex
> I can't help interpreting "card was a leech" notification other than "how dumb can you be". Fortunately there is no way to turn it off.
> It keeps phoning home for some reason, each time it gets into the foreground. It is really great when you are behind a proxy, and it keeps complaining that there is no network, every single time. Of course that call can't be turned off. Also, have no idea what it sends home. I try to trust that it's not some nefarious.
> Some years ago, for some reason Anki changed DB format, in a backwards incompatible way. There was a notification at the start of the app, that if I don't want it, I shouldn't update my app. I did turn off auto-update. A few weeks later it bricked my deck (my deck got updated to the new format, even though that old iOS app was the only way I accessed it), also trashing my 3 years long strike.
I use the iOS app daily, and while it's not the prettiest thing in the world, it has nearly every feature of the desktop client, including full scripting support for card contents, which is amazing for things like collapsable elements and media. And, at the end of the day, it's about what you learn from using it that matters.
Just have them use it on their computer or the web?
It improved my grades so much in college that I spent the 25 bucks as a broke student so I could have it on my second hand iPad. This was before AnkiDroid even existed so it's amazing the price is still the same.
That works for people who already convinced that they want to use it. I'm talking about people who've heard it for the first time and they're not going to spend 25$ for some new app just to try. 25$ is unusually high price for an AppStore app and it's just doesn't work unless you're really determined to use it. I don't understand why people are downvoting this.
I would argue that it's almost impossible to start first with the mobile version so this situation should never happen. The computer version is essential for setting up and getting decks.
The web version remains free as well.
Anki app has an interface for adding/editing cards, and can absolutely be used without AnkiWeb or syncing. In fact, this is how I used it myself for years. I would argue that using AnkiWeb and syncing is an advanced feature for people who got the taste of having own decks and don't want to loose it.
Some people would need to buy computer first. Again, it's very hard to recommend mobile app to people if you need to add these kind of "workarounds". Especially for the main target audience - young students – many of whom live in their mobile phones and not used to spend 25$ for apps.
I think you essentially have to use the desktop version no matter what—so the real dichotomy is whether you want to use a free program with free online hosting with the bundled (free) web application... or if you want to buy a $25 app.
It seems a lot like saying nobody should use GMail unless they agree to pay for premium Google Services.
I don't have this problem. I bought iOS Anki app for myself many years ago. What I found hard is to recommend it to others, who never heard about spaced repetition yet, especially to young students, who arguably is the main target audience for this kind of tools. They just not jumping into buying 25$ app to try it. As soon as you start mentioning switching to laptop, using web/desktop - they're not jumping into it either. I don't know maybe you all have different experience, but that's what I experienced over the years and it always felt sad, because this price is a prohibitively high for many people.
It was a fascinating symbiotic between nerdy med students from all over the world and an obscure open source flashcard app that originally targeted language learners. I've been part of that community for many years and would have never foreseen this outcome but in hindsight it seems the best path forward for anki.
Amazing. A few nerdy med students and I started a student group for tech back in 2009 or so, a big part early on was preaching Mnemosyne (another SRS app), with shared decks syncing over a free Dropbox account.
Later used Repetitions (iOS / Mac / web) for the steps, EM boards, and informatics boards most recently.
Only within the last year finally tried Anki -- and this time for language.
If one is of a certain age, of course they studied for step I without it
and the classic method was the inspiration for Anki to begin with: making your own flashcards on index cards! You could do a version of spaced repetition by shuffling the deck.
Not sure the digital version is actually easier or more effective
Always a bit scary when an open source project changes stewardship like this, but I'm quite relieved to see all involved parties seem to be aware of the dangers and very much on the same page about not screwing this up.
Done right, commercial interests can often have a very positive symbiotic relationship with open source. Almost all the largest and best open source projects out there have substantial involvement from commercial interests.
I do think though that from a structural/governance perspective it's not a good idea for Anki to be owned by AnkiHub. Anki is a community project, not a corporate product, and while it sounds like the license will continue to reflect that, I personally think it would be best if the corporate structure did too. If Anki were spun out as an independent foundation (like Blender, Linux, etc) receiving most of its support and development work from AnkiHub, rather than owned outright, I think that would allow a much more robust governance structure than just having everything be under AnkiHub's direct control with some pinky promises about listening to the community.
Many community-oriented programs have failed after acquisition because they came out too firm, too decided, and too purposeful, only to realize the community is still skeptical and turning against them six months in.
Honestly, for a program like Anki, starting out by saying "we need to figure out what good governance looks like, as well as what might be agreeable and possible for everyone involved" is a much stronger positioning than coming up with something that may or may not fly to try make a strong first impression. Communities do not follow the conventional rules of American business.
From the posts, it sounds like the original maintainer was approaching the point where they'd just abandon it, so this overall seems like a better outcome than either abandonment or sale to a PE firm.
Community focused organizations like this are hard to run without governance transitions. I think Anki brings value to the world and anyone willing to take on a leadership role in keeping it going should be given trust and grace to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have. I wish them luck.
It seems more than a little bit careless to agree on a deal without having those very important things hammered out. What if there is disagreement about these?
Or: They don't want to force a specific governance model onto an existing community.
I have no deep insight here, but given the times I have seen a negative reaction from the community with ownership changes or similar, giving yourself time to figure out how to do things may actually be a good thing.
It seems like the core things that Anki needs are new user experience improvements, and algorithm updates. SM2 really shows its age as compared to other algorithms.
I think many learners are walking into a trap of thinking, if they just change their SPS algorithm, they will magically learn more. I think they might learn a little bit more, but the biggest effect is simply due to time investment and doing the repetitions. It is good to be able to practice known words less often, obviously, but that can be achieved using a very basic system already.
If changing their SPS or the promises about an SPS motivate the learner, then great, they're putting in the work and time to learn, but I doubt that the effect of changing the SPS is as large as some people claim.
For example I used a tool that supposedly uses FSPS, but it did have a low maximum for the duration you don't have to practice a word, and no way for me to "ban" a word, so that it asks me in 6 months or something, and simple words kept coming back, especially after not learning for a few days. I didn't make much progress using the tool, even though it had FSPS.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/supermemo-is-better-than-f... seems to suggest that yes, it is a major improvement over SM-2, and given how critical they are of FSRS I'm happy to believe them. SM-2 to my understanding is basically the simplest possible spaced repetition algorithm - I think something like 'double the review interval if easy, otherwise multiply by some difficulty factor to reduce this interval depending on which button was clicked'.
That said, even SM-2 is probably vastly superior to just not doing SRS at all.
Our data in the cloud, hallowed be thy computation, your kingdom come, your will be done, on our devices as it is in the cloud. Give us today our daily feed.
Yeah, FSRS is much better. For me it was the difference between learning 10 new words of Mandarin a day and learning 20, with the same time commitment.
To me it sounds like an incredible speed to learn even 10 Mandarin words per day, let alone 20. So extreme, that I must wonder, what definition of "Mandarin words" and what definition of "learned" you are using, when you are writing that, or, that you are an extreme outlier in terms of memorizing visual information.
For me really learning a word means:
(1) Knowing how to say it.
(2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.
(3) Still remembering (1) and (2) after at least a month.
(4) Being able to actually use the word correctly.
Do you really learn 20 words properly under those definitions? If so, then respect. I consider myself to have quite a good memory for visual information, but if I don't try to memorize 20 words as a full-time activity on that day, and write them hundreds of times, I am fairly sure they won't stick for long, maybe not even until the next day. Some obviously will, and some have good explanations why the characters look as they do, but others don't, and feel arbitrarily constructed.
You've just admitted that the way you use "learn" is different. It's you who is using it differently from the commonly agreed upon way. (3) is arbitrary, ideally you would want to remember the words for your entire lifetime. A lot of people don't care about (2), you'd only care if you want to live in the country and are presented with a lot of paperwork.
You learn the words for a day (you're able to match the sounds and meaning to it). You will forget a lot of them tomorrow, so now you have to re-learn them. This is just how Anki works. You keep learning and re-learning until they stick for a prolonged period of time. It's common for Japanese learners to add between 20 or 30 words to their learning queue.
If you understand how Anki works, you will also understand how the word learning is used in relation to its flashcard mechanism.
With all due respect, your comment doesn't add much to the discussion. I explicitly mentioned different definitions of learning, and then proceeded to give mine.
And with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim. If you think that "learning" is commonly agreed upon to mean "memorize for a couple of hours", then please show me the research into the meaning of the word, that proves your claim. While I have explicitly stated, what _my personal_ definition is, you are claiming to be knowledgeable about a "commonly agreed upon" definition. That is an impressive claim in itself. Let us all hear that definition, that is so commonly agreed upon, so that we can gain from that.
What you call learning, I call "training" or "practicing" or "revising". Now the onus is on you to prove to me, that indeed as you claim there is some commonly agreed upon definition, specifically in the area of learning Mandarin, that proves, that my definition is off.
And I will have you know, that I am learning Mandarin for some 10+ years, and have a lot of experience in that area. I know what counts and what is important.
I am referring to the standard metric used in SRS communities.
When people in the language learning community say they "learn 20 words a day", they are referring to New Cards Added. It is a metric of input and initial encoding, not guaranteed permanent storage.
In Anki, "Learning" is literally a specific phase (the red cards). You introduce the card, you pass the initial threshold, and then the algorithm handles the retention over the subsequent weeks. You are conflating the process of learning (adding new information) with the result of mastery (long-term active recall).
> with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim
Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular? Do you think it's harder than other languages to learn new words? It's not like you have to learn new hanzi for every word. Most are compounds. It's like being surprised someone easily learned how to spell "lighthouse" because it's got a silent "gh" and a silent "e" and the "ou" is not pronounced the way you'd expect, and the "th" in the middle isn't pronounced like "th" should be.
The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
My experience with Japanese is that you hit around 800 or so kanji and new vocab comes very easily. Even new kanji come extremely easily because they're all made up of the same parts ("radicals").
EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
> Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular?
The original claim was about 20 Mandarin words.
> The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
This kind of comparison doesn't work properly for learning Chinese characters. Simply combining characters like that only works ~half of the time or less.
> EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
Delusional for Mandarin, unless you have some kind of special brain putting you in some 0.001% of the population. Not even natives learn that many words in a year. That many characters they might know when reaching university, and then later forget many again. Most native adults don't know that many.
> The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
Well, at least on that we agree. If one doesn't put in the time and effort, then the results will reflect that.
> (2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.
Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
How would your opinion change if you knew that plenty of native Japanese and Chinese speakers can't write the characters they can read anymore? If you don't have to physically write anymore, you lose the ability to write the characters. This is true of even educated adults in Japan and China. When I was a university student (I'm not Japanese), I could write kanji that my 30+yo Japanese friends had forgotten, but no one would say I knew how to use the words better than they could.
EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
> Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
Bad example, but to roll with it: In that case I would say they don't know it properly, since it is apparent, that in their mind there is no difference between "their" and "they're" or even "they are".
> How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
I am basing my personal definition of when I consider a word "learned" on reality, not on some "what if". If I had to map that idea of no spelling standardization to Chinese characters, then it would mean, that characters don't have standardized lines/components/parts. If there was no standard, then I guess I would consider this kind of making up how to write it on the fly sufficient for having learned a word. Thankfully there is standardization, so that is not a reality we live in.
Since I strive to not be an illiterate, I do not count being illiterate as having learned a word.
> EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
That depends very much on the language and course, but if it is your major, then sure, such a time commitment seems reasonable, since it is the thing you are doing. If your major is anything else and you just take an additional language course, where I come from you have once or twice a week that course. Then maybe 1 or 2 weeks you finish one chapter of a course book, which might have 20 new words, so that makes 20 words in 1-2 weeks, not in 2 days.
Typically for Mandarin the speed will also be slower than other easier to learn languages. For example at school I almost never had to learn vocabulary in English or Spanish. I just saw the words and memorized them somehow. Usage in class and often their sound and structure was sufficient , and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages.
It doesn't work like that with Chinese characters. You are not gonna learn them (including writing them) by just looking at them a few times, unless you got an extraordinary visual, almost photographic memory. I consider myself already to have a pretty good visual memory, but still I need to put in the time and effort, and 20 words a day is way out of my league. But then again it was already cleared up in another comment, that the OP cuts out writing entirely. That's definitely a choice one can make and explains how 20 newly added words (I would still debate that that's "learned") make any sense.
I should have clarified. My goal in learning Mandarin is only conversational fluency, not literacy.
I don't bother with the Hanzi past being able to recognize them. I want to be able to talk to people and, if I have to, use a pinyin keyboard to write basic sentences.
So only 1 & 4 are really relevant, 2 is what Anki is designed to do.
Literacy shouldn't matter for the definition of knowing a language anyway. Orthography isn't language. It's a symbolic notation that represents a language. Blind people don't speak a different language from non-blind people. Illiterate people can still speak language. Children still speak language. Humans in societies where writing systems do not exist still can speak language.
Writing a language makes you more skilled at living in the modern world. It's not a threshold past which you must travel to count as a speaker of that language.
Also you can probably still write. Just not by hand. Which is a vanishingly useful skill.
Unless you're applying for something in China, you don't need to know how to write hanzi ever, except for very one-off instances like "I can write happy new year in Chinese"
You know how many times I've written "real" Japanese by hand since 2005? Zero. I've written my name and stuff, sometimes I'll write 愛 to show my daughters. Nothing else. Because it's a worthless skill unless you live in Japan. Not even visiting. You live there.
Of course I type all the time. But typing is speaking + reading. It's not writing. You type phonetically (i.e., you know how to say the word), and then you hit spacebar until the correct kanji comes up (i.e., you can read kanji).
Does using FSRS result in less retention, due to scheduling less reviews than other systems? Or is it actually more efficient in a meaningful way by cutting out unnecessary reviews?
The goal of the scheduling algorithm is to predict the optimal time for when you need to review your card again. FSRS has a bunch of parameters tja you can customize based on previous learning attempts, usually a few 100 cards is enough to adapt to your own learning abilities, but in current Anki versions you need to manually update the parameters to optimize your learning.
I'm an Anki user, on and off since 10 years or so, but was still confused. If I understood correctly, the entities here are:
- Anki, as set up by dae aka Damien, is like the brand name and desktop implementation with the spaced repetition algorithm
- AnkiWeb is what I thought this hub thing was. It's where you download decks
- AnkiHub is a third party (started by "AnKing", now 35 employees) who sells decks as a monthly subscription and has their content on the deep web (you need to create an account and agree to terms to even see a listing of what's there besides a few featured parts). This is who is getting ownership of the former two. Because they write that Anki will remain open source at its "core", I presume that means that things will, at best, stay stable rather than anything (like AnkiWeb the deck sharing platform) becoming open
- AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
> - AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
----
To copy from my message on Discord:
> I’m moving to a full-time position working on Anki [incl. AnkiWeb & AnkiMobile]. I’m really excited about this, but there’s a mountain of pending, somewhat undefined work which will need to be done, and it’ll need my full-time attention for a while.
> I’ll still be contributing to AnkiDroid, but I won’t be able to commit as much time as I am doing currently (at least for the first few months while things stabilize). I’ll be here on evenings/weekends, and will be contributing in other ways (hopefully: unified Note Editor, JS addons etc… ), but I expect to slow down with code contributions to ensure I’m staying on on top of PR reviews & general force multiplier work. I’m definitely Org Admin’ing for GSoC over the summer [assuming Google gives us the greenlight], it’s historically been a VERY light role.
> In all honesty: I’m expecting things to be business as usual, I have more than enough capacity to keep up with the notification queue. Even if I completely dropped off the planet, we’re a great team and the improvements would keep on flowing. AnkiDroid’s bus factor has been >>> 1 for a LONG time now.
Information on Discord visible only if you sign up for it (and afaik, in some countries, upload identification)... that does seem rather in line with the deep web architecture that AnkiHub uses. Maybe this would be good in a ticket or the Anki forums, since it's relevant to the people using and contributing to the app. Here on HN it's now also findable in web searches as a side effect of copying it I guess
Worth noting you don't need to use it. Anki comes with a syncserver implementation for a while now, and there are docker images too. It's worth it for the transfer speeds alone IMO.
Anki is under AGPL too, which has an anti-DRM clause, so many type of enshittification of anki or their addons (e.g. to prevent sharing of their decks) would be unenforceable too.
As such I see no obvious things that would be susceptible to enshittification here.
Just as a counterpoint, to avoid people getting the wrong idea about the complexity involved - I use it and it took literally minutes. The most confusing part was that the sync settings in Ankidroid referred to Ankiweb.
It's mostly due to time/resource/technical constraints [some of our strings come from a shared backend], but we can do better here, especially if there's now a lot more community interest in the feature.
Pull requests welcome! Do feel free to get in touch on the issue/Discord.
Was about to do that, but it turned out it's already fixed in the current version - so literally the only minor issue I hit on my way to a custom sync server is resolved already :)
The pip instructions are bad. Typical Python things: Non-reproducible, not involving a proper lock file. Cargo instructions seem not much better, since they are only referring to a tag in the git repo. The installation from "package build" leak user and password in shell history.
Overall this doesn't inspire much confidence in how solid and tested the procedure is.
I see. I am not claiming, that it is your job to fix that.
On that page though, the same issues are present. The pip install does not make use of any lock file.
pip install anki
Isn't a command we should be seeing in 2026. Unless it is a one-off experiment setup. There should be proper lock files, not just version numbers, especially in the Python and JS ecosystems this has become less and less acceptable.
Leaks username and password to shell command history. Again, can be fine for a one-off quick hack, but is not a great practice, since the shell command history is not the most secure place to store ones credentials in. This could be easily mitigated by adding leading " " (space), at least in environments I am familiar with, but better would probably be putting the credentials in a config file, so that they never hit the shell command history.
The repo already has a lock file for uv. It would be better to make use of that lock file, when using Python to install. And in fact, when one downloads a release of Anki for desktop and runs it the first time, it does make use of uv, creating a venv, and (unconfirmed) hopefully makes use of the uv lock file.
I see these kinds of issues very frequently in Python projects. As someone, who has previously worked on providing docker images for data science workflows, enabling reproducible research, I am quite sensitive to this. But also I hear from friends, that they are traumatized by Python projects installing things in system python and other shenanigans. In general there seem to be tons of people doing Python projects, who don't have a clear idea of how to make things safe and reproducible, which is giving Python projects in general a bad reputation. All while good solutions to these problems exist and existed for years.
In fairness, Python as an ecosystem doesn't make it clear, either. I used to write a ton of Python back in the v2 days. I came back to Python to write a web crawler in summer 2025 and couldn't believe how it was still a bunch of arcane commands to create a virtual environment and install dependencies and capture the dependencies. Yes, an IDE like Pycharm handles this (thank goodness), but jiminy crickets, why doesn't "pip" refuse to even work until you've done "pip init" which generates a requirements.txt and then every pip install should check for a requirements.txt in the PWD. If it doesn't exist, refuse to install the dep. If the file does exist, append the version of the dep to that file.
It's 2026. Even JavaScript can do this.
pip is the de facto manager for the entire language. It should be better. With Node Package Manager for JS, the installation default is at the project level. You have to do a command line override to install globally.
PIP is the opposite. In fact, the only way to install at the project level is to create a virtual environment and trick PIP into thinking it's installing at the global level!
What language operates like this in 2026? Maven installs at the project level. Unison at the project level. Haskell at the project level. JS/TS at the project level.
(Same person as above but felt that this part had a separate purpose so I've moved it into its own comment)
The ecosystem is currently such that it seems hard to enshittify it. They say they have no intention of doing that and I believe it, but their vision of a healthy and good product might involve a fair price (for rich countries at least) whereas it was always free so far
Time will tell; it sounds like there's currently no plans either way, but it's also simply open enough that users can always just install the open source software and share decks with each other by whatever file transfer/sharing means. Everything that's already there won't simply go away. I'm going to keep using AnkiDroid and building the language deck I am working on
This may be true, but as someone who picked up Anki as a desktop app back around 2009 it feels a little crazy.
I also can’t imagine making cards on a phone, given how much switching between apps/windows is involved and how poor mobile platforms are at multitasking. It’s difficult to envision it being anything but maddening.
That's how some people do their "computing" these days, if they do any that deserves the name at all. I had to do some of that on vacation. With a modern phone it's possible, but mentally taxing. Phones feel like MS-DOS operating systems, where each application is fullscreen. Most people are just consumers. This is probably true for Anki decks as well. Only a small minority creates decks, the vast majority only consumes.
Why'd people choose a closed ecosystem but then care about open software? I assume the main crowd is on AnkiDroid, either via f-droid or google play, and that the few iOS people don't care about a new corporation taking over the rights
In America perhaps. Android is more popular in other countries, most people I know use Anki for free. The desktop app and sync are useful for editing cards and managing a large collection. Both of those are free too, but for how long?
> The iOS app has never been free and that's the way most people use it these days.
Where are you getting the stats that drive this claim? How are you measuring usage on platforms that don't necessarily collect usage metrics, e.g. desktop versions?
When a popular, free and open source passion project led by a single dev moves into the hands of a company that needs to sustain its 30-people team [0], you know what happens next.
AnkiHub's modus operandi has been to take over communities or projects where free exchange happens and monetize/paywall them. If you've been a part of the /r/medicalschoolanki subreddit, you know exactly what I mean. It's been hollowed out completely.
In the post, AnkiHub mentions how Anki is "sacred" to them. Yet, they have had no qualms entrenching themselves into Anki's settings menu as the only third-party ever to do so. [1] I am sure more is to come. And the language used in their post almost never helps their case, especially in the pricing and OSS sections.
I understand why Damien felt he was being a bottleneck in Anki's development. This is similar to what was happening with Bram and Vim. Ultimately, the community forked and built Neovim. Gorhill had also similarly transferred uBlock, but then came back and built uBlock Origin. So the precedents are there for a successful community-run or leader-run spinoff.
Syncing is sure to become a paid feature, and access to shared decks too.
Creating a fork pointed to a hosted version of Sync Server [2], and an alternative hub where people can share decks other than AnkiWeb [3] is paramount. As well as saving and preserving all of the decks there, as they are sure to go behind a paywall.
I, and I am sure many other HNers, would be willing to support that with our time and financially.
This is the correct take. It's over for Anki. Even assuming a best case scenario where the status quo remains and AnkiWeb continues to be "free", all the valuable data collected in AnkiWeb is now ripe for paywalling & potential abuse. The AnkiWeb privacy policy is likely to undergo a change quite soon - https://ankiweb.net/account/privacy
A really disappointing development all around & I hope it galvanizes the community to fully disassociate itself from AnkiHub & dae.
> Absolutely. Anki’s core code will remain open source, guided by the same principles that have guided the project from the beginning.
Already caveating with the "core" code. Even without PE and VC, it's clear that a company with 35 employees is bound to take this in a different direction than 1 guy, and not a good one. If there comes a day where those 35 employees can't be sustained anymore by revenue, and the choice is between enshittification and shutting down/firing everyone, we'll see what happens. That's the big difference - such a decision was never on the cards, or at least much less likely, when run by a single person. Now it will be.
Big conflict of interests too. AnkiHub makes money from selling paid addons. No chance any of those will ever end up in Anki now.
Also not a good look that they immediately locked the thread in their most popular community.
Considering that anki can always be forked if development goes being hostile towards users I think this is a net positive. The most common complaint among new users is the learning curve and the UI. Both can be solved and Anki can flourish to the bigger level. I say this as someone who does 300+ cards every day.
AnkiHub people seem kind of slimy in my experience (at least their leader, "The AnKing"). I hope they figure out a good leadership situation, and make stronger commitments to openness.
Anki is in a very solid position to be forked if anything happens, so even if this is bad news I have faith in the larger community.
I have this vague sense that this is the opinion of many people in the Anki community many years ago when I last used it (to improve my German vocabulary before my first child was born—with whom I speak German).
I was reminded that AnkiHub's business model is selling Anki add-ons.
So it seems clear they would decline to add competing features to Anki, but instead create an add-on to sell instead, and never add it as a feature to Anki.
In a nice and controlled manner, so seemingly no reason to panic just yet:
> I ended up suggesting to them that we look into gradually transitioning business operations and open source stewardship over, with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
> This is a step back for me rather than a goodbye - I will still be involved with the project, albeit at a more sustainable level.
From AnkiHub:
> No enshittification. We’ve seen what happens when VC-backed companies acquire beloved tools. That’s not what this is. There are no investors involved, and we’re not here to extract value from something the community built together. Building in the right safeguards and processes to handle pressure without stifling necessary improvements is something we’re actively considering.
Relieved at that part where they say there are no investors involved, makes the whole thing a whole lot less risky. Good for everyone involved, and here's to many more years with Anki :)
Might as well give a recommendation then: I've been using hashcards [0] for a few weeks now and have enjoyed its simplicity and the fact that it all stays forever in raw markdown files and versioned git. A simple justfile has also been helpful.
Well every company claims no enshittification when they get acquired, in the end that's rarely the case. It's like Private Equity buying a company out and say "Nothing will change"
Give it a try to work in both, see what work gets prioritized VS not in each of them. Makes a huge difference, in my experience. Investors are counting on eventually getting paid 10x or nothing, employees generally expect a monthly salary and a Christmas bonus, this massively change what direction they think the company should be on.
Owner of the thirty-five employees company wants long term income and sort of security. They usually do not want huge peek in short term followed by death. They are also less comfortable with strategy that has 95% chance of destroying the company and 0.5% chance is earning a lot with 5% in between.
Outside investors are the exact opposite.
Also, smaller owners do not have that billionaire mindset of "any unethical or illegal action goes". It is not like they would be saints, but there is range of personalities and value systems among them. Billionaire became billionaires because not caring about any of that gives them advantage.
I have peer-reviewed research on the efficacy of SRS in second-language acquisition and this should be everywhere for everyone and the fact that it isn't is both a scandal and an opportunity for learners who do use it to leverage that advantage.
I use it extensively in my teaching. The problem is deploying Anki on locked down networks can be difficult so I've built alternatives and hacks to let you deploy decks and school accounts, but making a full-featured web client would change all of this.
So maybe it's a good time for me to have also started one of my own that I'm temporarily calling libreSRS because I'm not sure of the new direction here.
The goal is to have a multi-user, multi-algorithm-capable, web-based system that exposes everything (especially uploading!!) to the web client.
I've started using LLMs to help with card creation, and reviewing historic cards. Its been increasingly successful, I still end up with cards tailored to me, and the card quality has gone up (as I've asked the LLM to look for other views/sources and to do associate research to produce high quality cards).
Having ability to bake some of that into the tool in a configurable way would be ideal, and I hope thats sort of path they go down.
I realise in meantime plugins are an option, but I've found the quality of plugins very mixed.
At a fundamental level the algorithms predict the probability of a learner to correctly recollect a factoid at a given point in time given a history of sampling that recollection / presentation.
It would be interesting to have machine learning predict these probability evolutions instead. Simply recollecting tangential knowledge improves the recollection of a non-sampled factoid, which is hard to model in a strict sense, or perhaps easy for (undiscovered) dedicated analytic models. Having good performing but relatively opaque (high parameter counts) ML models could be helpful because we can treat the high parameter count ML model as surrogate humans for memory recollection experiments and try to find low parameter count models (analytic or ML) that adequately distill the learning patterns, without having to do costly human-hour experiments on actual human brains.
FSRS just works, even without a GPU so it's not the cool kind of AI / machine learning these days.
No joke though: the FSRS model is marvelous, and Anki remains one of the best free + open source implementations around.
I've been learning German recently and Anki (in FSRS mode) is one of the most important learning tools I have. No joke.
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Every card remembers every rating you give it, as well as the time / date. This allows for Anki to solve for a 'forgetting curve', and predict when different cards have a chance to be forgotten.
There is furthermore the machine learning / stochastic descent algorithm to better fit the assumed forgetting curves to your historical performance. This is the FSRS Optimize parameters button in the settings panel.
> Every card remembers every rating you give it, as well as the time / date. This allows for Anki to solve for a 'forgetting curve', and predict when different cards have a chance to be forgotten.
True to a point; every card has its ratings, but the "forgetting curve" algo of FSRS is only tuned to the deck (or "option set") that the card is in, not per card.
The best thing that can happen is a fork. There is no way this will make the app worse, at least if you use a phone to do the reviewing. Syncing is sure to become a subscription.
I still haven't quite understood how Anki can apparently be profitable when the web sync with Ankiweb apparently supports an unlimited amount of data (surely some people heavily abuse this - but one never hears about fair use being applied?). Even legit and honest use can mean massive collection sizes since you can have any rich media in an Anki collection.
A few things. Up until now Anki was not a business and was not meant to be profitable.
AnkiWeb also does not support an unlimited amount of data. It's evident that their storage requirements aren't infinite. They aggressively cull content. Not syncing for 6 months results in automatic deletion last I checked.
I would still expect ingress and egress costs to be significant - as well as storage for content that isn't culled. And while it was not 'meant to be profitable' my point is that it was profitable, apparently exclusively from revenue from the iOS app which I still find surprising that it would cover the Ankiweb costs.
Can't help but wonder if it might not be time to start a FOSS alternative just in case Anki begins to decline.
It might not be the worst idea to do that anyway. Anki is great, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Off the top of my head, an architecture that doesn't involve fragile and finicky python bits and is designed to support multiple independent clients would be a nice step up (Telegram is a good model here — make a core lib with all the nuts and bolts which devs build clients around).
I don't think anyone will comfortable pour 1000 hours into a closed source app. Especially because Anki is what it is today due to the numerous add ons
Mochi has really come a long way and has some wonderful built-in functionality. The automatic text-to-speech template options are high quality and randomize a variety of voices in each language. It's also doing some cool things with dynamic cards and LLMs.
Impressively, Mochi now offers FSRS (beta but still available in the app's main settings) and both the type of scheduler (Mochi default or FSRS) and the schedulers' settings are configurable on a deck-by-deck basis.
The developer is very responsive to folks on the forum and often quickly adds requested features.
Overall the app is well-designed and fun to use. I appreciate the swipe left/right to fail/pass cards on iOS. My one complaint is that the web clipper only works with Chrome and Firefox, but not with Safari (surprisingly). It would also be useful to have a global hotkey/palette to quick-add cards to various decks, similar to how OmniFocus lets you quickly add items to the OF Inbox.
I've been paying for the pro version for a while. It's templating is really powerful and easy to use. For my vocab deck, I set up a input field (e.g., word) and a bunch of derived fields (dict definition, AI-generated example, TTS audio). To add a new card, I just input the word and other fields will be automatically populated.
Technically this can be implemented in Anki as an addon. But only the desktop version supports addons and the default UI is a bit too complicated.
I don't think the main objection that people have to Electron is that it includes HTML rendering functionality. A proper desktop application that includes an HTML renderer for content formatting is a very different thing from a framework that implements an application entirely as an encapsulated webapp.
As someone who has used Anki for a decade, a thank you to dae for everything. Best of luck in your future endeavours.
With that out of the way, some thoughts:
- Anki is in a really good position to work around enshitification. The app, at least to me, is "complete" - the only additional features that might pique my curiosity is a different scheduler (at the moment, they're integrating a newer one, although I don't follow enough to know the state of it). Additionally, modern Anki is really well architected: the core of it is a Rust library, that is used by all of the platforms [0]. You can write new front ends using that, or just fork the existing FOSS ones. Maybe dae does a gorhill and gives us Anki Origin.
- Really the only service-y part of Anki I use is AnkiWeb, which is basically a backup and sync system. Wonder how that'll evolve (if they do end up charging for it, I hope it is "Obsidian" reasonable). EDIT: Ooo, Anki has public server software for running your own version. Awesome! [1]
- The idea outcome in my opinion would have been some form of charitable organisation (Linux Foundation?), with people donating to support Anki.
- So, AnkiHub is a company that produces Anki flashcards, and they've scaled that quickly? Jeez. Obviously Quizlet proved there was a market for flashcards, but I didn't realise this was possible for Anki.
- No outside investment is... hopeful. Not quite sure what indicates that this company has the technical know-how to maintain it.
- I've heard too many stories of a maintainer or creative being "hopeful" about their new acquirers, only to regret it years down the line.
Spaced repetition seems like an ideal candidate for vibecoding. Sure, it gets complicated if you want all sorts of multimedia support, but for a lot of people, that's not necessary. How hard is it to build something like this, especially in 2026?
You could fit the most basic version of a spaced repetition program on the back of a napkin. Why would you want to vibe code yet another program lacking a bunch of useful features though?
Probably because I've seen so many people complaining about the issues with so many of the common apps. I don't want to pay a subscription for SR, and I don't really understand what the useful features are that I'd be missing out on. Can someone clue me in?
It uses the HN API and algolia and golang with the bubble tea libraries. I'm parsing/scraping the threads page though, because reconstructing that from the API was proving to be a hassle.
It even supports logging in and commenting and reply notification!
I'm not totally sure where I land on using libraries (bubble tea) as they do bloat the program with unnecessary features, but I do like its simple text interface over using a web browser and a whole javascript engine for just rendering text.
I feel like there's a lot of confusion, so not sure if anyone can clear up mine, but I'm really struggling to see a significance of this.
Obviously, like all ignorant people do, I am going to oversimplify things here. But still, to me, the "platonic idea" of Anki seems a dead simple thing. All what I care about when using Anki is what's on the 2 sides of a Card, a question + answer, which can only be some visual image (possibly encoded as text, possibly just JPEG, I really don't care as long as it fits in my mobile device memory) + optional sound. That's really it. If it should be bi-directional or uni-directional card is a detail of how the deck is generated/encoded, and the spaced repetition algorithm is a detail of the app that I use to study (so, usually AnkiDroid, I imagine — an unaffiliated 3rd party; who even uses desktop apps nowadays?).
So, I imagine there can exist (and do exist) some minor additional features, like an ability to require a typed answer for a card, but it seems pretty minor, and I really don't see a lot of room for the app to evolve.
So, ultimately people need only a common .apkg format, which exists and is relatively simple (although I suppose it could've been even simplier), and a place like AnkiWeb, where people can share their decks, so Spanish top-2000 or basic integrals deck isn't re-invented over and over again. It's a pity that AnkiWeb isn't more open and will be even less open from now on, but as long as someone is willing to just host it (which is ultimately just paying for downloads traffic) it's easy to replicate, so no super-valuable IP here.
Of course, a primary use-case for Anki is a tool to make decks, but you could really do with pretty simple python script + YAML/JSON/CSV/whatever metadata file to convert it to AnkiDroid-compatible .apkg file.
IMO, the add-on value is the repository of decks that exist (and may or may not be free).
So an app-store of sorts.
As others have said, there are some provisions in place that make it allegedly harder to do a hard landgrab and keep people from freely sharing decks, to to me, even if it were so, I would not be too concerned.
In my opinion, the very act of creating one's deck is a key part of the learning. Maybe it's different for larning vocabulary, but as you said, it will be very hard to make those hard to share.
Learning a deck generated by someone else has never been as effective with me, so I think it's a false sense of time saving to use those.
> All what I care about when using Anki is what's on the 2 sides of a Card, a question + answer
This is damn near the least effective way to use Anki. Cloze deletion alone surpasses this.
Also, Anki is SRS. The value of Anki is in the rescheduling, not in the fact it's flashcards. And Anki has implemented the FSRS rescheduling algorithm, which is just one more feature not all flashcard apps do.
That's not the way the world works. I'm not in it for the money.
In the past 12 months, I've made £65.79 from GitHub Sponsors (no fees, thank you GitHub/Microsoft) and $87.89 from Patreon (pre-fees, I'll probably see ~$50), and a split of the Open Collective [below]
Longtime anki user here. I think the thing people never appreciate with flashcards is that deck maintenance is real work. And in many cases, it's not work that you can do yourself as a learner of the material: the deck really needs to be created by someone who knows the material.
Commercial decks, where the deck maintainer is paid for his efforts, make a lot of sense.
And I suppose if they are making money out of the ecosystem, it also only makes sense that commercial deck makers make a contribution to the technology that makes it possible. I suppose I would prefer that be a contribution rather than ownership and custody, but I suppose Anki's license terms (it is AGPL3+ - I think without a CLA) prevents them closing it.
Is it really beneficial to use a deck created by someone else? I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards - by writing them, thinking about them, and making mental associations with things you already know.
Yes. Absolutely. The biggest data point pushing the affirmative is less Anki itself but the success of products at the forefront of the second wave of spaced repetition apps [1] like Khan Academy. Duolingo, too, but Duolingo gets flak from people for being too Goodhearted by retention for its own good; Khan Academy actually does force feed you enough actual problems to learn some math.
Writing the cards is engaging with the cards for some small subset of the population. I am part of that audience. But most people are terrible at it, and it's not an easy skill to build.
Ther majority of people who are interested in Anki -- and the vast majority of normal human beings with nonzero willingness to pay, which is a very unique subset of the population with goals that tend to look like "Pass X exam by Y date so I can [get a job|earn my citizenship in a better country|...] -- just want good pedagogical material wrapped in some control harness so they can treat some fraction of their learning the same way they treat going to the gym. Show up, put in the reps, get results.
Just as an example: I learn languages using Anki, and I always do it the same way: I use decks that
* exclusively quiz entire sentences
* introduce around 500 new words (a nice mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives)
* use a wide variety of grammatical constructs (including all conjugations of the new verbs),
* and that have audio of a native speaker reading the entire sentence after I "flip" the card
Such a deck needs to be thoroughly designed, and while I could choose the new words and then write software to make sure they are all used equally in sentences and no conjugations are missing, I actually can't easily make sure they are correct and I can't record the audio of the text.
"I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards"
I would substitute "the material" for "the cards" in this sentence. Making the cards yourself is one way to do that, but it's not always the most time effective - imagine the extra work put onto a medical student having to make the cards for every subject they need to cover. That is what ankihub does and it seems to be very popular
But yeah: downloading the median deck off of ankiweb: very sub-optimal
No one is appreciating cheap working solution from good folks and prefer to accept the free spy-me stuff going around.
I see lots of people also moving stuff with AI that will clearly be biased and force products down your throat.
This might be the end of the internet as we know, but the next thing, although sometimes looks exciting, will be controlled by faceless greedy monsters.
I guess the fact that we all didn't prioritise those small businesses is getting somewhere
I've found the opposite when using Anki myself. The process of developing the deck is a critical part of learning the material for me. I consume my target language, see something I don't understand, figure out what it means, then put it into the deck - and _then_ practice it. To cut out the whole first part of that chain by using a premade deck eradicates much of the learning process for me (I've tried).
Works well in some cases (eg some language learning patterns - but not all) but not in others. And even when you "create your own cards" you're usually using resources from elsewhere - eg native speaker audio on language cards.
A significant number of anki users (eg: medicine, law - others) are working with pre-made decks and if you look at anki's competition - all of them offer pre-made decks as a key part of it. Medics have always used flashcards (many university bookshops sell physical flashcards for medics) and I don't each medical student would benefit from producing, eg, their own anatomy flashcards.
I have had a bad experience with Anki so far. Maybe someone can chime in, clearing things up for me:
When I search for HSK vocabulary Anki decks or whatever they call it, I found almost exclusively sets of words that are the wrong way around. They showed me the Chinese characters and asked me what the English translation is. I was incredulous about how many wrong decks there are and that I could not find good decks. I was starting to wonder, if people are actually just using Anki to learn to read Chinese characters, one-way learning basically, only recognition not writing. Only for reading subtitles and such, instead of writing with friends. Or perhaps they have the illusion, that they are able to write, because they can type in the Pinyin, and will get a selection of characters, which they then can recognize. But I, I want to be able to properly write the characters myself. The crucial issue was, that I did not find a simple setting to invert the direction of translation of a deck. How can such a simple thing not be among the most easy to find actions to perform with a deck? I read something about it not being possible on mobile phone, but somehow being possible on computer, but not as simple as flipping a switch.
Ultimately, I abandoned Anki and recently proceeded made my own tool for learning the characters, that is highly configurable and that can change the direction with the change of one config attribute.
>Ultimately, I abandoned Anki and recently proceeded made my own tool for learning the characters, that is highly configurable and that can change the direction with the change of one config attribute.
You built an entire flashcard app by yourself, but you couldn't figure out how to edit card templates in anki?
Ah who am I kidding, your probably just trying to advertise your app.
I have fun developing useful software catering exactly to my individual needs, learning a GUI framework/toolkit on the side. I don't have fun needing to figure out the abstract concepts of someone else's tool, and needing to search a lot, to find a way to do something that should be very simple and very prominent in the interface, as it seems to be necessary for most decks I can find, in order to properly learn the characters including writing them.
I have not much to gain from advertising my app. It is AGPL and I don't plan on ever selling it. If it is useful to other people, that's great. If not, then it will at least be very useful to myself. I don't see what's wrong with mentioning, that I build my own, especially since this is HN. We are not on TikTok here.
You can do that easily with Anki as others have mentioned, however it is generally recommended to create your own cards since the process of researching, phrasing, and formatting the content serves as the crucial first stage of cognitive encoding. By actively deciding how to simplify a concept or which image best represents a term, you are building unique neural "hooks" that link new information to your existing knowledge. This personal investment transforms the card from a dry piece of data into a meaningful memory, making it far more resistant to forgetting than a generic card designed by a stranger.
That's basically what I do with my own tool. I create my own data files and store lots of meta information like similar words, usage, and mnemonics in there. I try to keep that somewhat usable for others, but ultimately, I am building the tool for myself and also write the data about words in the way I personally find it useful, so it will be biased in that way. Only, that I am also building the software to use the data around it, combining 2 hobbies, computer programming and learning Mandarin.
Regarding the "wrong direction" issue: In my experience it could also have just been the case that both directions had card templates, but due to some sorting order of new cards setting all Chinese->English cards would appear before any English->Chinese.
If that is the case, it could be corrected in the deck options. And if the English->Chinese cards are missing altogether they can be created from the note by adding a new card template to the note.
> They showed me the Chinese characters and asked me what the English translation is. I was incredulous about how many wrong decks there are and that I could not find good decks.
You can edit the structure of the card templates so they're the 'right way around' for you:
Is this available on the mobile app? A template editor?
My issue is, that I also don't know where to find the functionality for editing the template. I also cannot find it under deck "Options" in the desktop app. There is sooo much in the UI, that I think it is possible, that I am simply overlooking it somewhere. The docs you linked don't tell me where to find that. No screenshots of any UI are visible. Even now, after you telling the I need to edit templates, I still cannot find the functionality in the UI. I simply don't see it.
My feedback at this point would be to make this something, that is easily discoverable for the user, or add screenshots of how to get there to the docs and have keywords in the docs, that will ensure, that when I search for how to invert a deck, I will most likely find that page of the docs.
I assume those are header and footer of a card when it is displayed? But this does not include translation direction.
And why is it called "Note Type"? How does this concept relate to "Cards" or "Templates"?
Can you see, why one would have problems finding the correct setting?
EDIT: Now I found it under:
Menu bar -> "Tools" -> "Manage Note Types" -> select a deck -> "Cards" (in the side bar)
There I would actually expect some list of the cards, not a template editing. It seems rather unintuitive to me. The issues are:
(1) The user has to know where to find that.
(2) The user has to know, that there is no short way to get to editing the attributes of the word shown, but instead, that they need to edit a template.
(3) The user has to know, where they will find the function to edit a template. I claim a normal user will not suspect this option to be hidden under "Note Types". What even is a note? Starting to use Anki, I would look for words like "Card", "Flashcard", "Translation", "Direction", "reverse", "training options", etc., but not "Note Types". It is a weird naming.
(4) A user will have to discover, that they are not supposed to click "Options", but "Cards". But that this brings up the card options, and that that contains the template, instead of the templates being something entirely separate, loosely coupled.
It is hard to include so much functionality in one tool. I understand that. But personally, I would have had to wade through every single menu item, to find this functionality, and this also explains, why in the past I have not been able to find this at all.
On mobile you can edit the front and back template.
Anki is a platform, not a content creator. I would be thankful that someome shared their hard work of creating a deck that has all of the content to meet your needs.
For what it's worth, there are many "RTK" decks for Japanese that show english keyword on front and expect you to write the kanji before flipping.
Maybe search for an "RTH" deck to go along with the book Remembering the Hanzi.
Anki is an extremely powerful and feature rich software, and it seems that you barely scratched the surface before dismissing it.
What does RTH stand for? I am guessing "something something To Kanji/Hanzi".
The deck you linked is not mentioning HSK in the description though. It was maybe 1 year ago or so, that I searched for HSK1-3 level decks and only got wrong direction ones.
I am searching again now:
(1) "HSK1 English" -- nothing
(2) "HSK1" -- lots of results, but also tons of results that are not relevant for me, because they are not for English. -- Results like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1474834583 -- but that is 1-4 which is too much for me. I either need the 1, 2, 3 levels separate, or 1-3 in one deck. Also finding https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/166845167, which is the wrong way around. Starts right away by asking me "的" instead of something like "(some description here)". When I go to deck options in Anki desktop app, I see "Display Order", but there I cannot select any "English -> Chinese". Tons of options, but none that inverts what the cards show.
One sibling comment informs me, that I have to edit a template somewhere. But I don't know where, and in the deck options I don't quickly see any template editing function.
And this has been my experience with pretty much every HSK deck I found there. It would seem silly, that everyone uploads decks in the "wrong" order. Which leads me to think, that many people cheat themselves, by only doing the recognition part of learning the characters. Why else would so many people upload decks, only so that whoever who downloads the deck has to invert them first, before using them. I also think that many learners are probably not aware of the issue with seeing the character first and then translating to English, in comparison with doing it the other way around.
So now lets do your "RTH" search:
"HSK1 RTH" -- " Error: Please log in to perform more searches."
I am sorry, I cannot even do a keyword search a couple of times??? I need to log in, requiring an account (!) to even find a suitable deck?! OK, at this point I give up again.
I could, but as you can see in this thread in sibling comments, even stating that I couldn't find a way to invert the direction easily already attracts ire of Anki evangelists, who assume bad intentions and try to dismiss personal experiences of others. Anki must be perfect! If you want to take a look, you can check out my recent comments, or my git repos.
I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting to take my coding hobby more seriously at the time and hacking on Anki was a big part of that too. Thanks for all the hard work Damien and David Allison. I'm so grateful for the software you've worked on.
Agreed, Anki has really helped me with learning new languages. The creation of cards was always a slog though, so recently I've been playing with an Anki MCP server hooked up to Claude. I can dump my iTalki lessons in, or ask Claude to make cards based on a song I've been listening to, etc and get a bunch of relevant cards generated for me. It's honestly been kind of magic.
That’s… genius. This might get me using anki again, I gave up because of the friction of card creation. Thank you for this!
You're welcome! Here's the one I've been using: https://github.com/ankimcp/anki-mcp-server
I've definitely hit walls with Anki over the years, and while the community decks help a lot, it's really nice to just tell Claude "can you take this assignment my tutor gave me, extract all the infinitive verbs, and then make cloze style cards for conjugations at an A1/A2 level?" and get it all done in a couple minutes.
Ha, I love this!
In a way making the cards helps a ton to learn the content and decide what's really important to retain. On the other hand, it's such a slog that I usually end up relying on community cards, or skipping it altogether. The MCP idea may be a nice middle ground. Will give it a try for an upcoming exam.
Same for me. I was doing my PhD in another country and was just overwhelmed and disoriented at the sheer scale of information I suddenly had to remember and digest. Anki was on again/off again for me at first, but once I learned to edit and update the cards and add my own, I really began to understand how to boil concepts down into something I could remember, i.e. I could structure it to my own personal chaotic mode of thinking, and I've flourished with it since then
I've been barely keeping my head above water (ok, much better than that honestly) for 35 years intellectually due to lack of more methodical learning. Your post might convince me of trying Anki...
The real trick is not realising that its working until you stop using it :-)
I've just started using Anki and I'm almost grieving. If I had had this 15 years ago I probably would have done so much better in school. I've always struggled with memorizing, but Anki has made this much easier for me. I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I'm baffled by how much I've retained in that period. Now I'm playing with using it to learn the rules for the OneRing TTPRG.
Same for me. I discovered spaced repetition through Anki. It helped me study Japanese, Agile, and countless other topics, and the Android and macOS apps work perfectly together. A friend used it so much that he ended up contributing to the Android app as OSS.
> with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
I really hope this holds.
I think Anki, originally, was for studying Japanese too.
And I recently wrote about making my own Anki Japanese cards in my blog[1]
[1] https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-proje...
You're right about that, Anki is named after the Japanese word for memorisation. (暗記 - あんき "anki")
https://jisho.org/word/%E6%9A%97%E8%A8%98
Is Anki that much better than, say, Quizlet?
Same for me, while I learned Danish, which is even harder then Japanese.
Sorry if I’m missing an implied /s :D
Ftr Danish is a category 1 language, while Japanese is category 4 ("https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages")
... for the native speakers of English which not all the people in the world are.
> Sorry if I’m missing an implied /s :D
You caught me. ;-)
tbh I was perhaps also eager to reshare that website someone linked the other day :P I saw a chance and by golly I had to take it.
On the plus side, the actually good mobile Anki client, AnkiDroid, remains out of the hands of this potentially questionable new entity.
(AnkiDroid has always been run independently, which is good, considering the state of the iOS client, which has always been neglected.)
True. It should however be noted that the most active maintainer of AnkiDroid will be joining the new entity:
> We’re currently talking to David Allison, a long-time core contributor to AnkiDroid, about working together on exactly these questions. His experience with AnkiDroid’s collaborative development is invaluable, and we’re grateful he’s willing to help us get this right. We’re incredibly excited to have him join us full-time to help propel Anki into the future.
Yeah, and while they say AnkiDroid is going to be maintained by the original creator separate from AnkiHub, we won't be privy to any employment contract language that makes any work done by the employee as being property of AnkiHub. Which would be an issue.
Why would that be an issue?
Because it would mean any contribution by AnkiDroid's owner to AnkiDroid would be considered property of his new employer, AnkiHub.
A contributor's license agreement would overrule the terms of the employment contract, assuming they set one up properly.
anki has so much potential and has such a big and unique audience, it is incomprehensible to me how it has managed to be so neglected.
and then now why, of all times, when a solo developer is never more productive, would the lead maintainer cede ownership? the antidote for programming burnout has just been invented, just take it haha
My experience using AI is that it wildly increases burnout, not decreases it.
Writing code is fun. Solving interesting problems is fun.
Debugging deep problems is fun.
Debugging slop code is a painful suffering experience, having to constantly double check that the AI agent didn't just change the unit tests to "return true" and lie to you is tiring, and the feeling that you can't significantly improve the tool burns me out hard.
That last one can't be overstated. When I find a weird behavior that looks like a bug in the linux kernel or rustc or such, I find it exhilarating to read code and understand what the bug is, how it got there, and to feel like I can fix it and never see it again.
When claude code gives me a "wrong" output for my prompt, I don't feel like there's any possible way I can go and find what part of the Opus 4.5 model resulted in it not being able to give better output.
I feel helpless to debug what went wrong when claude code spirals into the deep end.
I can add more initial context, add skills, but those are tiny heuristic tweaks around the giant mass of incomprehensible weights and biases that no human understands.
The antidote for programming burnout is not to replace all the fun parts of programming with painful probabilistic suffering.
I've been using Anki for a few years and have never experienced it as neglected. There are regular updates and a big community contributing knowledge, add-ins, etc.
What’s so bad about the paid iOS client? I remember it being expensive when I got it but it works fine for my use case (mix of getting me through part of med school, all of law school, and the just general shit I’d like to remember and learn). There’s definitely never been anything jarring about using it vs the Mac or windows clients but I’m happy for somebody to point out the problems I’ve been missing!
I paid 30€ for Anki on iOS. I remember being a bit upset because the Android and the macOS version (Qt based) are completely free. Even the iOS version is open-source. In the end, I did not want to create my own build and sideload Anki for iOS via Developer certificates, so I just paid the 30€. I think it is too expensive especially since I can easily afford that having a job and all, but I remember at uni I would struggle to afford this. But then again, when I was at uni there were no smartphones, and my computer cost less than an iPhone. So I'd probably have cheap android anyway.
To amend, I got way more than 30€ of value out of it. I learn a new language, and vocab training with Anki works better than anything else.
I use the official iOS client everyday. What’s wrong with it?
I also use it every day. It does its job, but it has many usability issues that make it less than ideal.
For example, copy and paste retains the text color (probably by design). So, sometimes I get black text on a black background, when the app is in dark mode.
The editing process to remove the formatting is pretty annoying.
It takes me time to find the edit button, which is buried in the menu but prominent in the desktop version. Then, I have to toggle the HTML mode and delete the retained tags, which on a phone takes time. The desktop version, instead, has a button to remove all formatting.
The App uses the Mac Text element rather than a custom one, so it'll have the same shortcuts as all of them; `⇧ Shift ⌥ Option ⌘ Command V` to paste and match the formatting of the current field (in the case of a blank field, remove formatting).
Try pasting into an app/textbox that doesn't support any formatting then copy/paste from there.
iOS one is fine, pretty good. I use it daily too. Ankidroid is much better, which I would attribute to being open source with lots of eyeballs on it and making improvements for the love of it.
I do too, and I hate it. Some of my pet peeves from the top of my head (there would be more most likely if I'd think a bit, but maybe later):
AnkiDroid is *just* an interface over the shared core/engine (written in rust nowadays)
The (paid!) iOS client has always been a disappointment to me, and I've long been jealous of the open source Android one.
I don't mind so much that it's paid, given how much use I get for the price, but it sucks knowing it sucks and not being able to help make it better.
I've just bought it to support the developer, as it was according to his website his preferred way to support him.
Agreed. I’m particularly excited that they’ll be investing in the UI/UX.
I use the iOS app daily, and while it's not the prettiest thing in the world, it has nearly every feature of the desktop client, including full scripting support for card contents, which is amazing for things like collapsable elements and media. And, at the end of the day, it's about what you learn from using it that matters.
Is it still 25$ price? Makes it impossible to recommend Anki to friends/students to "try spaced repetition".
Just have them use it on their computer or the web?
It improved my grades so much in college that I spent the 25 bucks as a broke student so I could have it on my second hand iPad. This was before AnkiDroid even existed so it's amazing the price is still the same.
That works for people who already convinced that they want to use it. I'm talking about people who've heard it for the first time and they're not going to spend 25$ for some new app just to try. 25$ is unusually high price for an AppStore app and it's just doesn't work unless you're really determined to use it. I don't understand why people are downvoting this.
I would argue that it's almost impossible to start first with the mobile version so this situation should never happen. The computer version is essential for setting up and getting decks. The web version remains free as well.
Why would it be the case?
Anki app has an interface for adding/editing cards, and can absolutely be used without AnkiWeb or syncing. In fact, this is how I used it myself for years. I would argue that using AnkiWeb and syncing is an advanced feature for people who got the taste of having own decks and don't want to loose it.
They can just use the computer version then, and buy it when they know it's useful for them?
Some people would need to buy computer first. Again, it's very hard to recommend mobile app to people if you need to add these kind of "workarounds". Especially for the main target audience - young students – many of whom live in their mobile phones and not used to spend 25$ for apps.
They can try it on desktop and web for free if they are that skeptical.
Can you imagine, a lot of young people don't have desktop/laptop, only mobile.
The web client works just fine!
"Hey, there is an amazing app for learning, but it costs 25$ for your iPhone, so just use web version instead".
Very appealing, makes people try app immediately. :)
I think you essentially have to use the desktop version no matter what—so the real dichotomy is whether you want to use a free program with free online hosting with the bundled (free) web application... or if you want to buy a $25 app.
It seems a lot like saying nobody should use GMail unless they agree to pay for premium Google Services.
I don't have this problem. I bought iOS Anki app for myself many years ago. What I found hard is to recommend it to others, who never heard about spaced repetition yet, especially to young students, who arguably is the main target audience for this kind of tools. They just not jumping into buying 25$ app to try it. As soon as you start mentioning switching to laptop, using web/desktop - they're not jumping into it either. I don't know maybe you all have different experience, but that's what I experienced over the years and it always felt sad, because this price is a prohibitively high for many people.
Given that push notifications haven't worked in AnkiDroid for years, it doesn't feel good to me?
Just one data point but they work for me. (Nothing phone, android 16, Ankidroid 2.23.3 installed from Fdroid)
Notifications work extremely badly.
We've got a setting [developer options only] which completely reimplements them, it won't be live for 2.24, but hopefully 2.25
https://github.com/ericli3690/gsoc-ankidroid-report/blob/mai...
Why would you need push notifications on AnkiDroid?
Duolingo effect, people will forget to do the learning if they are not reminded
I prefer Apps that won't manipulate me. Duolingo is annoying. Anki is a habit after a certain point
Reminder is not manipulation.
Those used by Duolingo definitely are
It was a fascinating symbiotic between nerdy med students from all over the world and an obscure open source flashcard app that originally targeted language learners. I've been part of that community for many years and would have never foreseen this outcome but in hindsight it seems the best path forward for anki.
Amazing. A few nerdy med students and I started a student group for tech back in 2009 or so, a big part early on was preaching Mnemosyne (another SRS app), with shared decks syncing over a free Dropbox account.
Later used Repetitions (iOS / Mac / web) for the steps, EM boards, and informatics boards most recently.
Only within the last year finally tried Anki -- and this time for language.
Does the community have extensive medicine syllabus as decks? I got 429ed from searching their decks.
I don't think it's just for nerdy med students nowadays. Who studied for Step I without it? And How? (And Why? :)
If one is of a certain age, of course they studied for step I without it
and the classic method was the inspiration for Anki to begin with: making your own flashcards on index cards! You could do a version of spaced repetition by shuffling the deck.
Not sure the digital version is actually easier or more effective
At one time I had more than 20,000 cards that I had >85% recall on after 21 days... Hard to do that without the digital version.
Step 1 is pass/fail now. If I had to redo it and just pass, I don't think it would be necessary to use anki now (except maybe for something Sketchy).
Amboss
Always a bit scary when an open source project changes stewardship like this, but I'm quite relieved to see all involved parties seem to be aware of the dangers and very much on the same page about not screwing this up.
Done right, commercial interests can often have a very positive symbiotic relationship with open source. Almost all the largest and best open source projects out there have substantial involvement from commercial interests.
I do think though that from a structural/governance perspective it's not a good idea for Anki to be owned by AnkiHub. Anki is a community project, not a corporate product, and while it sounds like the license will continue to reflect that, I personally think it would be best if the corporate structure did too. If Anki were spun out as an independent foundation (like Blender, Linux, etc) receiving most of its support and development work from AnkiHub, rather than owned outright, I think that would allow a much more robust governance structure than just having everything be under AnkiHub's direct control with some pinky promises about listening to the community.
> What We Don’t Know Yet
> Governance and decision-making: How decisions are made, who has final say, and how the community is heard
> Roadmap and priorities: What gets built when and how to balance competing needs
> The transition itself: How to bring in more support without disrupting what already works
In other words: they have no clue what to do next (https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/ankis-growing-up/68610/2#p-1905...)
Many community-oriented programs have failed after acquisition because they came out too firm, too decided, and too purposeful, only to realize the community is still skeptical and turning against them six months in.
Honestly, for a program like Anki, starting out by saying "we need to figure out what good governance looks like, as well as what might be agreeable and possible for everyone involved" is a much stronger positioning than coming up with something that may or may not fly to try make a strong first impression. Communities do not follow the conventional rules of American business.
From the posts, it sounds like the original maintainer was approaching the point where they'd just abandon it, so this overall seems like a better outcome than either abandonment or sale to a PE firm.
That remains to be seen. Many things are much worse than "abandonment" for completed software.
Knowing what they don't know puts them ahead of many organizations.
Community focused organizations like this are hard to run without governance transitions. I think Anki brings value to the world and anyone willing to take on a leadership role in keeping it going should be given trust and grace to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have. I wish them luck.
It seems more than a little bit careless to agree on a deal without having those very important things hammered out. What if there is disagreement about these?
I actually really appreciate the honesty of this. Much better than undue confidence.
Or: They don't want to force a specific governance model onto an existing community.
I have no deep insight here, but given the times I have seen a negative reaction from the community with ownership changes or similar, giving yourself time to figure out how to do things may actually be a good thing.
The community has been in a deadlock over making FSRS the default (https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/3616), and I wonder if this will lead to some resolution.
It seems like the core things that Anki needs are new user experience improvements, and algorithm updates. SM2 really shows its age as compared to other algorithms.
Is there that much of a difference?
I think many learners are walking into a trap of thinking, if they just change their SPS algorithm, they will magically learn more. I think they might learn a little bit more, but the biggest effect is simply due to time investment and doing the repetitions. It is good to be able to practice known words less often, obviously, but that can be achieved using a very basic system already.
If changing their SPS or the promises about an SPS motivate the learner, then great, they're putting in the work and time to learn, but I doubt that the effect of changing the SPS is as large as some people claim.
For example I used a tool that supposedly uses FSPS, but it did have a low maximum for the duration you don't have to practice a word, and no way for me to "ban" a word, so that it asks me in 6 months or something, and simple words kept coming back, especially after not learning for a few days. I didn't make much progress using the tool, even though it had FSPS.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/supermemo-is-better-than-f... seems to suggest that yes, it is a major improvement over SM-2, and given how critical they are of FSRS I'm happy to believe them. SM-2 to my understanding is basically the simplest possible spaced repetition algorithm - I think something like 'double the review interval if easy, otherwise multiply by some difficulty factor to reduce this interval depending on which button was clicked'.
That said, even SM-2 is probably vastly superior to just not doing SRS at all.
Isn’t the linked article claiming that SM is superior to FSRS?
SM is claiming that the latest versions of the SM algorithm (namely SM-19) are vastly superior to FSRS (maybe it is?).
They state in contrast:
We do not dismiss the work behind FSRS. It is a commendable open-source effort and a marked improvement over ancient algorithms like SM-2.
For context, Anki uses SM-2's algorithm (albeit apparently heavily modified for various special cases) if FSRS is not enabled.
As a user, it’s a HUGE difference. FSRS leads to an incredibly reduced workload.
Yes, because intervals on some cards become absurdly large (4 years after seeing the card twice) .
If the algorithm says so, so it is.
Our data in the cloud, hallowed be thy computation, your kingdom come, your will be done, on our devices as it is in the cloud. Give us today our daily feed.
And forgive us for our typos, as we forgive those typo [sic] against us.
This sounds like some absurd mis-optimization of parameters on your part.
Yeah, FSRS is much better. For me it was the difference between learning 10 new words of Mandarin a day and learning 20, with the same time commitment.
To me it sounds like an incredible speed to learn even 10 Mandarin words per day, let alone 20. So extreme, that I must wonder, what definition of "Mandarin words" and what definition of "learned" you are using, when you are writing that, or, that you are an extreme outlier in terms of memorizing visual information.
For me really learning a word means:
Do you really learn 20 words properly under those definitions? If so, then respect. I consider myself to have quite a good memory for visual information, but if I don't try to memorize 20 words as a full-time activity on that day, and write them hundreds of times, I am fairly sure they won't stick for long, maybe not even until the next day. Some obviously will, and some have good explanations why the characters look as they do, but others don't, and feel arbitrarily constructed.You've just admitted that the way you use "learn" is different. It's you who is using it differently from the commonly agreed upon way. (3) is arbitrary, ideally you would want to remember the words for your entire lifetime. A lot of people don't care about (2), you'd only care if you want to live in the country and are presented with a lot of paperwork.
You learn the words for a day (you're able to match the sounds and meaning to it). You will forget a lot of them tomorrow, so now you have to re-learn them. This is just how Anki works. You keep learning and re-learning until they stick for a prolonged period of time. It's common for Japanese learners to add between 20 or 30 words to their learning queue.
If you understand how Anki works, you will also understand how the word learning is used in relation to its flashcard mechanism.
With all due respect, your comment doesn't add much to the discussion. I explicitly mentioned different definitions of learning, and then proceeded to give mine.
And with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim. If you think that "learning" is commonly agreed upon to mean "memorize for a couple of hours", then please show me the research into the meaning of the word, that proves your claim. While I have explicitly stated, what _my personal_ definition is, you are claiming to be knowledgeable about a "commonly agreed upon" definition. That is an impressive claim in itself. Let us all hear that definition, that is so commonly agreed upon, so that we can gain from that.
What you call learning, I call "training" or "practicing" or "revising". Now the onus is on you to prove to me, that indeed as you claim there is some commonly agreed upon definition, specifically in the area of learning Mandarin, that proves, that my definition is off.
And I will have you know, that I am learning Mandarin for some 10+ years, and have a lot of experience in that area. I know what counts and what is important.
I am referring to the standard metric used in SRS communities.
When people in the language learning community say they "learn 20 words a day", they are referring to New Cards Added. It is a metric of input and initial encoding, not guaranteed permanent storage.
In Anki, "Learning" is literally a specific phase (the red cards). You introduce the card, you pass the initial threshold, and then the algorithm handles the retention over the subsequent weeks. You are conflating the process of learning (adding new information) with the result of mastery (long-term active recall).
> with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim
Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular? Do you think it's harder than other languages to learn new words? It's not like you have to learn new hanzi for every word. Most are compounds. It's like being surprised someone easily learned how to spell "lighthouse" because it's got a silent "gh" and a silent "e" and the "ou" is not pronounced the way you'd expect, and the "th" in the middle isn't pronounced like "th" should be.
The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
My experience with Japanese is that you hit around 800 or so kanji and new vocab comes very easily. Even new kanji come extremely easily because they're all made up of the same parts ("radicals").
EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
> Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular?
The original claim was about 20 Mandarin words.
> The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
This kind of comparison doesn't work properly for learning Chinese characters. Simply combining characters like that only works ~half of the time or less.
> EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
Delusional for Mandarin, unless you have some kind of special brain putting you in some 0.001% of the population. Not even natives learn that many words in a year. That many characters they might know when reaching university, and then later forget many again. Most native adults don't know that many.
> The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
Well, at least on that we agree. If one doesn't put in the time and effort, then the results will reflect that.
> (2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.
Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
How would your opinion change if you knew that plenty of native Japanese and Chinese speakers can't write the characters they can read anymore? If you don't have to physically write anymore, you lose the ability to write the characters. This is true of even educated adults in Japan and China. When I was a university student (I'm not Japanese), I could write kanji that my 30+yo Japanese friends had forgotten, but no one would say I knew how to use the words better than they could.
EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
> Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
Bad example, but to roll with it: In that case I would say they don't know it properly, since it is apparent, that in their mind there is no difference between "their" and "they're" or even "they are".
> How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
I am basing my personal definition of when I consider a word "learned" on reality, not on some "what if". If I had to map that idea of no spelling standardization to Chinese characters, then it would mean, that characters don't have standardized lines/components/parts. If there was no standard, then I guess I would consider this kind of making up how to write it on the fly sufficient for having learned a word. Thankfully there is standardization, so that is not a reality we live in.
Since I strive to not be an illiterate, I do not count being illiterate as having learned a word.
> EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
That depends very much on the language and course, but if it is your major, then sure, such a time commitment seems reasonable, since it is the thing you are doing. If your major is anything else and you just take an additional language course, where I come from you have once or twice a week that course. Then maybe 1 or 2 weeks you finish one chapter of a course book, which might have 20 new words, so that makes 20 words in 1-2 weeks, not in 2 days.
Typically for Mandarin the speed will also be slower than other easier to learn languages. For example at school I almost never had to learn vocabulary in English or Spanish. I just saw the words and memorized them somehow. Usage in class and often their sound and structure was sufficient , and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages.
It doesn't work like that with Chinese characters. You are not gonna learn them (including writing them) by just looking at them a few times, unless you got an extraordinary visual, almost photographic memory. I consider myself already to have a pretty good visual memory, but still I need to put in the time and effort, and 20 words a day is way out of my league. But then again it was already cleared up in another comment, that the OP cuts out writing entirely. That's definitely a choice one can make and explains how 20 newly added words (I would still debate that that's "learned") make any sense.
I should have clarified. My goal in learning Mandarin is only conversational fluency, not literacy.
I don't bother with the Hanzi past being able to recognize them. I want to be able to talk to people and, if I have to, use a pinyin keyboard to write basic sentences.
So only 1 & 4 are really relevant, 2 is what Anki is designed to do.
Thanks for clarifying, that sounds reasonable then.
Literacy shouldn't matter for the definition of knowing a language anyway. Orthography isn't language. It's a symbolic notation that represents a language. Blind people don't speak a different language from non-blind people. Illiterate people can still speak language. Children still speak language. Humans in societies where writing systems do not exist still can speak language.
Writing a language makes you more skilled at living in the modern world. It's not a threshold past which you must travel to count as a speaker of that language.
Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking also.
By cutting out the memorization of Hanzi, I am able to accelerate my actual goal of having conversations with people.
In Silicon Valley speak, I think the term would be "ruthless prioritization" .
Also you can probably still write. Just not by hand. Which is a vanishingly useful skill.
Unless you're applying for something in China, you don't need to know how to write hanzi ever, except for very one-off instances like "I can write happy new year in Chinese"
You know how many times I've written "real" Japanese by hand since 2005? Zero. I've written my name and stuff, sometimes I'll write 愛 to show my daughters. Nothing else. Because it's a worthless skill unless you live in Japan. Not even visiting. You live there.
Of course I type all the time. But typing is speaking + reading. It's not writing. You type phonetically (i.e., you know how to say the word), and then you hit spacebar until the correct kanji comes up (i.e., you can read kanji).
Does using FSRS result in less retention, due to scheduling less reviews than other systems? Or is it actually more efficient in a meaningful way by cutting out unnecessary reviews?
The goal of the scheduling algorithm is to predict the optimal time for when you need to review your card again. FSRS has a bunch of parameters tja you can customize based on previous learning attempts, usually a few 100 cards is enough to adapt to your own learning abilities, but in current Anki versions you need to manually update the parameters to optimize your learning.
The goal is of course the latter.
I'm an Anki user, on and off since 10 years or so, but was still confused. If I understood correctly, the entities here are:
- Anki, as set up by dae aka Damien, is like the brand name and desktop implementation with the spaced repetition algorithm
- AnkiWeb is what I thought this hub thing was. It's where you download decks
- AnkiHub is a third party (started by "AnKing", now 35 employees) who sells decks as a monthly subscription and has their content on the deep web (you need to create an account and agree to terms to even see a listing of what's there besides a few featured parts). This is who is getting ownership of the former two. Because they write that Anki will remain open source at its "core", I presume that means that things will, at best, stay stable rather than anything (like AnkiWeb the deck sharing platform) becoming open
- AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
> - AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
----
To copy from my message on Discord:
> I’m moving to a full-time position working on Anki [incl. AnkiWeb & AnkiMobile]. I’m really excited about this, but there’s a mountain of pending, somewhat undefined work which will need to be done, and it’ll need my full-time attention for a while.
> I’ll still be contributing to AnkiDroid, but I won’t be able to commit as much time as I am doing currently (at least for the first few months while things stabilize). I’ll be here on evenings/weekends, and will be contributing in other ways (hopefully: unified Note Editor, JS addons etc… ), but I expect to slow down with code contributions to ensure I’m staying on on top of PR reviews & general force multiplier work. I’m definitely Org Admin’ing for GSoC over the summer [assuming Google gives us the greenlight], it’s historically been a VERY light role.
> In all honesty: I’m expecting things to be business as usual, I have more than enough capacity to keep up with the notification queue. Even if I completely dropped off the planet, we’re a great team and the improvements would keep on flowing. AnkiDroid’s bus factor has been >>> 1 for a LONG time now.
https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/701922522836...
GSoC: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
Information on Discord visible only if you sign up for it (and afaik, in some countries, upload identification)... that does seem rather in line with the deep web architecture that AnkiHub uses. Maybe this would be good in a ticket or the Anki forums, since it's relevant to the people using and contributing to the app. Here on HN it's now also findable in web searches as a side effect of copying it I guess
This is the Discord server which AnkiDroid has used for dev for just under 6 years. Nothing AnkiHub related.
> AnkiWeb
Worth noting you don't need to use it. Anki comes with a syncserver implementation for a while now, and there are docker images too. It's worth it for the transfer speeds alone IMO.
Anki is under AGPL too, which has an anti-DRM clause, so many type of enshittification of anki or their addons (e.g. to prevent sharing of their decks) would be unenforceable too.
As such I see no obvious things that would be susceptible to enshittification here.
Aha [0], that is neat.
[0]: https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html
I've tried several times before to install syncserver using those pip instructions, on multiple platforms, without success.
Just as a counterpoint, to avoid people getting the wrong idea about the complexity involved - I use it and it took literally minutes. The most confusing part was that the sync settings in Ankidroid referred to Ankiweb.
Hey, could you put in an issue, especially regarding the pain points, but also including what 'seems unusual': https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android
It's mostly due to time/resource/technical constraints [some of our strings come from a shared backend], but we can do better here, especially if there's now a lot more community interest in the feature.
Pull requests welcome! Do feel free to get in touch on the issue/Discord.
Was about to do that, but it turned out it's already fixed in the current version - so literally the only minor issue I hit on my way to a custom sync server is resolved already :)
The pip instructions are bad. Typical Python things: Non-reproducible, not involving a proper lock file. Cargo instructions seem not much better, since they are only referring to a tag in the git repo. The installation from "package build" leak user and password in shell history.
Overall this doesn't inspire much confidence in how solid and tested the procedure is.
The page is on GitHub:
https://github.com/ankitects/anki-manual/blob/main/src/sync-...
Full disclaimer - it's a feature which AnkiDroid supports, but isn't one which I use.
I see. I am not claiming, that it is your job to fix that.
On that page though, the same issues are present. The pip install does not make use of any lock file.
Isn't a command we should be seeing in 2026. Unless it is a one-off experiment setup. There should be proper lock files, not just version numbers, especially in the Python and JS ecosystems this has become less and less acceptable. Leaks username and password to shell command history. Again, can be fine for a one-off quick hack, but is not a great practice, since the shell command history is not the most secure place to store ones credentials in. This could be easily mitigated by adding leading " " (space), at least in environments I am familiar with, but better would probably be putting the credentials in a config file, so that they never hit the shell command history.The repo already has a lock file for uv. It would be better to make use of that lock file, when using Python to install. And in fact, when one downloads a release of Anki for desktop and runs it the first time, it does make use of uv, creating a venv, and (unconfirmed) hopefully makes use of the uv lock file.
I see these kinds of issues very frequently in Python projects. As someone, who has previously worked on providing docker images for data science workflows, enabling reproducible research, I am quite sensitive to this. But also I hear from friends, that they are traumatized by Python projects installing things in system python and other shenanigans. In general there seem to be tons of people doing Python projects, who don't have a clear idea of how to make things safe and reproducible, which is giving Python projects in general a bad reputation. All while good solutions to these problems exist and existed for years.
In fairness, Python as an ecosystem doesn't make it clear, either. I used to write a ton of Python back in the v2 days. I came back to Python to write a web crawler in summer 2025 and couldn't believe how it was still a bunch of arcane commands to create a virtual environment and install dependencies and capture the dependencies. Yes, an IDE like Pycharm handles this (thank goodness), but jiminy crickets, why doesn't "pip" refuse to even work until you've done "pip init" which generates a requirements.txt and then every pip install should check for a requirements.txt in the PWD. If it doesn't exist, refuse to install the dep. If the file does exist, append the version of the dep to that file.
It's 2026. Even JavaScript can do this.
pip is the de facto manager for the entire language. It should be better. With Node Package Manager for JS, the installation default is at the project level. You have to do a command line override to install globally.
PIP is the opposite. In fact, the only way to install at the project level is to create a virtual environment and trick PIP into thinking it's installing at the global level!
What language operates like this in 2026? Maven installs at the project level. Unison at the project level. Haskell at the project level. JS/TS at the project level.
Try docker: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/tree/main/docs/syncserver#...
(Same person as above but felt that this part had a separate purpose so I've moved it into its own comment)
The ecosystem is currently such that it seems hard to enshittify it. They say they have no intention of doing that and I believe it, but their vision of a healthy and good product might involve a fair price (for rich countries at least) whereas it was always free so far
Time will tell; it sounds like there's currently no plans either way, but it's also simply open enough that users can always just install the open source software and share decks with each other by whatever file transfer/sharing means. Everything that's already there won't simply go away. I'm going to keep using AnkiDroid and building the language deck I am working on
Worth mentioning too is the FSRS algorithm for scheduling cards is implemented in separate libraries which are released under MIT license.
The iOS app has never been free and that's the way most people use it these days. Desktop computing is a niche.
This may be true, but as someone who picked up Anki as a desktop app back around 2009 it feels a little crazy.
I also can’t imagine making cards on a phone, given how much switching between apps/windows is involved and how poor mobile platforms are at multitasking. It’s difficult to envision it being anything but maddening.
That's how some people do their "computing" these days, if they do any that deserves the name at all. I had to do some of that on vacation. With a modern phone it's possible, but mentally taxing. Phones feel like MS-DOS operating systems, where each application is fullscreen. Most people are just consumers. This is probably true for Anki decks as well. Only a small minority creates decks, the vast majority only consumes.
Desktop for creating cards, mobile for reviewing them.
I prefer a laptop for reviewing because it’s still portable, but also more amenable to comfort for longer sessions and makes spot corrections easier.
Who is this
Why'd people choose a closed ecosystem but then care about open software? I assume the main crowd is on AnkiDroid, either via f-droid or google play, and that the few iOS people don't care about a new corporation taking over the rights
In America perhaps. Android is more popular in other countries, most people I know use Anki for free. The desktop app and sync are useful for editing cards and managing a large collection. Both of those are free too, but for how long?
It's very unlikely that a majority of Anki users only uses the iOS app.
1. Anki isn't your everyday application with your everyday audience.
2. The number of people willing to splash $25 on an iOS flashcard app without first having tried it for free elsewhere, is incredibly small.
> The iOS app has never been free and that's the way most people use it these days.
Where are you getting the stats that drive this claim? How are you measuring usage on platforms that don't necessarily collect usage metrics, e.g. desktop versions?
This sounds concerning. Someone ought to back up the public AnkiWeb decks while we still can.
I love anki.
But upon reading this I think it's high time I exported all my notes in simple text format, just in case.
Maybe also try Fernando Borretti's flashcard app I saw (and dismissed) recently here
Anki uses a SQLite database for all its data, so it's already an open format.
Anki also regularly takes local backups.
Good on him, 19 years is a long time to carry the flame. Thanks for getting me through school!
When a popular, free and open source passion project led by a single dev moves into the hands of a company that needs to sustain its 30-people team [0], you know what happens next.
AnkiHub's modus operandi has been to take over communities or projects where free exchange happens and monetize/paywall them. If you've been a part of the /r/medicalschoolanki subreddit, you know exactly what I mean. It's been hollowed out completely.
In the post, AnkiHub mentions how Anki is "sacred" to them. Yet, they have had no qualms entrenching themselves into Anki's settings menu as the only third-party ever to do so. [1] I am sure more is to come. And the language used in their post almost never helps their case, especially in the pricing and OSS sections.
I understand why Damien felt he was being a bottleneck in Anki's development. This is similar to what was happening with Bram and Vim. Ultimately, the community forked and built Neovim. Gorhill had also similarly transferred uBlock, but then came back and built uBlock Origin. So the precedents are there for a successful community-run or leader-run spinoff.
Syncing is sure to become a paid feature, and access to shared decks too.
Creating a fork pointed to a hosted version of Sync Server [2], and an alternative hub where people can share decks other than AnkiWeb [3] is paramount. As well as saving and preserving all of the decks there, as they are sure to go behind a paywall.
I, and I am sure many other HNers, would be willing to support that with our time and financially.
[0] https://www.ankihub.net/about-us [1] https://github.com/ankitects/anki/pull/3232 [2] https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html [3] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks
This is the correct take. It's over for Anki. Even assuming a best case scenario where the status quo remains and AnkiWeb continues to be "free", all the valuable data collected in AnkiWeb is now ripe for paywalling & potential abuse. The AnkiWeb privacy policy is likely to undergo a change quite soon - https://ankiweb.net/account/privacy
A really disappointing development all around & I hope it galvanizes the community to fully disassociate itself from AnkiHub & dae.
I'm hopeful this new company wont ruin anki, but assuming they do, how do I find the "new anki" fork and how do I contribute.
Is there a community / anki forum that hasn't been acquired?
Personally what I did is pop over to the Anki github repo and star it. You can also get notifications.
One thing I notice is that it does seem to have a large group of contributors. It's hard to imagine the desktop app will die completely.
> Absolutely. Anki’s core code will remain open source, guided by the same principles that have guided the project from the beginning.
Already caveating with the "core" code. Even without PE and VC, it's clear that a company with 35 employees is bound to take this in a different direction than 1 guy, and not a good one. If there comes a day where those 35 employees can't be sustained anymore by revenue, and the choice is between enshittification and shutting down/firing everyone, we'll see what happens. That's the big difference - such a decision was never on the cards, or at least much less likely, when run by a single person. Now it will be.
Big conflict of interests too. AnkiHub makes money from selling paid addons. No chance any of those will ever end up in Anki now.
Also not a good look that they immediately locked the thread in their most popular community.
Considering that anki can always be forked if development goes being hostile towards users I think this is a net positive. The most common complaint among new users is the learning curve and the UI. Both can be solved and Anki can flourish to the bigger level. I say this as someone who does 300+ cards every day.
I shared my thoughts as a veteran user and contributor to Anki, as well as a former AnkiHub team member https://youtu.be/13p0t8Tv-jw
AnkiHub people seem kind of slimy in my experience (at least their leader, "The AnKing"). I hope they figure out a good leadership situation, and make stronger commitments to openness.
Anki is in a very solid position to be forked if anything happens, so even if this is bad news I have faith in the larger community.
I have this vague sense that this is the opinion of many people in the Anki community many years ago when I last used it (to improve my German vocabulary before my first child was born—with whom I speak German).
I was reminded that AnkiHub's business model is selling Anki add-ons.
So it seems clear they would decline to add competing features to Anki, but instead create an add-on to sell instead, and never add it as a feature to Anki.
Anki is and was truly a blessing. Not sure I would have gotten through my studies without it. Thank you dae!
As a person with really poor memory, the entirety of my learning depends on this app. I'm worried :/
Worrying won't help. Find alternatives. Make a plan.
In a nice and controlled manner, so seemingly no reason to panic just yet:
> I ended up suggesting to them that we look into gradually transitioning business operations and open source stewardship over, with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
> This is a step back for me rather than a goodbye - I will still be involved with the project, albeit at a more sustainable level.
From AnkiHub:
> No enshittification. We’ve seen what happens when VC-backed companies acquire beloved tools. That’s not what this is. There are no investors involved, and we’re not here to extract value from something the community built together. Building in the right safeguards and processes to handle pressure without stifling necessary improvements is something we’re actively considering.
Relieved at that part where they say there are no investors involved, makes the whole thing a whole lot less risky. Good for everyone involved, and here's to many more years with Anki :)
Yeah my first thought on seeing the headline was “Uh-oh. Time to replace Anki.”
But finding out there are no VCs, no investors, I’ll stay with Anki for now.
But still, these HN comments - after an announcement like this - are usually a good place to find out about replacements.
Might as well give a recommendation then: I've been using hashcards [0] for a few weeks now and have enjoyed its simplicity and the fact that it all stays forever in raw markdown files and versioned git. A simple justfile has also been helpful.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264492
Sadly, their entire business is built on paywalling content the community built and distributed for free.
Well every company claims no enshittification when they get acquired, in the end that's rarely the case. It's like Private Equity buying a company out and say "Nothing will change"
The key difference is the outside investors, who more times than not has no interest in what's best for users ultimately.
Outside investors want profits. A company with thirty-five employees wants profits. I don't see a meaningful difference.
Give it a try to work in both, see what work gets prioritized VS not in each of them. Makes a huge difference, in my experience. Investors are counting on eventually getting paid 10x or nothing, employees generally expect a monthly salary and a Christmas bonus, this massively change what direction they think the company should be on.
Owner of the thirty-five employees company wants long term income and sort of security. They usually do not want huge peek in short term followed by death. They are also less comfortable with strategy that has 95% chance of destroying the company and 0.5% chance is earning a lot with 5% in between.
Outside investors are the exact opposite.
Also, smaller owners do not have that billionaire mindset of "any unethical or illegal action goes". It is not like they would be saints, but there is range of personalities and value systems among them. Billionaire became billionaires because not caring about any of that gives them advantage.
I have peer-reviewed research on the efficacy of SRS in second-language acquisition and this should be everywhere for everyone and the fact that it isn't is both a scandal and an opportunity for learners who do use it to leverage that advantage.
I use it extensively in my teaching. The problem is deploying Anki on locked down networks can be difficult so I've built alternatives and hacks to let you deploy decks and school accounts, but making a full-featured web client would change all of this.
So maybe it's a good time for me to have also started one of my own that I'm temporarily calling libreSRS because I'm not sure of the new direction here.
The goal is to have a multi-user, multi-algorithm-capable, web-based system that exposes everything (especially uploading!!) to the web client.
I've started using LLMs to help with card creation, and reviewing historic cards. Its been increasingly successful, I still end up with cards tailored to me, and the card quality has gone up (as I've asked the LLM to look for other views/sources and to do associate research to produce high quality cards).
Having ability to bake some of that into the tool in a configurable way would be ideal, and I hope thats sort of path they go down.
I realise in meantime plugins are an option, but I've found the quality of plugins very mixed.
At a fundamental level the algorithms predict the probability of a learner to correctly recollect a factoid at a given point in time given a history of sampling that recollection / presentation.
It would be interesting to have machine learning predict these probability evolutions instead. Simply recollecting tangential knowledge improves the recollection of a non-sampled factoid, which is hard to model in a strict sense, or perhaps easy for (undiscovered) dedicated analytic models. Having good performing but relatively opaque (high parameter counts) ML models could be helpful because we can treat the high parameter count ML model as surrogate humans for memory recollection experiments and try to find low parameter count models (analytic or ML) that adequately distill the learning patterns, without having to do costly human-hour experiments on actual human brains.
This is being actively researched (in the open!). https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-benchmark
Isn't FSRS (the new algorithm used in Anki since a few years ago) already based on machine learning?
Too old school and too effective.
FSRS just works, even without a GPU so it's not the cool kind of AI / machine learning these days.
No joke though: the FSRS model is marvelous, and Anki remains one of the best free + open source implementations around.
I've been learning German recently and Anki (in FSRS mode) is one of the most important learning tools I have. No joke.
------
Every card remembers every rating you give it, as well as the time / date. This allows for Anki to solve for a 'forgetting curve', and predict when different cards have a chance to be forgotten.
There is furthermore the machine learning / stochastic descent algorithm to better fit the assumed forgetting curves to your historical performance. This is the FSRS Optimize parameters button in the settings panel.
> Every card remembers every rating you give it, as well as the time / date. This allows for Anki to solve for a 'forgetting curve', and predict when different cards have a chance to be forgotten.
True to a point; every card has its ratings, but the "forgetting curve" algo of FSRS is only tuned to the deck (or "option set") that the card is in, not per card.
[delayed]
Yes. Stochastic gradient descent, to be precise.
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The...
The best thing that can happen is a fork. There is no way this will make the app worse, at least if you use a phone to do the reviewing. Syncing is sure to become a subscription.
I still haven't quite understood how Anki can apparently be profitable when the web sync with Ankiweb apparently supports an unlimited amount of data (surely some people heavily abuse this - but one never hears about fair use being applied?). Even legit and honest use can mean massive collection sizes since you can have any rich media in an Anki collection.
A few things. Up until now Anki was not a business and was not meant to be profitable.
AnkiWeb also does not support an unlimited amount of data. It's evident that their storage requirements aren't infinite. They aggressively cull content. Not syncing for 6 months results in automatic deletion last I checked.
I would still expect ingress and egress costs to be significant - as well as storage for content that isn't culled. And while it was not 'meant to be profitable' my point is that it was profitable, apparently exclusively from revenue from the iOS app which I still find surprising that it would cover the Ankiweb costs.
I've used Flashcards Deluxe for years and been very happy (no affiliation):
https://orangeorapple.com/flashcards/
Easy to import and export my cards, plenty of options for tweaking the algorithms for my use.
Oh for fucks sakes. No please no.
AnkiHub was already annoying with shoving AI into their Add-On without anyone asking for it.
I don't think this will go well
Can't help but wonder if it might not be time to start a FOSS alternative just in case Anki begins to decline.
It might not be the worst idea to do that anyway. Anki is great, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Off the top of my head, an architecture that doesn't involve fragile and finicky python bits and is designed to support multiple independent clients would be a nice step up (Telegram is a good model here — make a core lib with all the nuts and bolts which devs build clients around).
> make a core lib with all the nuts and bolts which devs build clients around
That is modern Anki. The core is a Rust library, which all the clients (desktop, web, Android and iOS) use. [0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299897
I learned something today, thank you.
Even so, I believe there's room for another open competitor or two in this space.
Anki already is FOSS and AGPLv3, so we can always fork
It's not FOSS but Mochi [0] is a pretty good alternative.
[0] https://mochi.cards/
I don't think anyone will comfortable pour 1000 hours into a closed source app. Especially because Anki is what it is today due to the numerous add ons
Looks like it's already going in the wrong direction.
"Our agreement with Damien stipulates that the current AGPLv3 code remains open source"
It sounds like a very specific dementi.
There's no CLA on Anki. Even dae does not have the right to relicense it.
They still have the closed source AnkiWeb Backend to do some annoying fuckery
Possible alternative to check out (not affiliated):
https://mochi.cards/
Mochi has really come a long way and has some wonderful built-in functionality. The automatic text-to-speech template options are high quality and randomize a variety of voices in each language. It's also doing some cool things with dynamic cards and LLMs.
Impressively, Mochi now offers FSRS (beta but still available in the app's main settings) and both the type of scheduler (Mochi default or FSRS) and the schedulers' settings are configurable on a deck-by-deck basis.
The developer is very responsive to folks on the forum and often quickly adds requested features.
Overall the app is well-designed and fun to use. I appreciate the swipe left/right to fail/pass cards on iOS. My one complaint is that the web clipper only works with Chrome and Firefox, but not with Safari (surprisingly). It would also be useful to have a global hotkey/palette to quick-add cards to various decks, similar to how OmniFocus lets you quickly add items to the OF Inbox.
I've been paying for the pro version for a while. It's templating is really powerful and easy to use. For my vocab deck, I set up a input field (e.g., word) and a bunch of derived fields (dict definition, AI-generated example, TTS audio). To add a new card, I just input the word and other fields will be automatically populated.
Technically this can be implemented in Anki as an addon. But only the desktop version supports addons and the default UI is a bit too complicated.
Looks nice but being an Electron-based app is a huge dealbreaker for me.
I imagine it's for Anki users and Anki already embeds a HTML engine (for the cards).
I don't think the main objection that people have to Electron is that it includes HTML rendering functionality. A proper desktop application that includes an HTML renderer for content formatting is a very different thing from a framework that implements an application entirely as an encapsulated webapp.
Can you import Anki decks and review history?
People usually say they want to change the world, then there are people that just change the world. Thank you for Anki (heart)
I learned about Anki recently, and as I was told, this is somehow a standard on medical studies, where a whole bunch of knowledge must be memorised
The way AnkiHub answers the questions in the FAQ in that non-answer corporate way sure gives me bad vibes.
Andrew (the CTO of AnkiHub) is smart as a whip and has built an impressive and seemingly sustainable business. Seems like the ideal steward for Anki!
Ideal for Andrew, maybe. For the users? The jury is out.
As someone who has used Anki for a decade, a thank you to dae for everything. Best of luck in your future endeavours.
With that out of the way, some thoughts:
- Anki is in a really good position to work around enshitification. The app, at least to me, is "complete" - the only additional features that might pique my curiosity is a different scheduler (at the moment, they're integrating a newer one, although I don't follow enough to know the state of it). Additionally, modern Anki is really well architected: the core of it is a Rust library, that is used by all of the platforms [0]. You can write new front ends using that, or just fork the existing FOSS ones. Maybe dae does a gorhill and gives us Anki Origin.
- Really the only service-y part of Anki I use is AnkiWeb, which is basically a backup and sync system. Wonder how that'll evolve (if they do end up charging for it, I hope it is "Obsidian" reasonable). EDIT: Ooo, Anki has public server software for running your own version. Awesome! [1]
- The idea outcome in my opinion would have been some form of charitable organisation (Linux Foundation?), with people donating to support Anki.
- So, AnkiHub is a company that produces Anki flashcards, and they've scaled that quickly? Jeez. Obviously Quizlet proved there was a market for flashcards, but I didn't realise this was possible for Anki.
- No outside investment is... hopeful. Not quite sure what indicates that this company has the technical know-how to maintain it.
- I've heard too many stories of a maintainer or creative being "hopeful" about their new acquirers, only to regret it years down the line.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299897
[1]: https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html
>Will Anki remain open source?
>Absolutely. Anki’s core code will remain open source, guided by the same principles that have guided the project from the beginning.
>Anki’s core code will remain open source
Hmmmmmm. Could be benign, but... hmmmmmm...
I always though Damien earns well with the iOS mobile version. Does he also pass it to AnkiHub too so they can earn from the app sales?
Even in the worst-case scenario, Anki is already perfect for me as is.
Spaced repetition seems like an ideal candidate for vibecoding. Sure, it gets complicated if you want all sorts of multimedia support, but for a lot of people, that's not necessary. How hard is it to build something like this, especially in 2026?
You could fit the most basic version of a spaced repetition program on the back of a napkin. Why would you want to vibe code yet another program lacking a bunch of useful features though?
Probably because I've seen so many people complaining about the issues with so many of the common apps. I don't want to pay a subscription for SR, and I don't really understand what the useful features are that I'd be missing out on. Can someone clue me in?
Why would you want to install someone else's bloated mess that includes a ton of crap you'll never use?
Tell me about your custom browser you're reading HN on!
I'd love to!
So I used AI to help me write this, I gotta be honest, but I have this TUI I use over SSH to access HN. I call it Nitpick!
It's GPL, athttps://github.com/fragmede/nitpick
It uses the HN API and algolia and golang with the bubble tea libraries. I'm parsing/scraping the threads page though, because reconstructing that from the API was proving to be a hassle.
It even supports logging in and commenting and reply notification!
I'm not totally sure where I land on using libraries (bubble tea) as they do bloat the program with unnecessary features, but I do like its simple text interface over using a web browser and a whole javascript engine for just rendering text.
Anyway, patches welcome!
:)
I feel like there's a lot of confusion, so not sure if anyone can clear up mine, but I'm really struggling to see a significance of this.
Obviously, like all ignorant people do, I am going to oversimplify things here. But still, to me, the "platonic idea" of Anki seems a dead simple thing. All what I care about when using Anki is what's on the 2 sides of a Card, a question + answer, which can only be some visual image (possibly encoded as text, possibly just JPEG, I really don't care as long as it fits in my mobile device memory) + optional sound. That's really it. If it should be bi-directional or uni-directional card is a detail of how the deck is generated/encoded, and the spaced repetition algorithm is a detail of the app that I use to study (so, usually AnkiDroid, I imagine — an unaffiliated 3rd party; who even uses desktop apps nowadays?).
So, I imagine there can exist (and do exist) some minor additional features, like an ability to require a typed answer for a card, but it seems pretty minor, and I really don't see a lot of room for the app to evolve.
So, ultimately people need only a common .apkg format, which exists and is relatively simple (although I suppose it could've been even simplier), and a place like AnkiWeb, where people can share their decks, so Spanish top-2000 or basic integrals deck isn't re-invented over and over again. It's a pity that AnkiWeb isn't more open and will be even less open from now on, but as long as someone is willing to just host it (which is ultimately just paying for downloads traffic) it's easy to replicate, so no super-valuable IP here.
Of course, a primary use-case for Anki is a tool to make decks, but you could really do with pretty simple python script + YAML/JSON/CSV/whatever metadata file to convert it to AnkiDroid-compatible .apkg file.
So, basically, who cares? What is to "own" there?
IMO, the add-on value is the repository of decks that exist (and may or may not be free).
So an app-store of sorts.
As others have said, there are some provisions in place that make it allegedly harder to do a hard landgrab and keep people from freely sharing decks, to to me, even if it were so, I would not be too concerned.
In my opinion, the very act of creating one's deck is a key part of the learning. Maybe it's different for larning vocabulary, but as you said, it will be very hard to make those hard to share.
Learning a deck generated by someone else has never been as effective with me, so I think it's a false sense of time saving to use those.
> All what I care about when using Anki is what's on the 2 sides of a Card, a question + answer
This is damn near the least effective way to use Anki. Cloze deletion alone surpasses this.
Also, Anki is SRS. The value of Anki is in the rescheduling, not in the fact it's flashcards. And Anki has implemented the FSRS rescheduling algorithm, which is just one more feature not all flashcard apps do.
Ugly over complex app for what it does. never saw the appeal
Ankihub is bunk. Why don’t they let us play Darbot games here?
One of the apps that should be worth billions of dollars and the founder billionaire
That's not the way the world works. I'm not in it for the money.
In the past 12 months, I've made £65.79 from GitHub Sponsors (no fees, thank you GitHub/Microsoft) and $87.89 from Patreon (pre-fees, I'll probably see ~$50), and a split of the Open Collective [below]
AnkiDroid GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/ankidroid
and finances/sponsorship: https://opencollective.com/ankidroid (with immense help from dae).
Longtime anki user here. I think the thing people never appreciate with flashcards is that deck maintenance is real work. And in many cases, it's not work that you can do yourself as a learner of the material: the deck really needs to be created by someone who knows the material.
Commercial decks, where the deck maintainer is paid for his efforts, make a lot of sense.
And I suppose if they are making money out of the ecosystem, it also only makes sense that commercial deck makers make a contribution to the technology that makes it possible. I suppose I would prefer that be a contribution rather than ownership and custody, but I suppose Anki's license terms (it is AGPL3+ - I think without a CLA) prevents them closing it.
So cautiously optimistic
Is it really beneficial to use a deck created by someone else? I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards - by writing them, thinking about them, and making mental associations with things you already know.
Yes. Absolutely. The biggest data point pushing the affirmative is less Anki itself but the success of products at the forefront of the second wave of spaced repetition apps [1] like Khan Academy. Duolingo, too, but Duolingo gets flak from people for being too Goodhearted by retention for its own good; Khan Academy actually does force feed you enough actual problems to learn some math.
Writing the cards is engaging with the cards for some small subset of the population. I am part of that audience. But most people are terrible at it, and it's not an easy skill to build.
Ther majority of people who are interested in Anki -- and the vast majority of normal human beings with nonzero willingness to pay, which is a very unique subset of the population with goals that tend to look like "Pass X exam by Y date so I can [get a job|earn my citizenship in a better country|...] -- just want good pedagogical material wrapped in some control harness so they can treat some fraction of their learning the same way they treat going to the gym. Show up, put in the reps, get results.
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/the-second-wave-of-spaced-...
Just as an example: I learn languages using Anki, and I always do it the same way: I use decks that
* exclusively quiz entire sentences
* introduce around 500 new words (a nice mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives)
* use a wide variety of grammatical constructs (including all conjugations of the new verbs),
* and that have audio of a native speaker reading the entire sentence after I "flip" the card
Such a deck needs to be thoroughly designed, and while I could choose the new words and then write software to make sure they are all used equally in sentences and no conjugations are missing, I actually can't easily make sure they are correct and I can't record the audio of the text.
"I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards"
I would substitute "the material" for "the cards" in this sentence. Making the cards yourself is one way to do that, but it's not always the most time effective - imagine the extra work put onto a medical student having to make the cards for every subject they need to cover. That is what ankihub does and it seems to be very popular
But yeah: downloading the median deck off of ankiweb: very sub-optimal
I would also like to second that. For me, making Anki cards was 50% of the learning.
No one is appreciating cheap working solution from good folks and prefer to accept the free spy-me stuff going around.
I see lots of people also moving stuff with AI that will clearly be biased and force products down your throat. This might be the end of the internet as we know, but the next thing, although sometimes looks exciting, will be controlled by faceless greedy monsters.
I guess the fact that we all didn't prioritise those small businesses is getting somewhere
I've found the opposite when using Anki myself. The process of developing the deck is a critical part of learning the material for me. I consume my target language, see something I don't understand, figure out what it means, then put it into the deck - and _then_ practice it. To cut out the whole first part of that chain by using a premade deck eradicates much of the learning process for me (I've tried).
Works well in some cases (eg some language learning patterns - but not all) but not in others. And even when you "create your own cards" you're usually using resources from elsewhere - eg native speaker audio on language cards.
A significant number of anki users (eg: medicine, law - others) are working with pre-made decks and if you look at anki's competition - all of them offer pre-made decks as a key part of it. Medics have always used flashcards (many university bookshops sell physical flashcards for medics) and I don't each medical student would benefit from producing, eg, their own anatomy flashcards.
I have had a bad experience with Anki so far. Maybe someone can chime in, clearing things up for me:
When I search for HSK vocabulary Anki decks or whatever they call it, I found almost exclusively sets of words that are the wrong way around. They showed me the Chinese characters and asked me what the English translation is. I was incredulous about how many wrong decks there are and that I could not find good decks. I was starting to wonder, if people are actually just using Anki to learn to read Chinese characters, one-way learning basically, only recognition not writing. Only for reading subtitles and such, instead of writing with friends. Or perhaps they have the illusion, that they are able to write, because they can type in the Pinyin, and will get a selection of characters, which they then can recognize. But I, I want to be able to properly write the characters myself. The crucial issue was, that I did not find a simple setting to invert the direction of translation of a deck. How can such a simple thing not be among the most easy to find actions to perform with a deck? I read something about it not being possible on mobile phone, but somehow being possible on computer, but not as simple as flipping a switch.
Ultimately, I abandoned Anki and recently proceeded made my own tool for learning the characters, that is highly configurable and that can change the direction with the change of one config attribute.
>Ultimately, I abandoned Anki and recently proceeded made my own tool for learning the characters, that is highly configurable and that can change the direction with the change of one config attribute.
You built an entire flashcard app by yourself, but you couldn't figure out how to edit card templates in anki?
Ah who am I kidding, your probably just trying to advertise your app.
I have fun developing useful software catering exactly to my individual needs, learning a GUI framework/toolkit on the side. I don't have fun needing to figure out the abstract concepts of someone else's tool, and needing to search a lot, to find a way to do something that should be very simple and very prominent in the interface, as it seems to be necessary for most decks I can find, in order to properly learn the characters including writing them.
I have not much to gain from advertising my app. It is AGPL and I don't plan on ever selling it. If it is useful to other people, that's great. If not, then it will at least be very useful to myself. I don't see what's wrong with mentioning, that I build my own, especially since this is HN. We are not on TikTok here.
You can do that easily with Anki as others have mentioned, however it is generally recommended to create your own cards since the process of researching, phrasing, and formatting the content serves as the crucial first stage of cognitive encoding. By actively deciding how to simplify a concept or which image best represents a term, you are building unique neural "hooks" that link new information to your existing knowledge. This personal investment transforms the card from a dry piece of data into a meaningful memory, making it far more resistant to forgetting than a generic card designed by a stranger.
That's basically what I do with my own tool. I create my own data files and store lots of meta information like similar words, usage, and mnemonics in there. I try to keep that somewhat usable for others, but ultimately, I am building the tool for myself and also write the data about words in the way I personally find it useful, so it will be biased in that way. Only, that I am also building the software to use the data around it, combining 2 hobbies, computer programming and learning Mandarin.
Regarding the "wrong direction" issue: In my experience it could also have just been the case that both directions had card templates, but due to some sorting order of new cards setting all Chinese->English cards would appear before any English->Chinese.
If that is the case, it could be corrected in the deck options. And if the English->Chinese cards are missing altogether they can be created from the note by adding a new card template to the note.
> They showed me the Chinese characters and asked me what the English translation is. I was incredulous about how many wrong decks there are and that I could not find good decks.
You can edit the structure of the card templates so they're the 'right way around' for you:
https://docs.ankiweb.net/getting-started.html#card-types
Is this available on the mobile app? A template editor?
My issue is, that I also don't know where to find the functionality for editing the template. I also cannot find it under deck "Options" in the desktop app. There is sooo much in the UI, that I think it is possible, that I am simply overlooking it somewhere. The docs you linked don't tell me where to find that. No screenshots of any UI are visible. Even now, after you telling the I need to edit templates, I still cannot find the functionality in the UI. I simply don't see it.
My feedback at this point would be to make this something, that is easily discoverable for the user, or add screenshots of how to get there to the docs and have keywords in the docs, that will ensure, that when I search for how to invert a deck, I will most likely find that page of the docs.
It's available on AnkiDroid: Main menu -> Manage note types.
And on desktop? When i go to:
I only see some latex code for header and footer: I assume those are header and footer of a card when it is displayed? But this does not include translation direction.And why is it called "Note Type"? How does this concept relate to "Cards" or "Templates"?
Can you see, why one would have problems finding the correct setting?
EDIT: Now I found it under:
There I would actually expect some list of the cards, not a template editing. It seems rather unintuitive to me. The issues are:(1) The user has to know where to find that.
(2) The user has to know, that there is no short way to get to editing the attributes of the word shown, but instead, that they need to edit a template.
(3) The user has to know, where they will find the function to edit a template. I claim a normal user will not suspect this option to be hidden under "Note Types". What even is a note? Starting to use Anki, I would look for words like "Card", "Flashcard", "Translation", "Direction", "reverse", "training options", etc., but not "Note Types". It is a weird naming.
(4) A user will have to discover, that they are not supposed to click "Options", but "Cards". But that this brings up the card options, and that that contains the template, instead of the templates being something entirely separate, loosely coupled.
It is hard to include so much functionality in one tool. I understand that. But personally, I would have had to wade through every single menu item, to find this functionality, and this also explains, why in the past I have not been able to find this at all.
On mobile you can edit the front and back template.
Anki is a platform, not a content creator. I would be thankful that someome shared their hard work of creating a deck that has all of the content to meet your needs.
For what it's worth, there are many "RTK" decks for Japanese that show english keyword on front and expect you to write the kanji before flipping.
Maybe search for an "RTH" deck to go along with the book Remembering the Hanzi.
Anki is an extremely powerful and feature rich software, and it seems that you barely scratched the surface before dismissing it.
Edit: it took me 10 seconds to find this deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1489829777 there's probably a Simplified one as well. Good luck with your studies.
What does RTH stand for? I am guessing "something something To Kanji/Hanzi".
The deck you linked is not mentioning HSK in the description though. It was maybe 1 year ago or so, that I searched for HSK1-3 level decks and only got wrong direction ones.
I am searching again now:
(1) "HSK1 English" -- nothing
(2) "HSK1" -- lots of results, but also tons of results that are not relevant for me, because they are not for English. -- Results like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1474834583 -- but that is 1-4 which is too much for me. I either need the 1, 2, 3 levels separate, or 1-3 in one deck. Also finding https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/166845167, which is the wrong way around. Starts right away by asking me "的" instead of something like "(some description here)". When I go to deck options in Anki desktop app, I see "Display Order", but there I cannot select any "English -> Chinese". Tons of options, but none that inverts what the cards show.
One sibling comment informs me, that I have to edit a template somewhere. But I don't know where, and in the deck options I don't quickly see any template editing function.
And this has been my experience with pretty much every HSK deck I found there. It would seem silly, that everyone uploads decks in the "wrong" order. Which leads me to think, that many people cheat themselves, by only doing the recognition part of learning the characters. Why else would so many people upload decks, only so that whoever who downloads the deck has to invert them first, before using them. I also think that many learners are probably not aware of the issue with seeing the character first and then translating to English, in comparison with doing it the other way around.
So now lets do your "RTH" search:
"HSK1 RTH" -- " Error: Please log in to perform more searches."
I am sorry, I cannot even do a keyword search a couple of times??? I need to log in, requiring an account (!) to even find a suitable deck?! OK, at this point I give up again.
Could you share your tool please?
I could, but as you can see in this thread in sibling comments, even stating that I couldn't find a way to invert the direction easily already attracts ire of Anki evangelists, who assume bad intentions and try to dismiss personal experiences of others. Anki must be perfect! If you want to take a look, you can check out my recent comments, or my git repos.