You've probably heard that spaced repetition is the gold standard for memorizing vocabulary. You may have read something about the forgetting curve or seen Reddit threads where people claim to have learned 5,000 Japanese words in a year. And then you downloaded Anki, opened it, and immediately felt like you needed an engineering degree to get started.
That gap between "I know this method works" and "I have no idea how to actually use it" is where most people give up. This post is about closing that gap.
What spaced repetition actually does
The core idea is simple: you review a word just before you'd forget it. Review it again at that point, and the next interval gets longer. Each successful recall stretches the gap a bit further, until the word is in long-term memory.
The classic research here is Hermann Ebbinghaus, who mapped the forgetting curve in 1885 by memorizing nonsense syllables and testing himself at intervals. He found that without reinforcement, most new information fades within 24-48 hours. The saving grace is that each review makes the decay slower. By the third or fourth spaced review, retention stays high for weeks at a time. If you want a deeper look at the biology behind this, the science of spaced repetition post covers the forgetting curve and the "desirable difficulty" research in more detail.
For language learners, this matters a lot. Spanish has around 3,000 high-frequency words that cover roughly 90% of everyday conversation. Japanese JLPT N5 has 800 words. French A2 covers about 1,500. These are memorizable numbers if you're reviewing efficiently. They're crushing if you cram.
Why Duolingo stops working (and why Anki intimidates people)
Duolingo uses a form of spaced repetition, but it's buried under gamification, hearts, streaks, and XP. The scheduling gets overridden by what keeps you engaged rather than what you actually need to review. You end up repeating things you already know because they're in that day's lesson, while words you've half-forgotten sit untouched.
Anki goes the other direction. The spaced repetition scheduling is rigorous and configurable. There's a deck marketplace with thousands of shared vocabulary lists. You can install plugins that add pitch accent audio for Japanese, conjugation tables for Spanish, or sentence mining from Netflix subtitles. That's also the problem: most beginners don't need any of that. They need to learn words, and they can't find the "start" button under all the options.
There's also the card creation problem. Anki doesn't generate cards for you. You either find a pre-made deck (quality varies widely) or you build your own. For a beginner, that's hours of setup before you've learned a single word.
Building a review schedule that works
You don't need to configure an algorithm manually. But understanding what the algorithm is doing helps you trust it and use it right.
Most spaced repetition systems start with a short review interval after you first see a card: typically 1 day. If you get it right, the next interval might be 3-4 days. Then 10 days. Then 3 weeks. Then 2 months. These intervals aren't arbitrary; they're calibrated to review the card just as your recall starts to slip.
The main variable you control is how honestly you rate your recall. Most apps ask you to rate each answer on a scale (Easy / Good / Hard, or similar). If you rate something "Easy" when you actually had to think for a few seconds, the algorithm pushes it too far out and you'll blank on it next time. Be slightly conservative with your ratings, especially early on.
The other thing that helps is keeping sessions short and consistent. Twenty cards a day every day beats 140 cards on Sunday. This isn't just a willpower argument; the biological case for spaced practice is that memory consolidation happens during rest, particularly during sleep. A daily practice gives your brain regular chances to consolidate, while a weekly marathon gives it one shot.
How to make cards that actually stick
This is where most people go wrong, and it's not obvious from the outside.
Bad card: Front: "libre" / Back: "free (Spanish)"
Better card: Front: "El fin de semana libre" (with audio) / Back: "The free weekend -- 'libre' means free in the sense of unoccupied, not free as in no cost"
Context beats isolated translation every time. Here's why: your brain stores memories by connecting new information to things you already know. A word by itself has no hooks. A word in a sentence, with a note about where it differs from what you'd expect, has several.
Some practical rules for good cards:
- One concept per card. Don't put verb conjugation tables on a single card -- each form should be its own.
- Add a sentence example, preferably one you've encountered in context (from a show, book, or conversation).
- For gendered languages like Spanish or French, always include the article. Not "maison" but "la maison". Drilling the article alongside the noun is much easier than trying to add it later.
- For Japanese, include the reading (hiragana/furigana) and at least one context sentence. Kanji alone is nearly useless at the beginner stage.
- Mark the tricky part explicitly. If "attendre" means "to wait" (not "to attend"), write that on the card. Your future self will thank you.
You don't need to write perfect cards to start. Imperfect cards reviewed consistently will beat perfect cards you never make.
Real examples across Spanish, French, and Japanese
Here's what good vocabulary cards look like in practice for three different languages:
Spanish
Word: quedar / To remain, to be left; also used idiomatically to mean "to meet up" or "to fit (clothing)"
Example sentence: "Quedamos a las ocho" (We're meeting at eight)
Note: This word trips English speakers because "to remain" and "to meet up" seem unrelated. In Spanish, both senses are common and natural.
French
Word: pourtant / yet, however, nevertheless -- used to contrast a result you didn't expect
Example: "Il fait froid, pourtant elle ne porte pas de manteau." (It's cold, yet she isn't wearing a coat.)
Note: Beginners often skip connectors like "pourtant" and "cependant" in favor of nouns and verbs. That's a mistake. These words are what make sentences flow.
Japanese
Word: 大丈夫 (daijoubu) / okay, fine, no problem
Example: "大丈夫ですか？" (Are you okay? / Is that alright?)
Note: This word can be an answer ("I'm fine") or a question ("Are you alright?"). Beginners see it used both ways and get confused. Learning it with both contexts helps.
What to do when reviews pile up
If you miss a few days, you come back to a backlog. Fifty cards waiting, maybe more. The temptation is to power through them all at once. That usually leads to burning out and not coming back for another week, which makes it worse.
A better approach: cap your daily reviews at a fixed number, say 30 or 40, and work through the backlog gradually. Your intervals will temporarily stretch (the algorithm treats the overdue cards as reviewed late, and adjusts accordingly), but that's fine. Consistency matters more than keeping the queue at zero.
It also helps to pause adding new cards when you have a backlog. Reviews should come before new material. There's no point learning 20 new words today if 60 words you half-know are waiting to be forgotten.
Where MindCards fits in
This is the use case MindCards was built for. It handles the scheduling automatically, using a spaced repetition algorithm that adjusts to your performance without requiring you to configure anything. You generate cards from a topic or image, start reviewing, and the app figures out when to show each card again. The MindCards 1.11 release post goes into how the cross-deck scheduling works if you're curious about the mechanics.
For language learners specifically, the AI generation is useful for making context-rich cards quickly. You can describe a word or paste a sentence, and MindCards builds a card with a definition, usage note, and example. No manual formatting, no spreadsheet import. The free tier includes 5 AI credits per month; the premium plan gives unlimited generation with iCloud sync across devices.
If you've been meaning to try spaced repetition but Anki's setup kept putting you off, MindCards is worth 10 minutes of your time. The scheduling is handled, the cards are generated, and you can be reviewing vocabulary the same day you install it.
