Anki Is Great, But Here's What It Gets Wrong

I want to start by saying: I love Anki. I really do. It's probably responsible for about 30% of my grade improvement between my second and fourth semesters. The spaced repetition algorithm works. The science is solid. It's free. For a lot of students, especially in medicine, it's genuinely life-changing.

But after two years of daily use — we're talking 800+ day streak at my peak — I've developed some strong opinions about what Anki gets wrong. And I think they're opinions that a lot of long-term users share but don't say out loud because the Anki community can be, let's say, passionate.

The setup problem

Let's start with the obvious one. Anki's interface looks like it was designed in 2006, because it was. The learning curve isn't just steep — it's a wall. I spent my first week watching YouTube tutorials just to figure out how to create a card with an image on it.

And yeah, I know the community response: "It's powerful BECAUSE it's flexible." Sure. But there's a difference between powerful and hostile. VS Code is powerful and still manages to be usable out of the box. Anki could learn from that.

The average student who downloads Anki, opens it, sees that grey interface with incomprehensible menu options, and closes it within five minutes — that student isn't lazy. The app failed them.

Shared decks are a trap

This is my hottest take and I stand by it. Pre-made Anki decks — the ones with thousands of downloads on AnkiWeb — are actively harmful for most students.

Why? Because they weren't made from YOUR material. Your professor doesn't use the same textbook as the professor at Johns Hopkins whose students made that deck. Your course emphasizes different things. Your exam asks different questions.

I watched a friend study from a shared anatomy deck for an entire semester. She knew every card. She could recite them in her sleep. Then she walked into the exam and realized her professor had focused on clinical applications, not the pure anatomical terms the deck tested. She passed, but barely.

The whole point of flashcards is encoding — the act of deciding what's important and formulating a question. When you skip that step by downloading someone else's deck, you skip half the learning.

The "review hell" spiral

Here's something nobody warns you about: if you use Anki seriously across multiple subjects, your daily review count will explode. I hit a point where I had 400+ cards due every single day. That's two hours just on reviews, before I even started learning new material.

And here's the psychological trap: Anki makes you feel guilty for missing a day. Those "due" cards pile up. Miss Monday? Now Tuesday has 800 cards. Miss Tuesday too? You're looking at 1,200. At some point you just... stop opening the app entirely.

The algorithm is optimized for perfect retention, which sounds great in theory. In practice, most students don't need to remember every single card forever. They need to pass the exam in three weeks. Anki doesn't really have a good mode for that.

It doesn't understand context

Flashcards, by design, break knowledge into isolated pieces. Q: What enzyme catalyzes the first step of glycolysis? A: Hexokinase. Great, you know that. But do you understand WHY it's hexokinase? Do you understand how it fits into the bigger picture of cellular metabolism?

Anki doesn't help with that. It can't. It's not designed to. And this is fine as long as you use Anki as one tool among many. The problem is when students use it as their ONLY study method, which happens way more than you'd think.

I've seen med students who could recite every card in their 10,000-card deck but couldn't reason through a clinical case because they'd never practiced connecting the dots between isolated facts.

The manual labor problem

Making good Anki cards takes forever. A 30-page chapter might take me 90 minutes just to create the cards — deciding what to include, formulating the questions, adding images, tagging them properly. That's 90 minutes before I've done a single review.

Now multiply that across five courses. You're spending more time making cards than actually studying from them. At some point the tool that's supposed to save you time is consuming all of it.

This is where AI-generated flashcards genuinely help. Not as a replacement for thinking — but as a first draft. Upload your PDF, get a set of cards in two minutes, then spend 20 minutes editing them. You still engage with the material, but you skip the tedious formatting work.

What a better system looks like

The ideal study tool would keep what Anki gets right — the algorithm, the daily review habit, the active recall — and fix what it gets wrong. That means: an interface that doesn't require a tutorial. Cards generated from your actual materials. A review load that respects the reality of student life. And context — something that helps you see the big picture, not just isolated facts.

I'm not saying Anki is bad. I'm saying it's 2026, and we can do better. The science behind spaced repetition hasn't changed, but the tools we use to apply it should have evolved a lot further than they have.

If you're an Anki power user, keep using it. You've invested the time to learn the system, and that investment pays off. But if you're a student just getting started with spaced repetition, maybe look around before committing to a tool that'll ask you to watch a 45-minute setup guide before you can make your first card.