Anki is the best-known piece of software implementing spaced repetition. Medical students and language learners have relied on it for years, and there is no doubt the mechanism is sound. Even so, plenty of people say "I installed it, but it didn't stick."

This article lays out the typical reasons Anki doesn't stick and introduces another way to run spaced repetition without making cards. It is written by the official site of Ebbing, a review scheduling app, so read it with that in mind. The intent is not to dismiss Anki: for the people it fits, Anki is the best choice.

What Anki does well

First, an accurate picture of Anki's strengths.

  • Review intervals are optimized per card. Words you know get longer intervals and drop out of rotation, while the hard ones keep showing up
  • The scheduling research is deep. Besides the classic SM-2 family, newer schedulers such as FSRS are available
  • It is extremely flexible. Images, audio, cloze deletions, shared decks, add-ons: almost anything is possible
  • The desktop and Android versions are free and open source (the iOS version is paid)

For anyone who wants to memorize a large amount of one-question-one-answer knowledge and keep it for a long time, few tools optimize more finely than Anki.

Three reasons it still doesn't stick

1. Making cards eats into study time

Anki's effect depends on card quality. Good cards follow "one fact per card," "with context," "in your own words," and making just 20 a day takes 15 to 30 minutes. With material like a certification problem book or a textbook, where you read a chapter, understand it, and solve problems, it is not even clear what should become a card, and people stall at the card-making step.

2. Too many settings

Daily new-card limit, review limit, learning steps, interval modifier. Anki lets you tune all of it, which also means starting without knowing what to set. Get it wrong and you end up with "300 reviews due today," which is where many people quit.

3. Reviews pile up like debt

Skip a few days and the review queue stacks up. Anki carries missed reviews forward, so the day you come back there are 500 cards waiting. This is not a flaw in Anki; it is the consequence of rigorous per-card tracking. But psychologically it makes continuing hard.

It didn't stick not because of willpower. Per-card management just wasn't the right fit for your material.

Another way: set review days per material or section

The principle of spaced repetition is "recall at expanding intervals just as you start to forget" (the science of spaced repetition). That principle holds even when the unit is not a single card.

The approach is to treat the section you studied as one unit.

  1. If you did "chapter 3 of the problem book" today, register that as one unit
  2. Set its review days for the next day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, and 1 month later
  3. On a review day, rework the problems in that section (or test whether you can state the chapter's key points with the book closed)
  4. Go back to the textbook only for what you could not recall

No cards. The only entry is one line for today's section. For the review itself, the problem book or textbook you already have is what you use.

What this approach suits, and what it doesn't

  • Suits: certification problem books, textbooks, lecture notes, recorded lectures, any study where the material already exists. People running several materials in parallel
  • Does not suit: people who want to cycle vocabulary word by word. For that use, Anki (the flashcard type) is better

The two kinds are compared in detail in How to choose a spaced repetition app.

Using both

Many people use both, each for what it does best.

  • One-question-one-answer items like terms, words, and dates: Anki
  • Chapter-by-chapter review of problem books and textbooks: schedule type

For a certification, "terms in Anki, past-paper cycling in a schedule app" is a natural split. Dividing by the nature of the material is more sustainable than forcing everything into one tool.

Doing it in Ebbing

Ebbing is this "per material, per section" approach as an iOS app. Register a material and the section you did today, and review days are placed automatically on the forgetting curve (1, 3, 7, 14, and 30 days later), with only today's reviews shown on the home screen. The intervals can be changed to suit your goal.

If you are moving from Anki, there is no feature to import existing decks: per-card data and per-section data are different in nature. Instead, start by registering the problem book you are working through right now. It is free to start.

Summary

  • Anki is the best tool for optimizing spaced repetition per card. It suits people memorizing large amounts of Q&A knowledge
  • The main reasons it doesn't stick are the card-making load, the complexity of settings, and the weight of piled-up reviews. Not willpower
  • Spaced repetition works without per-card units. Set review days per material or section and no cards are needed
  • Problem books, textbooks, and notes: schedule type. Word-by-word vocabulary: Anki. Using both is natural
  • Ebbing is the per-section approach. Start by registering one problem book