1. If you read enough, (spaced) repetition occurs naturally. No need for a software.
2. It's not bad to forget words during the learning process.
3. Purely personal: SRS reviewing is the ultimate bore, however you design your cards. And making the cards is even more of a bore. It's the opposite of fun.
It's good for 'grinding it out' type learning tasks. Example: I sat for and passed all three ham radio exams in one shot mainly because of an android ham radio exam prep app that did SRS. No way I could have done that just by reading ham radio study guides.
Ankiapp in the browser. Also Anki for iOS (which is around 25 dollars but is the only way the developer is monetizing). This enables sync between iOS and browser.
I used tinycards, but at some point you want a desktop interface to mass import cards from CSV instead of punching them in the phone. Also as spartan as the Anki UX is, the actual SRS implementation is quite good.
The short version is that Anki’s spaced repetition is very good for retaining and learning vocabulary.
My background is that I’ve used it while studying Korean. I’m at about 2,000 korean words now, of which Anki has helped me a lot. Each day I review 50 words and add 20 new ones. It sucks but it works.
As you see new words in reading material, etc, you can add it to Anki. That’s supposed to be how it’s done, but there are premade decks also.
The real beauty lies in anki’s customization. You can add pictures or custom fields and style them. You can reverse the deck so you’re seeing one side or the other when reviewing.
Anki is NOT helpful with a word’s context if you don’t know it or don’t add sample sentences. Which is why people recommend building your own deck over time by reading short stories or news, etc, and adding every word you don’t know, rather than using a premade 5k word deck.
Funny coincidence, I am also studying Korean and think the searchable repository of pre-built decks is a great feature. I also enjoy that the spaced repetition algorithm seems to make it exactly as difficult as it should be without becoming frustrating. Would be interested in Anki decks for studying programming languages.
