Hello everyone,

I have been familiar with the ominous learning card software anki for a long time. Until now, I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with this program and have rarely used it. Now my life circumstances have changed and I am now more dependent on this software. And the more I immerse myself in it, the greater my disgust grows.

But I want to start on a positive note:

• Anki is (practically) the only open source educational software
• Anki is based on a sound learning approach
• Anki is extremely powerful and versatile
• Anki has a huge number of resources
• Anki is available on all platforms
• Anki is fast and efficient

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Well, from my point of view there are some big problems. Here is how I see it:

• Anki is overwhelming for beginners:A program is there to fulfil a specific task. In the case of anki, it is to provide an efficient and sustainable learning experience. It is expressly not there to spend days optimizing and setting up the program. All these things should happen automatically in the background. If I then want to adjust some parameters myself, I can still do that in the settings.
• Anki is cluttered and a nightmare to configure: the more numerous and complex the configuration options of a device or software are, the more indispensable a clear, intuitive, descriptive arrangement and a guiding design become: imho anki fails at all of these points miserably.
• The UI sucks and there is no easy way to change it: There is no way to change the appearance in the spplication settings. To do this, you have to rummage through numerous addons or fancy up the cards yourself with some shady hacks. All at the expense of performance, reliability and simplicity of the user.
• It is a chore to create, regroup or organize anki cards
• The parameters don’t adapt comfortably to my learning process: for the fsrs algorithm you have to have no less than a thousand repetitions to optimize the deck. So that doesn’t help me at all at the beginning. What’s more, as a user, I don’t want to know anything about the background processes at the beginning, I just want to learn)
• The defaults aren’t well optimized: For example, why is the sm2 algorithm used by default and not fsrs if it is that far superior?
• It doesn’t animate me to learn: Anki is really barebones andI totally agree with making the software as lightweight and efficient as possible, but a good learning program also requires good progress analysis. How often, how quickly, how efficiently or which specific topics you have learned enable you to reflect on your learning process and motivate.
• Spaced repetition does not always have to be in the form of flashcards. Multiple choice, cloze texts and other gamification options can not only loosen up learning but also create connections and promote memorization.
• Spaced repetition is by no means everything. Remembering facts alone is usually of little use in life. In my opinion, chunking and other learning methods are essential complements that should also be taken into account.

Can someone help me to fix these problems in anki as good as possible? I know a lot is personal and also card/deck dependent but maybe I’m missing some obvious things?

Thanks in advance!