How I Structured my Anki Decks

I’ve been using Anki to learn different things (mostly vocabulary of course) for many years, but it took me quite some time to find an approach that really works for me. It’s quite simple actually: Vocabulary decks and a general knowledge deck. I’ve used this for approximately three years now and I am quite happy with it.

Vocabulary Decks

I use one deck per foreign language. All of them are self-managed, I start them completely empty and only fill them with own vocabulary. There seems to be consensus among the foreign language community that using pre-created decks does not work or not so well, I can relate to that. By inserting all words on my own, I get a few benefits:

• when entering the word I already repeat it for the first time
• I’ve seen the word somewhere already, so I have some context
• the word also has some importance for me, because I’ve seen it in a text that I care about

The first point in my opinion is especially true with Anki. There’s (to my knowledge) no learning phase in Anki, you’re never presented with the word and its translation to start memorizing it. The first time the card shows up, you have to know the answer already.

One point where I work differently than many recommendations is example sentences. Many people recommend to use example sentences instead of isolated words. Other people recommend to at least add example sentences to the vocabulary card to have some context.

Japanese course Nativshark uses full sentences as “vocabulary” cards, I like it very much there. However, the effort for my own decks is too much. I’m usually reading something, and stumble upon a word I consider worthy to add to Anki. I lookup the translation, open Anki, add the word and translation, and want to return to reading the original text. Adding the full sentence would mean: Write the full sentence into Anki, translate the full sentence, ensure that I did not get anything wrong to not learn a wrong translation. I usually cannot fulfill the last step, because often enough I get the rough meaning of the sentence, enough to understand the story. However, there’s often some piece in a sentence that I do not know, yet, or about which I’m not sure enough. And verifying the grammar would take a lot of time.

Adding example sentences as context - for me personally - is not worth the effort, either. I usually just translate the word, check the answer, and never look at my example sentence.

One approach somewhere in-between, which I might eventually try, is: Use the original foreign language sentence for the first side of the card, highlight a single word, and on the second side of the card only give the translation for the highlighted word.

Some people also advocate against vocabulary cards at all. They say that you’ll see important words often enough in context that you’ll start memorizing them. That approach does not work for me. I’d have to look them up over and over again. Maybe after having looked up a word 3 times, 5 times or 10 times I’d remember the word. But I don’t like looking up foreign words while reading a text. Thus, I rather only look it up one time in the dictionary and then learn through spaced repetition.

Production or Recognition Cards?

I don’t have a clear approach yet, whether I’d rather use production or recognition cards. Production cards show you the word in your first language and ask you for the word in foreign language. So, they train your brain to produce the foreign language word. Recognition cards show you the word in the foreign language and give you the meaning in your first language as an answer.

Some people advocate for production cards, some prefer recognition cards. I’ve tried different approaches with different languages: For Japanese I’m only using recognition cards, for Finnish and Dutch (recent additions where I’m still on level A1) I’m trying both directions.

From current experience I’d say it depends on the language level, your learning goals and also a bit on the language itself. Reasons for production cards can be:

• you’re at an early language level and learn vocabulary for a lot of simple objects and activities
• you want to be able to communicate in the foreign language
• the vocabulary of the foreign language is similar to that of your first language

Let’s look a bit closer at these, starting with the first and last point, because they’re related. Production cards in my opinion should only be used if there is a very close relation between the word in your first language and the word in the foreign language, ideally a direct 1-to-1 mapping.

This is usually the case for simple words that you learn very early. Let’s assume you’re presented with the word “apple”. If you’re learning German, you’ll give “(der) Apfel” as an answer. That works well. But it usually becomes more difficult later in your studies. Often with more complex vocabulary there is no direct 1-to-1 mapping anymore. Words start to overlap, that’s why there are mono-lingual dictionaries (we started to use one for English in school, don’t know if that’s still a thing). Let’s take the German word “Handel”. This could be translated as “trade” or “commerce” in English. The English word “trade” can mean different things as well, among those according to my Oxford dictionary:

the activity of buying or selling or of exchanging goods or services between people or countries

a particular type of business: the building/food/tourist etc. trade

[…]

In German these are translated as different words: “Handel” and “Gewerbe”.

There are probably better examples, but I wanted to show: “trade” can be translated as “Handel” and “Handel” can be translated as “trade”, but there are other translations and meanings as well. With production cards you probably won’t know which exact meaning you meant, especially if the repetition interval of the card gets longer. And listing all possible meanings and trying to recall all of them is not ideal either, according to my experience.

Vocabulary similarity according to my experience can also depend on the language itself. In Japanese, I often see different words that are translated as the exact same word in my first language. A production card would completely fail here, I’d have to give too much disambiguation information. In Japanese this goes so far, that for example Wadoku clearly states that it is only a Japanese-German dictionary (i.e. the direction Japanese to German), not German-Japanese.

Whether to use production cards or not also depends on what your language goals are. My language goal is usually reading texts, ideally also watching TV shows or news. So, my goal is recognition-related. For Spanish, I’ve only used recognition cards. I can read through Spanish news and get the gist of it. However, when asked for it I cannot produce even simple Spanish sentences.

From this experience, I’d say, if you want to communicate in the foreign language, production cards could be very helpful at the beginning of your studies.

General Knowledge Deck

I’m also using Anki to recall other things, common knowledge, history and so on. Initially, I tried to put such things into separate decks as well - a history deck, a physics deck, a chemistry deck. That did not work out, I cannot recall why exactly.

Now, I have one deck called “Knowledge” (or rather “Wissen”, because I write all cards in my first language, German) where I store everything that is not a vocabulary card. To have quick contextual information the front-side of each card starts with the topic of the card, e.g. “Biology: Some question about biology”. I try to re-use the same topic names of course, but there’s no fixed list. It just has to help my brain quickly understand what the question is about.

I also use this deck for questions about foreign languages that are not vocabulary. The vocabulary decks are strictly reserved for vocabulary. If something is not vocabulary, it must go to “Knowledge”.

For example, yesterday I added a card “Dutch: When is ons (possessive pronoun ons/onze) used? - With singular het-nouns”. I recognized that I did not understand well enough when to use “ons” and when to use “onze” for “our …”. So, I made it an Anki card.

One other important aspect about the “Knowledge” deck is: I only insert information that likely will still be relevant in 5 or 10 years. This means both relevant for myself, but also still true information in the world. I don’t want to have any maintanance effort removing obsolete cards. Examples for bad cards:

• How many people live in China? - Interesting fact, but it does change.
• Who became the German Minister of Defense in May 2025? - I might want to know this now, but in 10 or more years I likely won’t care, anymore.

That’s essentially how I use my “Knowledge” deck. Read something that I find interesting and want to remember for a long time? Recognized that I fail to recall something that I’d like to know? Create a question for it in the “Knowledge” deck.