Why I Stopped Using Anki for German (And What I Use Instead)
Anki is the gold standard of spaced repetition. It's free, open-source, infinitely customizable, and backed by decades of memory science. If you can stick with it, it works.
That's a big "if."
I used Anki for German vocabulary for about a year. I made cards, reviewed cards, tweaked settings, installed add-ons, reformatted templates. And somewhere along the way, I realized I was spending more time maintaining Anki than actually learning German.
The problem isn't spaced repetition — it's the workflow
Spaced repetition works. That's not the debate. The problem with Anki for language learning is everything around the algorithm:
You have to build every card yourself. You're reading a German article, you hit a word you don't know, so you open dict.cc, find the translation, switch to Anki, create a new card, type the front, type the back, add the plural, maybe add an example sentence, maybe add audio. By the time you're done, you've lost the article completely.
Community decks are hit-or-miss. Sure, you can download a pre-made German deck. But half the translations are awkward, the example sentences are robotic, and the words don't match what you're actually encountering in daily life. You end up memorizing vocabulary you'll never use.
The review pile becomes a guilt machine. Miss two days and you come back to 200 pending reviews. The red number stares at you. You start dreading the app instead of opening it. Eventually, you stop opening it at all.
There's no reading experience. Anki is a flashcard app. It doesn't help you find words to learn. You need a separate tool for reading, a separate tool for looking up words, and then Anki for reviewing them. That's three tools for one activity.
What I actually needed
After quitting Anki (twice), I sat down and thought about what a better workflow would look like:
- Read real German content — not textbook sentences, but actual news articles at my level
- Look up words in context — without leaving the article, without tab-switching
- Save words with one tap — no manual card creation, no typing definitions
- Review automatically — spaced repetition that builds itself from what I've read
The key insight: the best vocabulary to learn is the vocabulary you've already encountered in context. Not a random list someone else curated. Not the "top 1000 German words." The words you ran into while reading something you chose.
What I built instead
I ended up building Prägen to solve exactly this problem. Here's how it works:
Daily German articles from sources like Tagesschau, Deutsche Welle, and Nachrichtenleicht — graded by CEFR level (A1 through C1) so you're always reading at the right challenge.
Tap any word in an article for an instant AI-powered lookup. Not just a translation — you get the full grammar breakdown: article, plural, conjugation, cases, example sentences, synonyms, and a memory tip. You never leave the article.
Save with one tap. The word, its full context, everything. Your personal vocabulary bank grows as you read. No manual card creation.
Spaced repetition built in. Every word you save becomes a flashcard automatically. The SM-2 algorithm surfaces words right when you're about to forget them. Words you know fade out. Words you struggle with come back.
Plus there's a bank of 3,000+ pre-built flashcards by CEFR level if you want to drill beyond your saved words, and 3,000+ multiple-choice quizzes for variety.
Anki vs. Prägen: honest comparison
Let me be fair — Anki has strengths that Prägen doesn't:
| Anki | Prägen | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (desktop), $25 iOS | Free tier (5 lookups/day), premium €6/mo |
| Customization | Infinite — templates, add-ons, scripting | Opinionated — one workflow, done well |
| Language support | Any language | German only |
| Card creation | Manual (full control) | Automatic (from reading context) |
| Reading integration | None | Built-in daily articles |
| Grammar context | Whatever you type in | AI-generated for every word |
| Community decks | Thousands available | 3,000+ curated cards by CEFR |
| Learning curve | Steep | Minimal |
If you love tinkering, want full control, and study multiple languages — Anki is still hard to beat.
If you're learning German specifically, you're tired of the manual workflow, and you want reading and review in one place — that's what Prägen is for.
Who should switch (and who shouldn't)
Prägen might be better for you if:
- You've tried Anki and stopped using it because the card-creation friction was too high
- You're somewhere between B1 and B2, past the basics but not yet comfortable reading freely
- You want to learn vocabulary from real content, not random word lists
- You'd rather spend 10 minutes reading and reviewing than 20 minutes making flashcards
Stick with Anki if:
- You study multiple languages and need one tool for all of them
- You enjoy the customization and have a workflow that's already working
- You primarily learn from textbooks or courses and create cards from those
- You're on a strict zero-budget and the free tier isn't enough
The bottom line
Anki's algorithm is excellent. Anki's workflow for language learners is not. The gap between "I saw this word" and "it's now a flashcard" is where most people drop off.
The best spaced repetition system is the one you actually use every day. For me, that meant removing the friction between reading German and reviewing vocabulary — and that's why I built Prägen.