Delete / Suspend Your Flashcards to Improve

Summary: Keeping old flashcards is a hidden trap: Language learning requires adapting to new contexts, but Anki keeps you stuck in the same ones. This silently limits your progress. Deleting cards is key.

Anki does not account for a crucial aspect of language learning: the constant switching of context. Consider the word ‘bank’ in these sentences:

  • ‘I deposited my paycheck at the bank.’
  • ‘We picnicked by the river bank.’

The sentence context not only defines the meaning of ‘bank’ but also makes this word easier to remember. This is why many learners use full sentences in their flashcards. However, this comes at a cost: Your understanding of a word becomes tied to a specific sentence, making it harder to recognize in new contexts.

Native speakers effortlessly adapt to shifting contexts, but learners using flashcards may struggle because their knowledge is forever bound to static examples. In Anki, if the same word always appears in the same sentence, it reinforces a rigid association instead of real linguistic flexibility.

While learning Japanese  I ran into this problem time and again: I learned most of my vocabulary from full sentences. In the original sentence, the new word was easy to remember. In a different sentence however, I could not understand it well, even if the meaning was the same!!!

This can lead to the following pattern, which has negative consequences for learners:

  • The context of a sentence makes learning easier. But once familiar, the flashcard loses its learning value and should be removed.
  • Anki’s strong reputation and effectiveness make learners afraid to delete cards, fearing they’ll lose their precious knowledge.
  • They repeat useless, old cards and get the feeling they are very productive and good (because they are doing reps and remember sentences quickly) while actually wasting their time.

As a consequence, I think that people become fluent only inside their flashcard deck, but stay lost in new content outside, even if they know all words and grammar. What is missing is the ability to switch context and this is something you are actively blocking if you stick to old sentence flashcards. The solution is simple: Delete (or suspend) them!

Suspending them is a bit less invasive. It keeps them in Anki but they are never displayed again until you unsuspend them. For the jlab decks, suspending cards might be better than deleting them, because updates would add the deleted cards again. When mining sentences from subs2srs decks, I always deleted the cards though.

Does this thought make you sweat? Does it sound wrong? I’ve been exactly at this point a long time ago. For now, maybe the following points maybe make deleting cards easier:

  • I never missed any deleted cards and never restored any of them.
  • For a new word to really stick, I had to see it in 2-5 DIFFERENT sentences. You do not need to keep the first one. Consider the second sentence as the continuation  of the first flashcard.
  • It is ok to look up a word multiple times. It’s hard to get around this. Keeping it on a a single flashcard forever rarely helps.
  • A language is a spaced repetition system itself. Words and grammar repeat themselves. No need to keep them on a flashcard forever.
  • In addition to words and grammar, you have to get used to the context they appear in. This is not immediately obvious, but absolutely crucial for listening comprehension, where you have very little time to figure out the context.
  • It is ok to forget a few things.
  • Deleting reduces the review load and prevents burnout and boredom.
  • Deleting makes you faster.

As an intermediate learner, I deleted cards after seeing them after an interval of ~12-20 days. This means I kept them for ~1 month in total. For beginners, I would recommend keeping them a bit longer. I cannot recommend a number here because I kept the cards for too long. In Anki, the time since the last repetition roughly corresponds to what is written on the “hard” button, but this depends on your settings. By the way: Deleting cards is MUCH more important than worrying about the settings.

  • The first thing I tried was to move old cards to a separate deck and exported this out of Anki with scheduling information (you can filter them by interval in the card browser). This way, the old cards could have been restored. I never imported any of the old decks again.
  • In AnkiDroid, I set up a swipe up action for this: When the hard button showed 12-20 days, I swiped up to remove it. You can also suspend the card, which will keep it but never show it anymore.
  • My Anki addon has a built in card management, but for time reasons I considered removing this in the future.