Should I use flashcards and flashcard apps like Anki?

One great use for flashcard apps are to learn other scripts. Anki and similar apps can be really powerful for this when combined with a mnemonic device for each letter or character that you want to memorize. However, we don’t recommend them as a way to acquire a language. There are many issues with flashcards that prevent them from being a useful tool to acquire vocabulary or grammar:\n\nThere is no context for the word or sentence that you are learning. Every time you review the card, you are not getting any new information about the nuances of the word, the situations in which it can be used, or the ways in which it can be used in different sentences.\nEven when "context" is included in the card, it's just one example sentence that still doesn't provide 90% of the context that you get when you encounter a word when you are receiving comprehensible input.\nWhen you review flashcards, the encounters that you have with the words are not being linked to experiences, so they are much easier to forget. Words that have been acquired through actual memorable experiences don’t need to be reviewed.\nWhen learning through flashcards, the memories you have of each word are connected to the context of reviewing your flashcards, and that's it. Those words won’t come to mind easily when encountered in other situations. This means that even understanding them will be hard.\nReviewing flashcards incentivizes you to learn the translation of words, or at the very least to consciously analyze their meaning. This promotes memorizing and reinforcing your own misconceptions about the meaning of words and fossilizes mistakes.\nIn our own experience, most times you end up learning the card, not the word or grammar point. As soon as you see the card you may already know the answer even if you haven’t finished reading the word or sentence in the front of the card. In that case, you are not even going through the exercise of recalling the meaning of the word or figuring out the meaning of the sentence by actually reading it. But rather, your brain has managed to figure out the least amount of work it can do to do what you are asking of it, which is coming up with the answer. And it managed to do that without learning any applicable skill.