An Anki alternative for learning languages

Anki is the best general-purpose flashcard app there is. It’s free on computers and Android, it can hold anything you want to learn, and its scheduling is excellent. If it’s working for you, keep using it.

For a language, though, Anki leaves a lot of the work to you. Building a good deck yourself takes hours, and the best premade decks usually cost money, even though Anki itself is free. Cards look plain unless you design them yourself, in the note type’s HTML and CSS. And making each word memorable, with a picture, a memory hook or audio, is work you do card by card. Most of that setup, like add-ons and card templates, needs Anki on a computer. The phone apps and AnkiWeb are mostly for reviewing. Flashfriend is built to do all of that for you, on any device. It’s made only for learning languages (Mandarin, Japanese and Spanish so far): it picks your words, gives every card its design and memory techniques, then builds sentences and grammar on the words you know.

This page compares the two, says when to stay with Anki, and shows how to move over without losing your reviews.

What Anki does better

• It’s free. Anki on a computer and AnkiDroid cost nothing, and so does syncing through AnkiWeb. Only AnkiMobile on iPhone is paid, as a one-off purchase.
• It’s for any subject. Medicine, law, music theory: Anki holds it all.
• You control everything. Card templates, note types, hundreds of add-ons and every scheduling setting.
• Shared decks. Thousands of free ready-made decks, for nearly any textbook or exam, though the quality varies and the most polished language decks are often sold separately.
• It’s open source, and your collection lives on your own computer.

Flashfriend does none of those. It has a few settings (how much you want to remember, and how many new words a day), it teaches three languages, and it costs money after the free trial.

What Flashfriend does differently

It picks your words

Flashfriend chooses your words for you. It teaches the most frequently used words of the language first, in the order that’s most useful, and each word gets the kind of card that suits it: a picture card for a word you can picture, a sentence card for one you can’t.

Your own flavour in every card, without the work

The cards that stick are the ones with something of you in them: a word tied to your kitchen, your cat, a joke only you get. That’s one of the most reliable findings in memory research, and in Anki it’s also the slowest part. There, every personal touch is work you do by hand: finding a picture, thinking up a memory hook, writing it into the card, for every word, thousands of times.

In Flashfriend it takes a few taps. For each word you pick a place you know for its first sound, and a scene from a phrase that sounds like it, or write your own, and Flashfriend paints the picture. 米饭 (mǐfàn, rice) sounds like “fan”, so your rice gets a fan, in a kitchen you know. Describe yourself once and you’re in the scenes too.

Each of those choices has research behind it:

• It means something to you. Things that relate to you are remembered better than things processed any other way (Symons & Johnson, 1997), and that holds for new words in a foreign language too (Pruss et al., 2025).
• You chose it. What you come up with yourself is remembered better than what you’re handed (Slamecka & Graf, 1978).
• You’re in it. Imagining yourself in a scene helps memory more than other strategies (Grilli & Glisky, 2010), and things linked to you beat things linked to anyone else (Cunningham et al., 2008).
• It happens somewhere you know. Memory champions remember by placing things in places they know, and ordinary people trained that way remember far more (Dresler et al., 2017).
• It’s a picture, with things happening in it. Your memory holds onto pictures better than words, so the word gets a second way back (Paivio, 1971; Nelson et al., 1976), and scenes where things interact are remembered better still (Wollen et al., 1972).

The memory techniques section on our homepage has them all, with the research for each. For more on the pictures and hooks themselves, see flashcards with pictures and memory hooks.

Tones, genders and readings you can see

The details that slip away first get a colour in the picture: each Mandarin tone, and el or la for Spanish nouns. Japanese words get furigana over the kanji. In Anki you’d need a custom template or an add-on for this; here it’s on every card.

Sentences and grammar, built from your words

Once you know enough words, Flashfriend writes sentences where every word but one is a word you already know. You learn the new word in context, and practise the old ones as you go. You need to know nearly every word in a text to understand it and pick up new words from it (Hu & Nation, 2000), so each sentence has exactly one word you don’t know yet.

Grammar comes the same way: each pattern arrives once you know the words to use it, with a short explanation and sentence cards that put it to work. In Anki you’d need to find or write those sentences yourself.

The same app on every device

Flashfriend is one app, and everything works wherever you are: making cards, importing your Anki deck, changing settings. Anki is really three apps (Anki on a computer, AnkiMobile and AnkiDroid), each with its own screens, and add-ons, card templates and much of the setup only work on a computer. Your Flashfriend deck syncs between your phone and computer by itself, and on iPhone you install it from this website, without the App Store.

Audio on every word

Every word has audio, with a Slowly button. No add-on or text-to-speech setup.

Mining without Anki

With Pro, Yomitan and asbplayer send words straight to Flashfriend, the way they send them to Anki. You don’t need Anki or AnkiConnect running.

Side by side

When to stay with Anki

• You enjoy building your own templates, and your cards already work for you.
• You don’t want to pay for a flashcard app.

You can also use both: keep Anki for everything else, and learn your language in Flashfriend.

Moving your deck over

Export your deck from Anki as an .apkg file with scheduling included, and Flashfriend imports every card with its whole review history. Cards you know well stay known, cards that are due stay due, and the words you already know are used to build your sentences. Each note type becomes one kind of Flashfriend card, cloze cards included, and you decide whether words without a picture get one now or later.

The Anki import guide has the steps for Anki on a computer, AnkiMobile and AnkiDroid.

You can also move back. Export to Anki any time, with or without a plan, and your cards arrive in Anki with their pictures, audio and schedule.

Common questions

Does Flashfriend use the same scheduling as Anki?

It uses FSRS, the algorithm Anki has offered since version 23.10, with its default settings. You choose how much you want to remember, and how many new words a day. Both apps rest on the two best-supported findings in learning science: spacing reviews out (Cepeda et al., 2006) and testing yourself instead of rereading (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

Can I keep using Anki at the same time?

Yes, and you can keep Anki for other subjects too. Importing the same deck again doesn’t make duplicates, and exporting back to Anki doesn’t either.

Will my add-on fields and custom note types come across?

Your cards and reviews always do. Note types Flashfriend recognises as words or cloze sentences become Flashfriend cards; anything else comes across as an Anki card, front and back exactly as in Anki.

Is there a free version?

Every plan starts with 14 days free. If you stop paying, your deck stays yours: you can keep reviewing it for free and export it to Anki any time. Making new cards needs a plan.