It sucks though, it's also the one thing that makes me constantly not be consistent using Anki, I get tired of creating cards and stop for a while.
I think what's key is that I'm taking the words and conjugation rules I'm learning and using them relatively quickly, often that day or that week. I.E., I'll come across words in Anki, then hear them in a baseball broadcast or see them in a news article. Or I'll recognize what tense something is because of the rules.
So it's supplemental, and maybe that's why it's sticking better. I don't think I'd want to create decks constantly, I created one 140 card deck and that was enough.
Finally, I do frequently use memory tricks to create associations so maybe my experience with memory castles, mnemonics, and other techniques (which I use on cards I forget frequently to create links I'm unable to create quickly on my own (or to differentiate similar words (or words that are the same but in different tenses))).
Yea, it's _work_!
People are just repeating this advice about making your own decks, and it's based in nothing but having had it repeated to them. Spaced repetition is boiling in pseudoscience and ancient studies that don't say much other than that there's a forgetting curve.
Most people are just parroting stuff they read on the Supermemo wiki (or somebody read off the Supermemo wiki and repeated to them like they came up with it), and all of that is just thoughts off the top of one guy's head. His innovation is that he wrote a program to do Leitner boxes before he had ever heard of a Leitner box, but people treat every word like gospel.
The only five things I can say for language learning is to go really hard on systems in a new language that are completely unknown to you (like Romance conjugations for an English speaker); only drill sentences, not individual words; always say your Anki answers out loud, and read out loud as much as you can; comic books have pictures, too; and once you get comfortable in an L2->L2 dictionary, you're a more comfortable reader than a lot of natives.
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* Random Anki decks for a few European languages: https://sookocheff.com/post/language/cloze-deletions/
(Edit: the lovely thing about 10K algorithmically generated clozes is that they're utterly disposable, unlike cards that you make yourself. If one is a leech, forget about it. You'll see another one just like it when you get to the point that it won't be a leech for you.)
* Instructions on how to generate your own in other languages, for developers: https://sookocheff.com/post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-d...
(You could probably point out the above URL to an LLM and it would generate the code for you.)
* Anki to learn Romance conjugations first: https://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjuga...
I feel even better than natives sometimes because they learn conjugations in order at school, and when asked to recall them out of order (or hop from form to form) get confused. Once you have conjugations, you can read anything with a dictionary (and the online dle is the best dictionary I've ever used.)
I'm about to start again with KOFI French, but I had to do a lot of work to get my mouth and ears adjusted to hearing French as anything other then murmurs, and to be able to read (luckily for me, French is the opposite of perl and read-only instead of write-only.) There's a lot of stuff in French I want to read; reading all of the stuff translated into Spanish from French (but never into English) has got my beak wet.
Also, Spanish-language comic books will make you forget about English-language comic books. And they are very online, examples: http://columberos.blogspot.com/ and https://comicsmexicanosdejediskater.blogspot.com/
Also lots of other good material for vos: https://ahira.com.ar/ including https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/skorpio/ and https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/hora-cero-suplemento-semanal/ which is a landmark of literature that is too good for us (El Eternauta spans the entire length of the series.)
> using preselected word lists makes sense
I have never used Anki for word to word translation, because there is no Spanish word that means any English word. You've restricted yourself to a particular paradigm from the beginning. I mean, do whatever you need to do to get a foothold, but you want to get away from L1 as much as possible as soon as you can.
