I am against using ANKI or any kind of flashcards. There are many disadvantages with flashcards: 1. They are time-consuming. It may take a long time just to write them. Then you have to read and keep repeating until you get the answers correctly. That can also take a long time. 2. They are boring, tedious, you may lose motivation. 3. They take the words out of context. It is much harder to memorize and understand them. Flashcards are completely inefficient compared to just reading. 4. The fact that you can answer all flashcards correctly doesn't mean you have learned the subject. 5. Flashcards ignore the difference between active and passive memory. Here I define active memory as the one you can actually remember. Passive memory is the one you can't remember but can recognize once it is presented to you. For example you may not remember the name of a certain actress in a certain film, but once someone tells the name, you can recognize it immediately. That is passive memory. The number of words in the passive memory is much larger than the active memory. And that is how it should be. According to the Pareto's law, you only need 20% of the most used words to be fluent. The remaining 80% is not that important, so you don't need that in your active memory. But flashcards ignore such distinction, putting everything in your active memory, which is completely unnecessary and inefficient. Just reading a book is much more efficient. In the same time you create and read flashcards you could just read a book. In one hour you can read several pages of a book. In the same hour how many flashcards can you write (and read)? Flashcards are much more time-consuming than just reading. Or, if you are studying something like Physics or Mathematics, you should just solve a bunch of exercises from a textbook. Most textbooks have plenty of exercises for you to practice. All you have to do is solve them. The book author already prepared all the exercises for you, you don't need to write them, unlike flashcards. If you are learning a foreign language you should read as much as possible. Reading is the best way to acquire vocabulary. You consult the dictionary for the words necessary to understand the text. Reading is much more fun, entertaining, engaging and pleasant than using flashcards. By reading you always see the words in context. In the case of JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) you should buy specific books for it. There are books on sale that specifically help you for the test, offering a bunch of exercises similar to the JLPT questions. It is a much more efficient way to study than flashcards created by someone you don't know. Even if you nailed all the ANKI flashcards, there is no way to know if the flashcards are actually related to the JLPT. Textbooks on the other hand will base their exercises on the actual questions that appear in the exam. I have been studying Swedish for 3 years now mostly by translating song lyrics. I have translated almost 500 songs. I listen to the songs while reading the lyrics, I get vocabulary and pronunciation at the same time. It is a lot of fun and pleasant, I never get bored. I don't worry about memorization, I only care about understanding the lyrics. In the beginning I was barely translating one song in one hour. Now I can translate more than 8 songs in one hour. And I never study more than one hour per day.