Anki Settings for Learning German: The Five That Matter

Anki's deck options screen has more than forty settings, and the internet has an opinion about each of them. Most of those opinions were written for the old scheduler and are now out of date. A beginner who follows three different guides ends up with a configuration that fights itself.

For learning German you need to set five things. Everything else can stay at its default, and that is not laziness: the defaults were chosen by people who measured them. This guide covers the five, the German-specific choices, and the changes that look clever and hurt.

1. Turn on FSRS

FSRS is Anki's modern scheduler, built in since late 2023. The older one, SM-2, used the same formula for everyone. FSRS models how quickly you forget each card and schedules it for the moment your chance of remembering drops to a target you choose.

In the deck options, find the FSRS section and switch it on. For most people this reduces the number of daily reviews for the same result. If your Anki is so old that the switch is missing, update it.

Once you have a few hundred reviews, press Optimize in the same section. That fits the model to your own history. Repeat it every month or two; there is no benefit to doing it weekly.

2. Desired retention: 0.90

This is the one number that controls your workload. It is the share of cards you want to get right when they come up.

The trap is the instinct to push it up. Higher retention feels safer, and the cost arrives silently, as a daily pile that doubles. Leave it at 0.90 for the first three months. If your reviews are taking too long, lowering it to 0.87 is a better move than skipping days.

3. New cards per day: 10

Anki's default is 20. For a single vocabulary deck studied next to a job, that is too many. Each new card brings eight to ten reviews with it over the following months, so 20 a day settles at roughly 170 reviews a day. Ten a day settles at about 85, which is ten to twelve minutes.

Start at 10. After a month, if reviews are comfortable, go to 15. The reasoning with all the numbers is in how many German words per day.

4. Maximum reviews per day: 9999

The default cap is 200. It sounds like protection and works like a blindfold: once more than 200 cards are due, Anki shows 200 and hides the others. The hidden cards do not go away. They get later and later, and your statistics stop telling the truth.

Set the limit so high that it never applies. If the real number is too large, the fix is fewer new cards, not a cap. What to do when the pile is already there is in how to clear a review backlog.

5. Learning steps: short, and within one day

Learning steps are the mini-intervals a new card goes through on its first day, before the scheduler takes over. With FSRS, keep them short and keep them inside one day:

• Learning steps: 1m 10m (the default) or 10m alone.
• Relearning steps: 10m.

Do not add steps of a day or longer, such as 1d 3d. That was common advice for the old scheduler. With FSRS it takes the first intervals out of the algorithm's hands and makes its predictions worse.

The answer buttons, used honestly

FSRS learns from your button presses, so they have to mean something consistent.

• Again: you did not know it. For a German noun, a wrong article counts as not knowing it.
• Good: you knew it. This should be nine presses out of ten.
• Hard: you knew it, with real effort. It is not a softer "Again". Pressing Hard on a card you failed is the most common way to corrupt the schedule.
• Easy: rarely.

Many experienced users work with two buttons only, Again and Good. That is a perfectly good way to use Anki.

German-specific choices

Card direction. Most German note types can produce two cards per word, German to English and English to German. Both at once doubles the load. Start with recognition and add production later, or go straight to production if speaking is your goal. The trade-off is explained in how to make German flashcards.

Typing the answer. Anki can show an input field and compare what you typed with the answer (add {{type:German}} to the card template). For production cards this is worth it: it catches ie against ei, single and double consonants, and missing umlauts. You will need to type ä ö ü ß; see typing German umlauts.

Audio. If your deck has recordings, let them play automatically. If it does not, Anki can read the German field aloud with your device's text-to-speech voice ({{tts de_DE:German}} in the template). Check that a German voice is installed, or you will hear German read with English pronunciation.

Bury siblings. Leave "bury new siblings" and "bury review siblings" on. Otherwise you see der Tisch - table and thirty seconds later table - ?, and the second card tests your memory of the first.

Leeches. The default marks a card as a leech after eight failures and suspends it. For vocabulary, lowering the threshold to 5 or 6 is reasonable, and "tag only" lets you decide yourself. A leech is a signal that the card needs changing, not more repetition: why you keep forgetting the same German words.

Settings to leave alone

• Interval modifier, starting ease, easy bonus. These belong to the old scheduler. With FSRS on, they do nothing or should not be touched.
• Maximum interval. The default is 100 years. A cap of 180 or 365 days is sometimes suggested "to be safe". It adds reviews for the words you know best.
• Display order. The defaults are fine. Changing them will not make you remember more.
• Add-ons that change scheduling. Most were written before FSRS existed.

Two habits that beat every setting

Review every day. The scheduler assumes you show up. A perfect configuration with four skipped days a week loses to the defaults used daily.

Fix cards while you review. When a card is confusing, has two answers, or lacks an article, press the edit key and repair it on the spot. Ten seconds now saves you eight frustrating reviews.

If the settings are the part you dislike

Some people enjoy this page of dials. Many do not, and for them configuration is a recurring source of doubt: is my retention right, should I optimise again, did that guide from 2021 still apply.

merke.me, which we build, takes the opposite position on purpose. There is no scheduler configuration. Every entry follows the same eight steps: 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 4 months, then mastered. The steps are fixed so that the workload is predictable and so that every word has a finish line. What you do choose is how you study: how many new entries per day in each deck, typing or reveal, how strict the spelling check is, single words or sentences with a gap, automatic audio.

Which is better depends on you. If the five settings above sound like a pleasant ten minutes, Anki will serve you well, and the best Anki decks for German is the next thing to read. If you would rather have the decisions made and the German content included, look at the decks and the grammar library; 100 words and 30 grammar points are free to learn. The full comparison is in Anki vs merke.me.