I built a flashcard app after burning out on Anki — here's what I learned

I used Anki for a long time. It made sense back then. You had a word list, you needed to memorize it, you drilled it until it stuck. Simple. Effective enough. But it's 2026. And I think we need to have an honest conversation about why Anki is starting to feel like a fax machine in a world of instant messaging. The uncomfortable truth about flashcards I was memorizing words. Not learning them. There's a difference — and it took me embarrassingly long to see it. When you drill "ephemeral → short-lived" a hundred times, your brain stores a weak, isolated link. It knows the definition. It does not know the word. But when you read "the beauty of cherry blossoms is ephemeral — they last only one week" — something different happens. Your brain attaches the word to a scene, an emotion, a moment. That's the kind of memory that survives a real conversation. This is called contextual encoding. It's not a new idea — memory researchers have known this for decades. And yet almost every flashcard app