This post is also available in: Portuguese (Brazil)

Learning English with Anki is a pretty good strategy to take your English to the next level. But how to do it effectively? You might not know that Anki has a couple of types of cards, each one has its purpose. So, today, I’m going to tell you how you can learn English with Anki through this variety of cards you can create. It’ll help you to learn words and expressions faster and keep them longer in your mind.

If you use Anki to learn English, you might like these articles I’ve written about Anki:

Where to pick up sentences?

Most of the sentences in my Anki come from the Oxford Learner’s dictionary online (unless there’s neither searched words nor sentence of example.) Regardless of where I’m reading (books, blog posts, magazines, and so) I look up the word in the dictionary, then I copy and paste a sentence from the dictionary.

I like to do that for three reasons:

I know where my sentences come from, it’s a reliable source;
The sentences are short and sweet (what optimizes my time when I’m revising the cards.)
Anki shows me duplicity when I add the same sentence. It shows that the sentence is already there. It’s important because sometimes you don’t remember which words you’ve already added to your Anki. So, this is a nice tool to help you with this task.

Types of cards

Basic cards

The name is quite straightforward. It’s a basic flashcard with front and back. But here you must pay attention to some details that will make all difference.

Make sure to add in your:

Front card:
1. Learning word in bold: highlight the word you’re learning will make you save time when you revise your cards. Immediately when you read your cards, you’re going to know what it’s about.
2. Picture/gif: it’ll help you to associate the word with its meaning. You’re going to recall the meaning faster. Tip: don’t waste time trying to find the best picture ever. Google the word and from the first couple of lines pick up the picture you think is good.
3. Source: where you get the sentence. It’s important because depending on the sentence you can’t remember fast the context but when you see the source it might help you.
Back card:
1. meaning the word/expression in English. I’m not a fan of translation, as you need to learn, learn it in one go, not twice in your native language than in English. It’ll hold you back when you come to speak to someone.
2. phonetic transcription: it might help you with the pronunciation of the word you’re learning and also recognize it later on when you listen to podcasts, TV Series, or even in conversations.
3. audio: you can record yourself pronouncing the word (that’s what I do most of the time) or you can use the “Awesome TTS” add-on (pretty useful, especially for connected speech).

Basic card example:

Cloze cards

These are the ones that you hide part of your sentence in order to guess which part is hidden.

Here I like to drop a hint about what is the “hidden part” about.

Cloze card example:

Reverse cards

You create a card with front and back, and anki will duplicate it, but the second card created is going to be what was in the front will come in the back and vice-versa.

This type of card is good for learning expressions.