Switching From Anki to immit: What Changes and What Stays
TL;DR: If you are hunting for an alternative to anki for Japanese, the part worth keeping is the spaced repetition. The part worth dropping is the setup, the manual flashcard creation, and the review pile that grows faster than you can clear it. immit keeps the spaced repetition and removes the rest: hover any Japanese word, save it in one click, and review it inside the same Chrome extension and desktop app. No add ons, no deck files, no account on the free tier. This post is the honest version of what changes when you switch, what stays the same, and when Anki is still the better tool.
I used Anki for a few years before we started building immit. It worked. I learned thousands of Japanese words with it, and I am not going to pretend it failed me. What wore me down was everything around the cards. Building each card by hand, or wiring up the add ons that built them for me. Watching the review count climb past 300 on a week I missed two days. Opening Anki and feeling the dread before I had reviewed a single card.
If you are reading Japanese every day and you have started typing "alternative to anki" into Google, you probably recognize that feeling. You are not looking to abandon spaced repetition. You are looking to keep the thing that works and lose the overhead.
That is the right instinct, and it is exactly the line this post walks. Some of Anki stays when you switch to immit. Some of it goes. Knowing which is which is the difference between a switch that sticks and another tool you bounce off in a month.
People rarely open the anki app looking for the exit because the spaced repetition stopped working. Anki's algorithm still works; what stops feeling worth it is the work around the cards.
The most common version of this is the review pile. You read a lot one week, you save a lot of new cards, and then life happens and you miss a few days. Anki does not forget. The due count waits for you, and it grows. By the time you come back, studying flashcards can feel overwhelming, more like clearing a backlog than learning a language. This is the pattern behind a lot of the "I quit Anki" threads on Reddit's r/LearnJapanese: not a failure of the spaced repetition algorithm, but a collapse of motivation under a review load that kept climbing.
The second version is the setup tax. Anki on its own is a blank flashcard app. To turn it into a tool for studying Japanese, you add a popup dictionary like Yomitan, wire it to Anki through AnkiConnect, pick a note type, build a card template with the fields you want, and keep it all syncing across your devices. Anki's interface is often considered overwhelming for beginners, and that is before any Japanese support add on enters the picture. For people who enjoy that work, it is part of the hobby. For people who want to learn Japanese rather than maintain a tooling stack, it is a steep learning curve standing between them and their first useful card.
immit was built for the second group. The rest of this post is about what actually changes when you move over.
The science does not change when you switch tools, so neither does the engine underneath.
Spaced repetition is based on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve: left alone, you forget a new word within days, but if you review it at expanding intervals, each review flattens the curve and the word moves from short term to long term memory. This is the principle Anki is built on, going back to SuperMemo, the program that pioneered spaced repetition algorithms in the 1980s. SuperMemo is often considered more mathematically precise than Anki for predicting memory decay, though its steep learning curve and dated interface kept most learners on Anki instead. immit rests on the same principle. It uses a built-in 8-stage spaced repetition system that schedules each card for review at proven intervals, surfacing it again right around the point you would otherwise forget it.
So the core promise carries over. Anki uses spaced repetition to help learners memorize well over 10,000 Japanese words, and that same mechanism, reviewing each word at the moment that strengthens memory most, is what immit runs on. Your daily load stays bounded rather than infinite, because the algorithm spaces reviews out as cards mature, and effective vocabulary retention is what both tools are optimizing for. If spaced repetition is the reason Anki worked for you, that reason comes with you.
What changes is everything wrapped around that engine.
So the core promise carries over. Anki uses spaced repetition to help learners memorize well over 10,000 Japanese words, and that same mechanism, reviewing each word at the moment that strengthens memory most, is what immit runs on. Spaced repetition flashcards are the most studied technique in language learning for exactly this reason: they keep daily load bounded rather than infinite, because the algorithm spaces reviews out as cards mature. If spaced repetition is the reason Anki worked for you, that reason comes with you.
Three things change the day you switch: how cards get made, how reviews are paced, and how you answer a card. None of them touch the spaced repetition itself.
Flashcard creation goes from manual to one-click
In Anki, a card exists because you made it. You either typed the front and back into a note type yourself, or you set up add ons and a popup dictionary to generate the card from a word you looked up. Either way, card creation is a step you manage. This is a known friction point across the whole category, not just Anki: surveys of flashcard users find that roughly 78% of students prefer fast and easy flashcard creation over any other feature, and tools like Voovo have leaned into it, letting users build a card in under a minute with diagrams, voice commands, and drag and drop. Anki, by design, asks more of you up front.
In immit, flashcard creation is a hover and a click. You are reading a Japanese page, you mouse over a word, the popup shows the reading, part of speech, definition, an example sentence, and an audio button. You click the bookmark icon and the word is saved as a card, front and back filled in from the dictionary. There is no note type to choose, no template to design, no add on to install. The card you would have spent a minute building in Anki takes about a second, and it saves time on every single word.
This is the single biggest day-to-day difference. The words you save are the words you were actually reading, so they are your own flashcards in the most literal sense, and saving them does not interrupt the reading.
No card limit, no deck settings, no steep learning curve
Anki gives you control through settings. New cards per day, maximum reviews, ease modifiers, deck options, sub-decks. That control is real, and for some people it is the appeal. For most learners it is a panel of dials they set once after reading a forum thread and never touch again.
immit has no deck-settings panel and no new-cards-per-day control. New cards enter your review queue as you save them while reading, so your daily load is shaped by how much you read, not by a number you dialed in. There is no card limit on the free tier and no session limit on reviews. If a week feels heavy, you save fewer words for a few days and the queue settles on its own. The trade-off is honest: you give up fine-grained pacing controls, and in exchange there is almost nothing to learn before you start.
Review modes: flip and type, not again, good, easy
This one surprises people, so it is worth saying plainly. immit does not use Anki's four-button review (again, hard, good, easy). immit has two ways of reviewing cards. Flip mode shows you the card and you mark it with one of two buttons, easy or difficult, after you flip it. Type mode asks you to type the answer and checks it for you, which is closer to active recall than recognition.
If your fingers have memorized Anki's again-good-easy rhythm, that muscle memory does not transfer. The upside is that there is less to decide on each card. The downside, stated plainly, is that you lose the granularity of a four-way self-rating. Whether that matters depends on how much you trusted your own again-versus-hard judgments in the first place.
Before you switch to anything, it is worth saying why most of the popular Anki alternatives are the wrong move for a Japanese learner specifically. When you search for the best Anki alternatives, the lists are dominated by general-purpose flashcard apps built for multiple subjects, and they are genuinely good at what they do. They are just not built for Japanese.
Quizlet has over 700 million user-generated study decks and multiple study dynamics, from matching games to mock tests, plus quick deck creation. Brainscape uses a 5-level confidence system for spaced repetition and allows real-time collaboration on flashcard decks. RemNote combines note-taking, PDF annotation, and automated flashcard generation for people who live in their study notes. FluentU uses real-world videos to build vocabulary in context. Studley AI generates personalized flashcards and study paths based on your performance. These are strong tools for a medical student cramming anatomy or anyone studying flashcards across many subjects at once.
The problem is that none of them read Japanese. They have no popup dictionary, no understanding of Japanese characters, no parsing of a Japanese word out of running text, no JP-EN definitions on hover. You would still be copying words into them by hand, which puts you right back at the flashcard creation step that wore you down in Anki. A general flashcard app trades Anki's setup for a different kind of manual work. A Japanese-specific alternative removes the manual work entirely, which is the whole reason to switch.
An honest switching guide has to name the cases where you should not switch, or should not switch all the way. Anki is free, open source, and more capable than immit on several axes that matter to some learners.
The biggest one is the ecosystem of anki decks. There is an enormous library of shared Japanese anki decks, from core vocabulary decks to mined decks built around specific anime and novels, plus a deep catalog of add ons that extend Anki in directions immit does not go. immit ships no pre made decks and does not import shared decks, because its whole model is mining words from what you personally read rather than studying a pre-curated list. If a frequency-ordered deck is how you want to study, that is a real Anki strength, and JPDB's deck library is another.
Anki is also more customizable. Custom note types with multiple fields, cloze deletion cards, fill-in-the-blank formats, fully editable card templates, and the add on system are all things Anki does and immit does not. Some learners also want features immit has not built, like stroke order diagrams on kanji cards, which Anki can show through the right add on and immit's word-focused popup does not. And Anki has a couple of things immit has not shipped yet: a review reminder so you get nudged when cards are due, and granular per-deck pacing. If a daily reminder is what keeps your streak alive, that is a real reason to wait or to keep Anki running.
So the rule of thumb is this. If you love configuring your tools, want a large library of pre made Japanese anki decks, or rely on custom decks with cloze and multiple field types, Anki is still the better fit. If you want the spaced repetition without the maintenance, keep reading.
immit is a Japanese-specific alternative to anki that combines popup dictionary lookup and a built-in spaced repetition system in one tool, free on Chrome and as a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The reason it can drop Anki's setup tax is that the lookup and the SRS are the same product. There is no bridge between two apps to build or maintain, because there are not two apps.
In practice the loop looks like this. You read, you hover a word you do not know, you save it, and later you review it, all without leaving the page or switching tools. The Chrome extension also includes a Pocket Dictionary, a small dictionary window you can pin to the corner of the page and keep open while you read. You can search it directly for a word you are thinking of rather than one you are hovering, and you can clear a few flashcards in it during a reading break, without opening a new window or a new tab. That pinned, read-alongside surface is something neither Anki nor a popup-only dictionary gives you, and on mobile devices, where Anki's desktop-grade configuration is most painful, a one-click save matters even more.
The honest framing is not that immit is more powerful than Anki. It is that immit collapses the multi-tool Japanese reading workflow into one tool, so the friction that builds up between lookup, saving, and review mostly disappears. For an immersion reader whose only problem with Anki is the overhead, that is the whole point. For the wider picture on how immit fits next to the rest of the immersion stack, our Anki alternatives for Japanese learners guide lays out the options side by side.
Try immit free. Free tier, no account, and you will be saving your first card within a minute of installing.
You do not have to make a clean break on day one. There are three realistic paths, and the right one depends on how attached you are to your existing deck.
The first path is parallel. Keep Anki running for your existing deck and start using immit for every new word from new reading. Your old cards keep their review history in Anki; your new mining happens in immit. After a few weeks most people find their reading-driven cards are all in immit and Anki quietly becomes the archive.
The second path is a fresh start. Freeze your Anki deck as a backup, open immit, and treat the switch as a reset. This works well if your Anki pile had grown demoralizing, because the cards you have not reviewed in months were not doing much for you anyway. You start light and let the queue grow at your reading pace.
The third path is for people who want to carry their old cards over. immit does not currently have an Anki import feature, so there is no one-click migration today. Until that ships, the practical options are the parallel path or the fresh start above. If keeping years of review history in one place is a hard requirement, that is worth knowing before you switch.
Whichever path you pick, install the immit Chrome extension and the desktop app, read something in Japanese, and save the first ten words you do not know. The switch is real once your next reading session feels lighter than your last Anki one. Pricing is on the /pricing page: the free tier covers lookup, SRS, and offline review with no account, and Pro at $9 a month or $108 a year adds multi-device sync with seamless syncing across your machines, cloud backup, and dark mode.
Is there a Japanese-specific alternative to anki? Yes. immit is a Japanese-specific alternative to anki that combines popup dictionary lookup and a built-in spaced repetition system in one tool, free on Chrome and as a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Unlike a general flashcard app built for multiple subjects, the dictionary and the spaced repetition are the same product, so you save words by hovering them while you read and review them in the same place, with no add ons or AnkiConnect setup.
Can I import or move my Anki deck into immit? Not automatically yet. immit does not currently have an Anki import feature, so there is no one-click way to bring an existing deck over with its review history. The two practical paths are to keep Anki running for your old deck while you mine new words in immit, or to freeze the old deck and treat immit as a fresh start. If a true import matters to you, factor that in before switching.
Does immit use the same spaced repetition method as Anki? immit uses its own built-in 8-stage spaced repetition system. It is not Anki's scheduler, but it rests on the same underlying principle, reviewing each word at expanding intervals to move it into long term memory and help you retain information over time. So the experience of seeing words again at the right time carries over, even though the specific scheduling is immit's own.
Is immit free like Anki? immit has a free tier that covers popup lookup, one-click save, built-in spaced repetition review, and full offline use, with no account required. Anki is free and open source on desktop and Android, with a paid iOS app. immit's paid tier, Pro, is $9 a month, $108 a year, or a $299 one-time purchase, and it adds multi-device sync, cloud backup, dark mode, and priority support. The free tier is enough to fully replace an Anki-based reading workflow.
What do I lose by leaving Anki? Mainly customization and the deck ecosystem. You lose custom note types, cloze and fill-in-the-blank card types, the add on library, stroke order diagrams from kanji add ons, granular per-deck pacing, and access to the large catalog of shared Japanese anki decks. immit also does not yet have review reminders. You keep the thing that mattered most, spaced repetition that schedules reviews for long-term retention.
Will switching from Anki reset my review progress? Only if you choose the fresh-start path. Because immit does not import anki decks, cards you create in immit start at the first SRS stage regardless of how long you studied them in Anki. If you keep Anki running in parallel, your old cards keep their progress there. Many learners find a soft reset is a feature rather than a loss, since the cards they had not been reviewing in months were not sticking anyway.
The reason "alternative to anki" is such a common search is not that spaced repetition stopped working. It is that the work around the cards piled up until the whole loop felt heavier than the reading it was supposed to support.
immit keeps the part that works, the spaced repetition, and removes the part that wore you down, the building and maintaining and pile-clearing. Lookup, save, and review live in one Chrome extension and desktop app, so there is no bridge between tools to fall through. Install immit free, read something in Japanese this week, and save the words you do not know. If the next session feels lighter, the switch already worked. If you miss the dials and the deck library, Anki is still there, and now you know exactly what you would be trading.
