Why I Can't Recommend Anki's $25 iOS App Anymore

I paid $25 for AnkiMobile years ago and convinced myself it was a good investment. Study tool I'd use daily, one-time purchase, seemed reasonable. Nearly 500 hours and over 400,000 reviews later, while spending another evening formatting flashcards instead of actually reading Korean, I started looking for a free Anki alternative.

The software itself is fine. Spaced repetition works, the sync is reliable. But for language learning specifically, I was optimizing the wrong thing. I got really good at maintaining flashcards and really bad at reading anything that wasn't a flashcard.

Is Anki Worth It? The Hidden Time Cost

When I bought the iOS app, I thought about the $25 Anki price. I didn't think about the hours. Setting up decks, finding example sentences, formatting everything consistently, fixing romanization errors in community decks. Easily 30-45 minutes a day of overhead.

I tracked it for a month once (because I'm like that). Between creating new cards and reorganizing old ones, I spent about 12 hours. At minimum wage that's more than the app cost. At my actual hourly rate, it was absurd.

And the whole time I was doing this, I could have been reading actual Korean content. Which is, you know, the point.

What the Anki iOS Cost Actually Gets You

The iOS app does exactly one thing: syncs your desktop flashcards to your phone. That's it.

You don't get any Korean content. You don't get a better algorithm (it's still the same SM-2 from 1987). You don't get audio unless you add it yourself. You don't get example sentences unless you create them. The interface is deliberately bare-bones because "distraction-free" is apparently a selling point.

You're paying $25 for the privilege of reviewing cards you already made on a different device.

The Part That Really Bothered Me

After hundreds of hours of diligent Anki use—over 400,000 reviews—I could recognize thousands of Korean words in isolation. Great for flashcard reviews, useless for reading news articles.

The problem wasn't the cards themselves. It's that flashcards fundamentally isolate words from context. When you learn 정부 (government) from a flashcard, you learn the definition. You don't learn how it appears in news articles, what words cluster around it, what register it requires, how to parse sentences containing it.

That kind of contextual knowledge only comes from reading. And Anki, by design, pulls words out of that context to make them easier to memorize. Which works great for memorization and terrible for actual reading comprehension.

Best Free Anki Alternative for Korean

I found ForeignPage after searching for the best free Anki alternative. Three things made me switch:

First, it just worked. No deck creation, no formatting, no decision fatigue about card templates. I picked the News path and started learning vocabulary that actually appears in Korean news, with real example sentences already there.

Second, the content was already curated. Every card had romanization for beginners, accurate definitions, examples from real text. I didn't create a single flashcard manually. That time went to reading instead.

Third, it was completely free. Not a trial, not freemium with paywalls, actually free. Free Anki on iPhone without the $25 barrier.

But the biggest difference was reading integration. I wasn't just memorizing isolated words anymore. I was reading Korean text and learning vocabulary in context. Click a word I don't know, it goes into my review queue automatically. The vocabulary and the reading reinforced each other instead of being separate activities.

After switching to ForeignPage, my Korean has improved more than it did in years with Anki. This free Anki alternative doesn't have magic features, but I spend my time differently. Reading instead of card maintenance. Context instead of isolation. Learning Korean instead of learning how to use Anki.

When Is Anki Worth It?

Despite the cost, Anki still has its place. If you're in medical school and already have thousands of cards for anatomy, pharmacology, and Korean vocabulary all in one app, switching doesn't make sense. Same if you actually enjoy making flashcards (some people do). Or if you're studying non-language subjects where isolated facts work fine.

But for most Korean learners starting from scratch, the time investment isn't worth it. Not when better alternatives exist that let you spend that time actually learning Korean.

What I'd Tell My Past Self

If I could go back three years, I'd skip the $25 and use that money to buy a Korean textbook instead. Or save it for conversation practice on iTalki. Or literally anything that helps you engage with actual Korean content instead of optimizing flashcard workflows.

The real cost of AnkiMobile isn't $25. It's the hundreds of hours you'll spend maintaining a system instead of learning a language. I wish someone had told me that before I bought it.

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This reflects my personal experience learning Korean. Your results may vary, but I figured it was worth sharing what worked and didn't work for me.