> We have the useful fiction that there is a 1-1 relationship between words in two languages, but there almost never is.

But you aren't forced to drill single word L1->L2/L2->L1 cards. You can drill sentences; I've never found single vocabulary word cards useful, or translation cards (before more advanced stages - B2/C1 - rather than early on.) What I found useful were full L2 sentences, often embedded in paragraphs, with words missing ("clozes.") There's also an L1 version of the complete sentence in small print on the front of the card, to use as a prompt to figure out the L2 word being asked for, but it may be phrased completely differently.

They allow you to just learn languages as they are. You can also drill synonyms and antonyms: single L2 word on the front, multiple L2 synonyms and antonyms on the back (and maybe a terse also L2 definition.) When the card comes up, name as many as you can out loud, say the definition if you can remember it. If you got a lot of them, and/or could repeat the definition you pass the card.

Also, an author (David Parlett) who studied the process of language learning from written grammars and radio broadcasts/ethnographic recordings (i.e. without an instructor or specialized recordings, usually very small languages) advised a long time ago that one tackle the hard part(s) first: coming from one language to another there are features that have no parallel in the languages one already speaks but are very important to be able to use. For example, if you're going from English to a Romance language, verbs and their conjugations. Anki can just let you learn those by rote and figure out how to use them later; if you separate each conjugation onto its own card, it will eventually be effortless. Then all you have left is vocabulary and set phrases, and all of the vocabulary and set phrases you read from native material will be sandwiching another verb that you can conjugate, being reinforced in that conjugation.

What I'm saying is that you can't dismiss Anki because you think that translating word by word between languages is a dead end for learning languages. There are any number of ways to use Anki; ingenuity doesn't stop at the existence of a spaced repetition effect, you can subject that to a little further engineering. People are doing all of the above, I certainly am.

> You really need to learn a subject before memorizing it, but in the learning phase Anki is not helpful.

I disagree with this for similar reasons. A lot of the learning phase is memorizing a bunch of vocabulary and units and remembering basic checklists. Having that done before you show up to do the learning will accelerate that learning significantly.

I don't think spaced repetition and Anki are limited by not being all-encompassing. It's a tool for remembering largely atomic things, and we have to figure out how to apply it.

But overall I probably have to agree with you on some level, because I think that Anki itself promotes a particular style of usage that may not always be ideal. Anki encourages a usage that reflects its simple model of spaced repetition, which is largely borrowed from Supermemo, and they make it difficult or impossible to change that behavior to the point of actively discouraging users from experimenting. I find it annoying that Anki is very opinionated, and I think that its decisions about how it should work were partially shaped by the fact that it started very amateurishly put together, and adjusting one's opinions to match the interface is easier done than the opposite. There's not a lot of good, exacting science around spaced repetition, and all the papers people cite are old, of very small size, and not very systematic or adventurous. It's too early to be opinionated.