Comment by pessimizer

> Spending half an hour mind-numbingly learning words through flashcards will teach you about as much vocabulary as an hour watching educational videos, but it'll be far less fun and you'll feel like it actually took two hours.

The first part is definitely untrue, you won't learn any vocabulary spending an hour watching an educational video, you'll be lucky if you remember one new word tomorrow. That half hour on Anki will be spread out over six months, and will teach you 20 words.

As for the second part, doing Anki is like doing through any sort of timeline that spits out random rewards and failures. I get a rush whenever I remember stuff, and I get bummed out when I forget; it's basically facebook.

I understand why one wouldn't think that with single-word vocabulary flashcards, because they are horrible to do and unhelpful. You should be running sentences, not words. Words rarely translate well, change form when they are in sentences, and often show up as part of seemingly ungrammatical set phrases.