How to Install and Set Up Anki for French: A Step-by-Step Guide

Introduction

Anki is the tool I recommend to almost every learner for memorizing French vocabulary and sentence structures. If you want to understand why it works so well, start with my guide to learning French vocabulary with Anki. This article is the practical side: how to install Anki, connect it to your phone, import ready-made decks, and set it up so that it helps you every day instead of overwhelming you.

The video above shows every step on screen. Below, you’ll find the same steps in writing, so you can follow along at your own pace.

Step 1: Download and Install Anki

1. Search for “Anki” on Google: the first result is the official website, apps.ankiweb.net.
2. Click Download. The site detects your operating system (Windows, Mac or Linux); pick another one if needed.
3. Once the installer has downloaded, double-click it and follow the steps. On Windows, you can choose Install just for you, then click through and finish.
4. Open Anki. You may be asked to create a profile first. Once that’s done, you’ll land on the main screen, which lists your decks (empty for now).

The desktop version of Anki is completely free.

Step 2: Create an AnkiWeb Account

AnkiWeb is Anki’s free online service. It keeps your cards synchronized between your computer and your phone, so you can review on whichever device you have at hand.

1. Go to ankiweb.net and click Sign up.
2. Accept the terms and confirm your email address.
3. Log in: your account is empty for now, with no decks and no cards. That’s normal.

You’ll use this same login on your computer and on your phone.

Step 3: Import a Ready-Made Deck

You don’t have to create every card yourself. Ready-made decks come as .apkg files, and the Liminal French courses (the A1–A2 and B1–B2 courses, and Daily Immersion) include one with their lessons.

1. In a lesson, open the downloads section and click the Anki deck. It downloads as a zip file.
2. Unzip it (right-click → Extract all). Inside, you’ll find a .apkg file.
3. Double-click the .apkg file. Anki opens and shows the import options.
4. Don’t change anything: just click Import. Anki lists the cards it has added.

Back on the main screen, the new deck appears with its cards waiting to be studied. To look at the cards themselves, click Browse, then select the deck in the left-hand column.

Step 4: Review Your Cards

The whole point of Anki is to review your cards regularly. Click on a deck, then Study Now.

Each card shows a French sentence, with its audio. Try to remember what it means (or what you’re being asked), then click Show Answer to check, with a translation and, in the course decks, a short grammar explanation. For example, a card about articles teaches that pomme is feminine: we always learn a noun with its article, because the article gives you its gender.

Under the answer, you’ll see four buttons: Again, Hard, Good and Easy. My advice: only use Again and Good.

• Again if you didn’t remember. The card comes back a few minutes later.
• Good if you did. The card comes back later: a new card first returns within about ten minutes, then the next day, then after a few days, then weeks, then months.

The better you know a card, the further apart its reviews get. After a while, a sentence you once struggled with will simply feel natural.

At the bottom of the review screen, three numbers tell you what’s left for today:

• blue: new cards you haven’t seen yet;
• red: cards you’re currently learning, which come back again today;
• green: cards you’ve already learned and are due for review.

When there’s nothing left, Anki congratulates you: you’ve finished the deck for now. Click Decks to go back to the main screen.

This is the habit to build: add some cards (imported or your own), then review them every day. That daily repetition is what makes vocabulary stick.

Step 5: Create Your Own Cards

Creating a card is not rocket science.

1. Click Add at the top of the main screen.
2. Keep the card type Basic: a front and a back.
3. Choose the deck the card goes into.
4. Write the French on the front (for example Je m’appelle Félix) and the translation on the back (My name is Félix), then click Add.

The card is now waiting with your other new cards. If you prefer to keep your own cards separate from the imported ones, create a personal deck with Create Deck on the main screen.

Cards you create yourself have no audio by default. There are ways to add it automatically, but that’s for a more advanced setup.

Step 6: Choose How Many New Cards per Day

This is the most important setting, because it decides how much work you’ll have every day, and you don’t want to be overwhelmed. If you go too fast too soon, you’ll burn out and give up.

To change it, click the gear icon next to a deck, then Options, and set New cards/day.

• Start with 5 new cards a day. Keep that pace for two weeks to a month.
• Then move to 10 if you feel comfortable. That’s a good pace: it’s what I do, and my daily reviews take me about 20 to 30 minutes.
• 15 to 20 is possible if you’re in a hurry, but it quickly becomes a lot: expect at least an hour a day just for reviews.

Why start so low? Because reviews pile up. Every day, the new cards of the previous days come back on top of today’s. It takes a while to feel the real effect of this setting, and after a few weeks you’ll be reviewing 40 or 50 cards a day. You don’t need to worry about Maximum reviews/day: your daily workload depends mainly on the number of new cards.

Click Save, and Anki will show you that many new cards each day.

Step 7: Suspend Cards You Don’t Need

Some imported cards may not be useful to you. Instead of deleting them, you can suspend them: in Browse, right-click the card and choose Toggle Suspend. The card will no longer appear in your reviews, and you can unsuspend it the same way later.

At first you won’t need this much. But as you progress, you’ll become more selective about what you study, because the perfect card is one with just one unknown word. For more on what makes a good card, see the flashcard traps to avoid.

Step 8: Track Your Progress (and Add a Heatmap)

Click Stats at the top of Anki to see everything you’ve studied: how many cards you’ve learned, how your reviews are going over time. Seeing that progress is a great source of motivation.

One add-on I really recommend is Review Heatmap. It shows a calendar of your study days, and each day gets colored as soon as you’ve done some reviews. To install it:

1. Find the add-on on ankiweb.net/shared/addons (that’s also where shared decks are). Its page gives you a code to copy.
2. In Anki, go to Tools → Add-ons → Get Add-ons, paste the code and click OK.
3. Restart Anki: the heatmap now appears on the main screen.

It may look like a gimmick, but from experience, a heatmap full of color is really satisfying. You want to keep the streak going, and that’s exactly what reinforces the daily habit.

Step 9: Use Anki on Your Phone

Reviewing on your phone makes it much easier to study a little every day. Be careful to download the right app: some apps on the App Store are called “Anki” but aren’t the official one.

• Android: the official app, AnkiDroid, is free.
• iPhone: the official app, AnkiMobile, is a one-off purchase of about €30.

Sync your computer with AnkiWeb

On your computer, click Sync and log in with your AnkiWeb account. The first time, Anki tells you that the AnkiWeb collection has no cards and offers to replace it with your local collection: accept, since your cards are on your computer. Once the sync is done, your decks and cards are also on AnkiWeb, and the phone app will download them when you log in with the same account.

The free option on iPhone

If you’d like to try Anki on your phone before paying for the app, there’s a workaround: open ankiweb.net in Safari or Chrome, log in, and review your cards directly in the browser. Then add the page to your home screen (Share → Add to Home Screen in Safari). You get an icon that opens AnkiWeb with all your cards ready to review, almost like an app.

Anki Supports Immersion, It Doesn’t Replace It

With regular repetition, you’ll memorize vocabulary and sentence structures far better than by simply reading or listening, and in the courses each lesson comes with cards made for it. Use the stats and the heatmap to keep a little daily momentum.

But don’t spend too much time on Anki. Reading and listening, in other words immersion, is still the most important part of learning French: Anki is there to support your memory. If you have questions about your setup, ask in the community Q&A. And once this basic setup feels comfortable, the next step will be creating cards from YouTube videos, which I’ll cover in a more advanced guide.