Anki speaking practice: run FSRS on your speech

Anki users do not need convincing that the recognition-production gap is real. You have lived it. Thirty thousand reviews, a mature deck, retention sitting where you want it, and then an actual Spanish speaker asks you something and the word you have graded Good forty times is nowhere. This post is about closing that gap without abandoning the scheduling discipline that got you here. The short version: treat spoken production as a review event.

Why a mature deck doesn't speak

A review grades one retrieval, in one direction, with no clock and no syntax. Even if you run production cards, L1 front to L2 back, you are retrieving an isolated item with unlimited time and no sentence to build around it. Speech is retrieval under a deadline, inside a sentence you are constructing at the same time, with your attention split. Same memory, different access path. The deck trains the slow path. Conversation is the fast path, and the fast path only builds from reps on the fast path.

None of this is an argument against Anki. The deck is what makes speaking practice efficient: you cannot retrieve words you never stocked. It is an argument that the review log is measuring the wrong end of the pipeline if speaking is the goal. The general case is in why flashcards alone won't make you fluent, but you already knew this one.

Speaking as a review event

Here is the idea Kotobia is built around. A voice tutor holds a conversation constructed from the cards that are due or young in your deck. What happens to each word in that conversation is scheduling signal. Produce it correctly, unprompted, and that is a successful review: the card gets credit as if you graded it Good. Produce it wrong and it is graded Hard, so it comes back sooner. Stumble, reach for it and miss, and the word drops into a lapses deck for focused work. Reach for the English word mid-sentence and that word is flagged as one you need but do not own yet: a new card.

The effect is that your schedule starts reflecting what you can say rather than what you can recognize. Words you can read but not produce stop coasting on easy recognition grades, because conversation keeps catching them.

The scheduler is FSRS, and it matches Anki's

We did not write a clever proprietary scheduler, on purpose. Kotobia runs FSRS-6 with Anki's defaults and we maintain a parity harness against Anki's own behavior: same learning steps (1 minute, then 10), same day rollover at 4am, same treatment of the first grades. If you know how your Anki deck schedules, you know how this schedules. The one deliberate difference is what counts as a review, since spoken production feeds the same state machine that card reviews do.

The tutor itself is capped at around thirty cards of context per session. That is a pedagogy constraint, not a technical one: a conversation that tries to service eighty due cards stops being a conversation.

Bringing your deck, honestly

You can import an .apkg. Before you do, know exactly what that means here, because it is narrower than what Anki users might hope. The import is text only: front and back fields per note, capped at sane lengths. No media, no cloze internals, no tags, and, the one that matters, no scheduling history. Your ease factors and intervals do not come across; imported cards seed as new and earn their state through reviews and speech. For a mature deck that is a real cost, and pretending otherwise would be worse. The known-words triage exists to soften it: mark the vocabulary you already own and it seeds as mature instead of new, so you are not re-grinding three years of reviews. Imported content stays in your account, full stop. We do not pool it, and we drop media on the way in.

Keeping Anki is fine

Nothing syncs back to Anki, so the honest setup for a heavy Anki user is a split: keep your existing deck for whatever it already does well (reading vocabulary, kanji, medical school), and run your active speaking language here, where the reviews and the conversations feed one schedule. Some people migrate entirely, some run both for months. Both are reasonable. If you want to see the mechanics before deciding, the Spanish course page shows how the deck, the story, and the tutor connect, and pricing is flat and low because we would rather have the Anki crowd than a margin story.