I built a flashcard app after burning out on Anki — here's what I learned

MindDory — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:53:53 +0000

I used Anki for a long time.

It made sense back then. You had a word list,
you needed to memorize it, you drilled it
until it stuck. Simple. Effective enough.

But it's 2026. And I think we need to have
an honest conversation about why Anki is
starting to feel like a fax machine in a
world of instant messaging.

The uncomfortable truth about flashcards

I was memorizing words. Not learning them.

There's a difference — and it took me embarrassingly long to see it.

When you drill "ephemeral → short-lived" a hundred times, your brain stores a weak, isolated link. It knows the definition. It does not know the word.

But when you read "the beauty of cherry blossoms is ephemeral — they last only one week" — something different happens. Your brain attaches the word to a scene, an emotion, a moment. That's the kind of memory that survives a real conversation.

This is called contextual encoding. It's not a new idea — memory researchers have known this for decades. And yet almost every flashcard app ignores it completely.

I got frustrated enough to build
MindDory — an app
that uses AI to wrap your target vocabulary
in short contextual stories instead of
isolated cards.

So I built MindDory

The idea was simple: what if instead of isolated cards, an AI generated short stories around exactly the words you need to learn?

You read the story. The words appear in context. Your brain does what it's actually designed to do.

I also added memory cues — smart keyword associations for the words that just refuse to stick — and spaced repetition to handle the review timing automatically.

Honestly? It felt like cheating compared to my old Anki routine.

Three things building this taught me

The hardest part had nothing to do with code.

I spent weeks just trying to understand why people fail at language learning. Reading research papers at midnight. Talking to strangers on Reddit about their Anki burnout. Watching where the drop-off happens.

The answer was always the same: isolation. Words learned without context don't transfer to real life. Full stop.

My first version was too clever.

I stuffed it with features I thought were cool. Users opened the app, got confused, and left. So I stripped everything back to the core loop: encounter a word → see it in a story → review it later. That's it. Everything else is noise.

Distribution is genuinely harder than building.

I'm a builder. I like building. But getting MindDory in front of people who actually need it? That's a completely different skill set — and honestly the thing I'm still figuring out.

If you've shipped something and cracked distribution, I'd love to know how. Drop it in the comments. I mean it.

Where things stand

MindDory is live on the App Store. Free to try. English, French, Korean, Chinese and more.

If you've ever felt like Anki was grinding you down without actually making you fluent — that's exactly who I built this for.

And if you have thoughts on contextual learning, memory science, or just want to tell me I'm wrong about something — please do. That's the kind of conversation I'm here for.

If you're curious what contextual learning
looks like in practice, I built MindDory
around this idea — minddory.com

DEV Community: MindDory

I built a flashcard app after burning out on Anki — here's what I learned

The uncomfortable truth about flashcards

So I built MindDory

Three things building this taught me

Where things stand