I've been reading a few posts here about Anki and / vs reading as a way to develop vocabulary and I feel like I see a growing trend on some multilingual people (I think Matt vs Japan and some other) moving away from Anki as a tool in favour of more natural methods, such as reading.
I am quite new to Anki. I have tried it before but got put off by the very high learning curve, it's price for iphone and the fact it's not very user friendly. I finally forced myself to learn how to use it and I'm finally starting to understand the hype. I wish I knew about it when I was studying Arabic a million years ago.
I am currently an advanced Spanish speaker (live in Spain - feel like I can do anything in the language but not without the odd mistake and still struggle with listening sometimes etc) and got to this point without Anki, just a bit of Quizlet (which I see now as woefully inferior). I feel like I truly understand the power of Anki for this point in my language journey. I know all the most common words, it's just more advanced and colloquial phrases and vocab that don't come up very much that I need to memorise. Otherwise, the most common words are pretty well memorised and I get natural retention from my input.
Now I've just recently started learning Portuguese and the other day I excitedly downloaded a "most common 5000 words in portuguese" anki deck. However, now I'm questioning the usefulness of this. The most common 2,500 words or so are naturally going to come up in the content I'm already consuming (a short novel, Netflix etc that I can quite easily understand due to my Spanish). I wonder if there's actually any use to this at this stage or whether I should instead spend the time I would be spending on Anki just doing more input, and then wait until I'm at a level where I need to memorise less common words and phrases?
In short, I want to know about people's thought on using Anki so early on. Is it useful in the early stages? Is there something I'm missing here?
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