Cadence Spanish · the Anki path
The best Anki settings, step by step
The simplest way to study Cadence Spanish is the free app — it runs in your browser, the scheduling is already dialled in, and there is nothing to install.
👉 Just want to study? Open the app → No setup, no account needed. This page is only for people who'd rather own their cards in Anki — the free, open-source flashcard app — and tune it by hand.
Anki works out of the box, but a few deliberate settings take it from good to genuinely the best learning setup money can't buy. You do this once, and it's the difference between forgetting half of what you study and remembering almost all of it. Ten minutes now buys you months of efficient learning.
Install Anki (free)
Pick your device. The desktop app is where you'll do the setup, so I recommend starting there — your phone can sync to it later (also free).
Download the deck & import it
Grab the file below, then in Anki open File → Import and choose it. That's the whole import. The deck includes full audio, so it's a chunky download (~140 MB) — but everything is baked in, nothing else to fetch.
Cadence Spanish Conjugations
⬇ Download the deck free · ~140 MBOn a phone? It's easiest to download and import on a computer first, then sync to your phone with a free AnkiWeb account. You can do it all on the phone too — just tap the file and open it with Anki.
Turn on the best settings
If you just want the answers, here they are. Skim the table, set these, and you're done — the detail below is for when you're curious why.
| Setting | Set it to |
|---|---|
| FSRS | ON |
| Desired retention | 80% — and never higher (the 80/20 rule) |
| New cards / day | 5 — your worst-day floor (do extra anytime) |
| Maximum reviews / day | 9999 (don't skip reviews) |
| Learning & relearning steps | Leave blank (let FSRS manage them) |
| New card gather order | Order gathered — important for this deck |
| Review sort order | Descending retrievability |
| Bury related (sibling) cards | All three ON |
| Optimize (the button) | Click monthly |
Walk through it with me
Update & sync first
Make sure your Anki desktop is version 25.x or newer (Help → About), and that any phone/tablet apps are up to date too. FSRS keeps improving, and you want the good version.
Open the deck's options
On Anki's home screen, click the gear icon next to the deck → Options. Everything below happens in this window. Scroll down to the section labelled FSRS.
Switch FSRS on
Flip the FSRS toggle on. That's the single most important switch in Anki — you're now using the state-of-the-art scheduler instead of the 35-year-old one.
Set desired retention to 80% — and never higher
This is your one big lever: how much you want to remember. Set it to 80%, and leave it there. Here's the thinking, because it matters: learning obeys the 80/20 rule. Roughly 20% of the effort earns you 80% of the results — and chasing the rest costs far more effort for far less return. Pushing retention to 90% or 95% won't make you fluent any faster; it just buries you under extra reviews for a sliver of memory you'll hardly miss.
So take the 80% — and spend the effort you just saved on things that actually compound. Rest (yes, resting after a drill is a form of self-respect — your brain quietly consolidates while you do nothing). Read a few interesting Spanish sentences or a short story. Live your day. Leave the parameters box untouched — that's auto-tuned for you.
Click "Optimize"
Find the Optimize button and click it. This tunes FSRS to your own review history. (Brand new, with no history yet? It uses excellent defaults — just come back and click it again after a few weeks.) You can ignore "Evaluate" and leave "Reschedule cards on change" off.
Daily limits — set your floor, not your ceiling
Set Maximum reviews/day to 9999 (never skip a review that's actually due). For New cards/day, here's the hard-won advice: it is so tempting to set this high while you're feeling motivated — and you'll almost always regret it later, when the reviews from those eager early days pile up on a busy week and make you want to quit.
So set it to the minimum you could manage on your worst day — something like 5 new cards a day. Treat that as your floor, not your limit. You can always do extra when you have the energy. Consistency at 5 beats a heroic 30 you abandon in a week.
Learning steps — leave them blank
Under New Cards (learning steps) and Lapses (relearning steps), the simplest and best move is to leave both empty and let FSRS manage the timing itself. Don't be surprised if it schedules things in hours rather than minutes — that's normal and correct. (Prefer to cram all your reviews into one daily session? Then put a single step of 15m in each. Either is fine.)
Display order — the one deck-specific setting
This is the most important setting for this deck. In Display Order:
- New card gather order → Order gathered. The cards are carefully sequenced so each builds on the last. Keep this on "Order gathered" (by position) — do not randomise it.
- Review sort order → Descending retrievability. On days you can't finish, this reviews the safest cards first and protects your retention most efficiently.
- New/review order → Show after reviews, and Interday learning/review order → Show before reviews.
Many great guides tell you to set the gather order to random. That's good advice for a pile of unordered cards — but this deck is sequenced, so for Cadence you want Order gathered. It's the one place to ignore the generic tip and trust the deck.
Bury related cards
In the Burying section, turn on all the "bury siblings" options. This spaces out closely-related cards so you're not reviewing near-identical items back to back. Click Save — and you're done.
Three habits that keep it humming
Once you're studying, three small things keep FSRS accurate and your memory strong:
- Use the buttons honestly. Again = I didn't get it. Good = I got it. Hard is still a pass — use it only when you got it right but it was a real struggle, never as a softer "Again." Misusing Hard quietly wrecks your scheduling. For this deck, you'll happily live on Again and Good.
- Click "Optimize" about once a month. It re-tunes FSRS to how you've been learning lately. Thirty seconds, big payoff.
- Don't loop a card over and over in one sitting. If something won't stick today, mark Again and move on — it'll come back. Drilling the same card ten times in five minutes confuses the scheduler and doesn't help you remember.
Or skip all of this
The Cadence Spanish app does every one of these settings for you — FSRS on, 80% retention, the right order — and saves your progress to your own Google Drive. Nothing to install.