Anki FSRS Settings for Japanese in 2026: The Updated Beginner Guide
If you searched for Anki settings, found a guide that looked helpful, followed it carefully, and still ended up confused. There’s a good reason for that. Most guides you’ll find are outdated.
In late 2023 and through 2024, Anki replaced its old review algorithm with something called FSRS. The settings changed. The sliders people used to obsess over became irrelevant. New options appeared. And the vast majority of guides online, including popular ones on Reddit and YouTube, still describe the old system.
This guide covers the correct Anki FSRS settings for Japanese learners in 2026, explained from scratch with no assumed prior knowledge. If you’re new to Anki, or if you’ve been using it with whatever default settings it came with, this is where to start.
Table of Contents
What Anki Actually Does, and What FSRS Changed
Anki is a flashcard app that uses spaced repetition (SRS) to decide when to show you each card again. The idea is simple: instead of reviewing everything every day, Anki reschedules each card based on how well you remembered it. Cards you find easy get shown less often. Cards you struggle with come back sooner.
For years, Anki used an algorithm called “SM-2” to calculate those intervals. SM-2 worked reasonably well, but it had a known problem: cards you got wrong repeatedly would get stuck in a cycle of very short review intervals. Anki users called this “ease hell.” Your review pile would balloon, old cards kept reappearing, and the whole system started to feel like punishment.
FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) replaces SM-2 with a more accurate memory model. Instead of tracking a simple “ease factor,” it predicts how stable each memory is in your brain and schedules reviews based on when you’re most likely to forget.
The practical result is fewer unnecessary reviews, better long-term retention, and no more “ease hell” to deal with.
For Japanese learners, this matters a lot. Japanese vocabulary takes years to build. An Anki setup that burns you out in month three by flooding you with 400 daily reviews is worse than no Anki at all. FSRS is meaningfully better at keeping your review load sustainable.
The catch?
You have to set it up correctly.
The default settings are fine as a starting point, but several of them need adjusting for a beginner Japanese learner’s actual workflow.
How to Enable FSRS in Anki
Before anything else: make sure your Anki is up to date. FSRS requires Anki version 23.10 or later. If you’re running an older version, update it first through the official Anki website The mobile version (AnkiDroid on Android, AnkiMobile on iPhone) also supports FSRS as long as it’s updated.
Once you’re on a current version:
Step 1: Open your deck options: Click the gear icon next to your Japanese deck, then select “Options.” This opens the settings panel for that specific deck.
Step 2: Find the FSRS toggle: Scroll down in the Options panel until you see the FSRS section. There will be a toggle switch labeled “FSRS.” It may already be enabled if you’re on a recent Anki version, check either way.
Step 3: Enable FSRS: Toggle it on. Anki will ask if you want to reschedule your existing cards based on FSRS. If you’re just starting out with a new deck, this doesn’t matter. If you’ve been using a deck for a while with old SM-2 settings, click “Reschedule.” It will recalculate your existing intervals based on the new algorithm.
That’s the core step. FSRS is now active for that deck. Everything below is about tuning the settings correctly.
The Settings That Matter: Your 2026 Configuration
With FSRS enabled, here are the settings worth actually adjusting. Everything else can stay at default until you’ve been using Anki for several months.
Desired Retention
This is the most important setting in FSRS, and it doesn’t exist in the old SM-2 system at all.
Desired Retention is a number between 0 and 1 that tells Anki how often you want to remember a card at the moment it comes up for review. A setting of 0.9 means you’re aiming to remember 90% of cards when they appear. A setting of 0.85 means 85%.
The default is 90%, and that’s where most guides tell you to leave it. For beginners, though, 90% produces a lot of reviews. Every 5% you go up roughly doubles your review load. The difference between 85% and 95% is enormous in terms of daily review time.
Recommended starting point for Japanese beginners: 85%
At 85%, you’ll still retain the vast majority of what you study. You’ll also forget a small percentage of cards at review time, which is actually fine. That forgetting-and-relearning cycle is part of how memory works. What you gain is a review pile that stays manageable, which is far more important than a theoretical perfect retention rate that you abandon in month two because you can’t keep up.
Once you’ve been using Anki consistently for three to four months and your daily reviews feel comfortable, you can nudge this up to 87% or 90%.
Learning Steps
Learning Steps control what happens the very first time you see a card. This setting is still present in FSRS and still worth configuring.
The format looks like: 1m 10m
That means: if you get a new card wrong, it comes back in 1 minute. If you get it right on the first try, it comes back in 10 minutes. Get it right again, and FSRS takes over the scheduling from that point forward.
Recommended for Japanese beginners: 1m 10m
Some people use three steps (1m 5m 10m) for extra reinforcement. This is fine but adds review time. Two steps is sufficient for most beginners. Feel free to play around with the interval time and how many intervals you have though, it’s about finding out works for YOU, not other people.
Graduating Interval
This is how many days after completing the learning steps a card waits before appearing again. Default is 1 day.
Leave this at 1 day. No adjustment needed.
Easy Interval
If you click the “Easy” button instead of “Good” on a new card, this is how many days the card waits. Default is 4 days.
Leave this at 4 days. You also shouldn’t be clicking “Easy” on new cards at all as a beginner since it pushes cards away too quickly before they’re actually solid. Stick to “Again” and “Good” for the first few months.
Maximum Interval
This caps how far into the future Anki can schedule a card. Default is 36,500 days (100 years, effectively unlimited).
Leave this at the default. Beginners sometimes lower this thinking it will help retention. It won’t, it just forces unnecessary reviews on cards you already know well.
FSRS Parameters
This is a row of numbers that looks like: 0.40255 1.18385 3.1262 15.4722…
These parameters represent your personal memory model, learned from your review history. When you’re new to Anki, these will be at generic default values. That’s fine for now.
Once you have around 1,000 reviews logged (roughly two to three months of consistent use), Anki can optimize these parameters to match how your specific brain retains information. You’ll see an “Optimize” button appear. Run it at that point. Until then, don’t touch these numbers.
Anki Settings You No Longer Need to Worry About in 2026
If you find old Anki guides talking about any of these, they’re describing SM-2 behavior. With FSRS enabled, these either don’t apply or are handled automatically.
Ease Factor / Starting Ease: In SM-2, cards had individual ease factors that would drop when you struggled with them, leading to the ease hell problem. FSRS doesn’t use ease factors. You’ll still see an “Ease” column in the browser, but it doesn’t affect FSRS scheduling. Ignore it.
Interval Modifier: A multiplier that used to artificially inflate or shrink all your intervals in SM-2. Irrelevant in FSRS. Leave it at 100%.
Easy Bonus: Used to give extra-long intervals to cards rated “Easy” in SM-2. Not relevant in FSRS mode.
New Interval: In SM-2, this controlled what percentage of a card’s old interval it kept when you forgot it. FSRS handles this through its own stability model. You don’t need to adjust it.
If you see an old Reddit post or YouTube video telling you to set your Interval Modifier to 130% or your Starting Ease to 250%, that’s SM-2 advice. It doesn’t apply here. You’re free from caring about their nonsense.
How Many New Cards Per Day?
FSRS makes your review intervals smarter, but it doesn’t change the math on new cards. Every new card you add today creates reviews that come back tomorrow, next week, next month, and beyond. Add too many new cards early and your future self inherits an unsustainable pile.
For Japanese beginners: 10 to 15 new cards per day maximum.
That sounds low. It isn’t. At 10 cards per day, you add 300 new words per month. In six months, that’s 1,800 words. That’s enough to cover most of the vocabulary required for JLPT N5 and a solid chunk of N4, with reviews that stay under 30 minutes a day.
Learners who start at 30 or 50 new cards per day almost always hit a wall at some point Reviews pile up, the deck feels overwhelming, and they either abandon the deck entirely or stop adding new cards for weeks while they dig out. Neither outcome is good.
Start at 10. If your daily reviews stay comfortably under 20 minutes after a month, add 5 more. Increase gradually. Never let your daily review time become something you dread.
The Best Deck to Use With These Settings?
Anki is just the tool. What you put in it matters as much as how it’s configured.
For Japanese beginners, the Kaishi 1.5k deck is the current community standard, and it’s significantly better than the decks it replaced (Core 2k and Core 6k, both of which are years old and increasingly outdated).
Kaishi 1.5k contains 1,500 of the most useful Japanese words for beginners, with audio pronunciation from a native speaker, sentences that show each word in context, and clean formatting that works well on mobile. It’s free on AnkiWeb.
The “1.5k” in the name means 1,500 cards total, about five months’ worth at 10 new cards per day. It’s designed to get you to a functional vocabulary base, not to cover everything. Once you’ve finished it, sentence mining (creating your own cards from Japanese content you’re actually reading or watching) becomes the more effective long-term approach.
If you find Anki’s interface too fiddly and want a more structured system that handles the scheduling decisions for you, WaniKani is a strong alternative for kanji and vocabulary specifically. It’s not as flexible as Anki, but the setup is essentially zero since you just study what it shows you.
What to Do If Your Anki Reviews Feel Off?
A few situations that come up regularly after switching to FSRS:
Your reviews suddenly spiked after enabling FSRS: This can happen if you had a large number of cards with artificially low ease factors from SM-2. FSRS recalculating those cards may bunch a lot of reviews into the near term. This usually settles within one to two weeks. Keep up with reviews and don’t add new cards until the pile stabilizes. This is something that I had to go through when I switched over to FSRS recently.
You’re seeing cards way too often: Lower your Desired Retention to 0.82 or 0.83 temporarily, then raise it gradually once your pile feels manageable. You can also suspend cards you already know well, just right-click any card in the Anki browser and select “Suspend.” You can un-suspend them later on.
You’re forgetting too many cards at review time: This is less common with FSRS than with SM-2, but it happens if Desired Retention is set too low. Raise it by 0.02 to 0.03 and monitor for two weeks. It’s good to fiddle around with settings in Anki, but do it in a gradual manner and take your time to assess the changes.
Your FSRS parameters haven’t been optimized: Once you have 1,000 reviews, go to Deck Options, scroll to the FSRS section, and click “Optimize.” This recalibrates the algorithm to your actual memory patterns. Do this every few months as your review history grows.
Is FSRS better than SM-2 for Japanese?
Yes, for most learners. FSRS produces fewer wasted reviews, handles lapsed cards more sensibly, and eliminates the ease hell problem that burned out a lot of SM-2 users. The main caveat is that you need enough review history (roughly 1,000 reviews) before the optimizer can fully personalize your parameters. Before that, you’re using default values that are still better than SM-2 but not yet tuned to your brain.
Should I use Anki every single day?
Yes, if possible. The scheduling in FSRS (and in SRS generally) assumes you’ll review on the day cards are due. Skipping days doesn’t ruin your deck, but it does create a pile of overdue cards that takes time to clear. Missing one day occasionally is fine. Missing a week means an uncomfortable catch-up session. A short daily session is significantly better than longer, irregular ones.
What’s the difference between “Again,” “Hard,” “Good,” and “Easy” in Anki?
hese are the four rating buttons you see after reviewing a card.
Again means you got it wrong. The card restarts the learning steps.
Hard means you got it right but it took real effort. FSRS will schedule it sooner than “Good” would.
Good means you got it right at a comfortable level of effort. This is the default button to aim for.
Easy means it was trivially easy. FSRS will push the card much further into the future.
For beginners, use “Again” and “Good” for almost everything. Using “Easy” too liberally on new vocabulary is one of the most common mistakes.
Can I use these same settings for a kanji-only deck?
Yes. The FSRS settings above apply to any Japanese flashcard deck. The one consideration for kanji specifically is that recognition kanji (seeing the character and knowing the meaning) tends to stick more easily than production kanji (knowing the meaning and being able to write the character). If you’re running a writing-focused deck, you may find a slightly higher Desired Retention (0.87 to 0.90) helps because those cards genuinely need more reinforcement.
My Anki version doesn’t seem to have FSRS. What do I do?
Download the latest version of Anki from apps.ankiweb.net. FSRS has been available since version 23.10. If you downloaded Anki a year or two ago and haven’t updated it, your version is almost certainly outdated. The update is free and takes two minutes.
Anki FSRS in 2026 is meaningfully better than what most guides describe, and the setup is simpler than the outdated SM-2 configuration advice makes it look. Enable FSRS, set your Desired Retention to 85%, use 1m 10m learning steps, keep new cards at 10 to 15 per day, and run the optimizer after your first 1,000 reviews. After that, start to play around with settings if you want a more custom experience tailored for just you. That’s most of what you need. Everything else is noise until you’re six months in and ready to refine.
