In my experience it was much more useful and engaging to learn by doing things (creating, writing, experimenting) that the facts were related to - then the most necessary facts would become deeply embedded in my memory, with others at just the right level of vagueness necessary to look up the details if needed.
I use it with Spanish, but without conversations with my wife and others or trying to read Spanish language content it would be a useless exercise on its own.
The app has an Anki-like backend, and augments the flashcards with guidance, feedback, and challenges with your wife. https://learncoupling.com
Why would you need to "stare at fact flashcards for hours on end"?
The whole idea is the opposite, to minimize learning time, and only stare at a flashcard periodically at the time when it makes more sense.
How would you solve this?
The largest factor determining your daily reviews is your daily new cards - it depends on retention somewhat, but in general daily reviews after a few months stabilize at around 10x daily new cards.
So the best way to use Anki is to limit your daily new cards to an amount where you can easily handle the reviews. And yeah, you basically can't take a day off ever.
Anki is very powerful, but you also need to structure your learning/routine around it somewhat, or maybe another way to look at it is that you need to make Anki work for you. I currently spend about 15-20 minutes a day on Anki, earlier on in my language learning it was over an hour a day.
One day I just stopped and deleted it all.
that said it certainly doesn't help that anki takes a non-trivial amount of time and study in and of itself to properly set up to be really efficient.
And it worked stunningly well. You see, I figured that whatever I targeted I'd do about 80% of the time. So, 35 a day is about ~1000 a month, and I reckoned I could hit that 10 months in a given year.
My first year of Japanese was basically RTK + KO2001 and JLPT2 grammar study. I was a few points off passing JLPT2 inside 1 year of study. At the time it say I had around 2 to 3 thousand vocab, and could read all Jyoyou kanji, plus understand almost all sentence structure used in daily life.
My 2nd year of Japanese I acquired an additional 10k vocab. I passed JLPT2 and came a few points short of passing JLPT1.
6 months into my 3rd year of study I passed JLPT1 and never touched studying Japanese again.
It has always been a big part of my life since then, and I credit that brutal effort with me really turning my life around. It was an absolutely epic adventure.
For example all downloadable Kanji decks basically ask "Kanji -> meaning, kun readings, on readings, nanori readings, translation, example jukugo, example sentence, pronunciation, stroke order, ...", i.e. not atomic at all.
I have instead made my own deck where each Kanji has multiple cards that ask for different pairs of information. One of the important reasons is that I may have more trouble remembering one of those than the others, and that should not make me have to redo those others, since SRS should ask when I'm about to forget.
I think I found your problem.
Try this cycle: - Add however many cards you like - Study - Got bored and didn't finish all your cards? Stop and don't add any new card until you can finish quick enough to not get bored - Finishing quickly? Add more cards
The exponentially increasing interval is your friend. Before you notice you won't be studying more than 10 cards a day :)
It doesn't feel like it in the first ~10 days of a block of cards, but there's a jitter in the spacing function, so you will see the same block at the same time 2 or 3 times but then they'll start dispersing and be a lot less overwhelming.
And most important of all: don't be afraid of slow progress: progress is progress!
I learned analysis a long time ago. Forgot most of it, despite applying it a lot.
I learned statistics twice, applied it, and still forgot most of it. The third time round I made flashcards and I haven't forgotten much.
I studied a textbook on floating point arithmetic for work (mathematical - with theorems, etc). Because it was secondary to my main work, I would have gaps - sometimes for months, before I could return to it. Yet whenever I did return to it, I could continue where I left off without reviewing much - because of flash cards.
Memory is useful.
While "stupidly" learning a one-two word definition might not allow you to understand how a word is actually used, it will allow you to get its meaning should you encounter it in native material, delaying understanding to that moment.
The definition is "what is it?". There is nothing to understand here. It could be taught to a parrot or child to repeat this information.
What you're mentioning is a bunch of cards on top of that: how does a red black tree stay balanced on insertions? When is the self-balancing property of red black trees useful? When is it not? Etc etc. You cannot answer this if you mistake a red black tree for another tree for example. It's essentially vocabulary.
Another one would be notations: what's the symbol for a cross product? Again, nothing to understand, but you must know it to work on actual math problems involving cross products.
And the great thing is, because of the spaced repetition, you don’t need to spend hours on it at a time. You can learn a lot in 5/10 mins a day.
(This may not apply if the target domain is actually itself rote memorization, e.g. medical exams)
It was using flashcards of cats with funny captions and it actually worked. Sadly my old phone eventually broken and the app can't be installed from the appstore anymore.