For a while the reviews felt productive. Now the deck is a chore, the same cards keep coming back, and none of it seems to show up when you speak. The method is not broken. The deck is.
Your cards are testing recognition, not recall
A card with the foreign word on the front and your language on the back asks you to recognise. That is the easy direction, and it is the one that does not transfer to speaking. Flip them. Prompt in your own language, produce the foreign word out loud. It feels harder because it is the thing you actually cannot do yet.
Single words carry no context
An isolated word gives your memory nothing to hold. The same word inside a short sentence you would plausibly say gives it a situation, a grammar pattern and a rhythm all at once. Replace bare words with six-to-ten-word sentences. A smaller deck of sentences beats a large deck of nouns.
The deck grew faster than your reviews
Adding twenty cards a day and reviewing for ten minutes produces a backlog that compounds silently until the daily queue is unmanageable and you quit. Cap new cards at a number your review time can actually absorb. Ten a day, sustained, beats fifty a day abandoned in March.
You kept cards you will never use
Some words arrive from a text you read once and have no place in your life. They fail repeatedly, cost the most time and teach you nothing. Delete them without ceremony. A card you have failed six times is not a card you need; it is a card you are not ready for.
Fix the direction, add context, slow the intake and prune ruthlessly. Same app, same minutes, completely different result.