Anki is used by serious Finnish learners precisely because Finnish vocabulary is not well-covered by commercial apps. The language has fewer than 6 million speakers and is not a priority market for Duolingo or Babbel, so self-directed learners reach for Anki and community-built decks faster than they would for Spanish or French.
The challenge with Anki for Finnish is that the language's complexity requires card formats that go beyond simple translation pairs. Drilling a Finnish word in isolation without drilling its common inflected forms is only partial learning. A word you know in the nominative but cannot produce in the genitive or partitive is not really known.
The most effective Anki cards for Finnish cases are not "what does this ending mean" but "how does this word change in each case." Cloze deletion cards work well: take a sentence with a case-marked noun and blank out the ending. To fill in the blank correctly you need to know both the case required by the sentence's meaning and the vowel harmony rule that determines which vowel the ending uses. This doubles the grammatical load of each card but also doubles the efficiency, because you are drilling usage and form simultaneously. Building these cards is slow, but they transfer to real comprehension and production in ways that vocabulary-only drilling does not. Use a base deck of the 500 most common Finnish words and build case variants for each.
Vowel harmony means every Finnish suffix has two forms. Consonant gradation means many Finnish words change their stem consonant depending on the suffix. Neither pattern can be drilled effectively with cards that show only the dictionary form. Your Anki deck needs to include stem variants explicitly. For a word like "kauppa" (shop), your deck should have cards that show the expected form in at least four or five cases, not just the nominative and a translation. This feels redundant but it is not. The repeated exposure to inflected forms from the same stem builds the pattern recognition that native Finnish speakers use when processing new words. Without it, you will be manually applying rules every time, which is too slow for real comprehension.
Anki is the most powerful tool available for serious Finnish learning, but only if you invest in building case-aware card formats rather than using basic vocabulary decks. The language's complexity rewards the extra setup time with significantly better retention and transfer. Gridually's spatial encoding is based on memory research from the University of Chicago, University of Bonn, and Macquarie University.
Start with the nominative and partitive because they appear everywhere. Then add the interior locatives (ssa/sta/seen) as a group because their spatial logic is self-consistent. Learn cases in functional groups rather than as a numbered list from 1 to 15.
Finnish vowels are divided into two groups: front vowels and back vowels. Words use only one group, and suffixes change their vowel to match the word's group. For flashcards this means you cannot just memorize a suffix in isolation. You need to practice it attached to words from both vowel groups.
Finnish is genuinely difficult for English speakers because of the case system, vowel harmony, and consonant gradation. The good news is that pronunciation is regular and spelling is phonetic. Most learners find the first six months very hard and then reach a point where the logic becomes intuitive.