Anki and Katarineko: keep your decks, add a path
Anki is free and the backbone of a thousand success stories. It's also the tool most quitters were holding when they quit. Where Katarineko fits depends on which of those two people you are.
If Anki works for you
Keep it. Nothing about Katarineko asks you to migrate, and a core deck or a mining deck runs happily alongside our weekly stories. The division of labor settles itself: Anki holds your general vocabulary and mined sentences; Katarineko drives the film-specific words and the reading volume.
Our own review covers the film curriculum and the sentences you save, so double-carding those is unnecessary. Card what the stories don't already cycle.
If Anki is why you quit last time
You're the person we built this for. Flashcards substitute for reading volume when reading is too hard. Once material at your level exists, reading itself does most of the review.
Our stories reuse the film's words on a schedule, and the save button is the only "card" you make. The phrase explanations are the lookup. No deck maintenance, no 200-review mornings.
Where sentence mining fits
Mining (clipping sentences from native media into Anki) is a good intermediate habit and pairs naturally with the watching stage. Katarineko sits one step earlier: it gets you to the point where your film is minable at all. Some learners then mine from the film they prepared for, which is mining at its highest hit rate.
Reading is the review. See what that looks like.
Find a film you want to understandChoosing between a frequency deck and a reading path is its own question: Katarineko vs jpdb. More pairings: your Japanese stack.