Welcome to the Anki journey! I agree it's really good for those stretches where you might be less active in studying. Just be careful not to let it pile up too bad - then it can feel overwhelming and be a bit of a discouragement.

Like you mentioned the starts and stops - totally get that. As far as Anki, when I'm excited about learning and I'm on it, I think "why not just do a hundred new cards today while I'm into, and let the SRS balance it out over time". But the important thing is to consistently do some reviews every day so that doesn't bite you.

There are some words that I already know the meaning to before I could retrieve the English word in my mind, those are what I put into "Easy", the ones where the English word comes first I put into "Good", and those where I stumble on or shuffle through is "Hard".

I do the same, and it seems to work out pretty well. All the advice I've read says to just do yes/no, but I'm not sure why.

(Btw for those using AnkiDroid, Learning Ahead limit is automatically set at 20 so when you press 'Again' the card will immediately be available, which defeats the purpose of spaced repetition. So, I set it at 0.)

I get where you're coming from, but I don't think it's too bad actually. Depends on your goals, but for me the point is long-term retention of words. I find that usually if I learned a word enough to pass now, I'll still know it in 20 minutes, so the lookahead doesn't hurt. That said, I did add an extra initial.learning step to mine - a 2hr one so that I can get another review later the same day maybe. Not sure it's worth it tho, it slows down the pipeline a bit.