In my limited experience with static cards you really do just end up learning the "appearance" of a card, which is why I've been more successful with dynamic cards, like say a card showing a concordance randomly selected from a large corpus every review, showing the word I want to learn in various contexts.
Also, the decadence of the American people is contributing a lot. Tough to find time to care when the average person is spending 2-4 hours staring at 10-30 second bursts of entertainment. It’s depressing…