100 new cards daily? (Core6k)

7 comments

1. Download the addon called ‘anki simulator’ and you’ll get an idea of how many reviews you’ll get. It’s gonna be a lot. I don’t have access to thw simulator right now but my very rough estimate is that the reviews will even out at 7k to 8k per day. Multiply that by the time per review and youll see how many hours it will take each day.

   Also your retention will not be as good as what it would be if you did less, that has an effect on how many reviews there will be.

   My opinion: probably not worth it

   Edit: I meant multiply by time per review

2. Isn’t there 18k cards in the Core6k? 1x vocab, 1x kanji, 1x sentence for each of the 6k words?

   Besides that, I don’t think it’ll be too effective; brains don’t handle that much new information well.

3. This is kind of orthogonal to your point but I’d recommend considering an alternative to core6k. The core decks are derived from non-recent newspapers’ frequencies. You’ll learn less random words you probably don’t care about for stuff like fax machines if you tailor a bit more, such as by mining or using premade decks from media you’re interested in.

4. Your time would be much better spent reading as much as you can.

   Even assuming you’re able to memorize 100 words a day, it’s going to be a very shallow understanding of them.
   You’ll boost your Anki stats, but it won’t translate to improving your comprehension of Japanese as well as reading or listening would.
   Not to mention that by the end of 60 days you won’t have memorized 6k words, you’ll have just added 6k words into your active reviews.
   It will likely take you several more months to get the whole deck to maturity, adding that many cards per day could very likely end up slowing you down in the long run.

   If you’re just starting out with Japanese and want to go the Anki route to get your basic vocab I’d go with a smaller set.
   2k, even 1k words really.
   If your goal is to go fast, get to the point where you can tolerate reading simple texts and then read as much as you can.

5. The bigger the quantity of what you learn the worse the quality is. Meaning that if you’re learning 100 new cards each day, the percentage of what you have to relearn will be (much) bigger than if you would have done 50 cards a day.

   Anki isn’t really what you should learn words through. It’s what should get you familiarised with them. Meaning that to truly learn a word, you still have to read text and encounter those words to actually engrain them in your memory. Therefore, it would be much more useful to start reading as early as you can, and not wait until you have N-amount of words you “know” through Anki.

   Also, I have experienced Core6k myself, and quite frankly, I wish I had done just 2k. After that, half of the words aren’t really useful at all (I think around 2500 words in it gives you words for equinox, and that was the first time I’ve seen that word in my 10 years of studying English), and you would be much better off just reading something with a dictionary/while creating your own Anki cards for words that you actually deem important.

   So, my advice would be to take Core2k and do no more than 50 words of it (preferably less, but you seem too eager for that) and spend the rest of your time on grammar if you’re can’t read actual books/games/VNs/whatever. But if you can, then it should be your top priority.

   Personal experience sidenote: I have done 50 cards of Japanese + three decks with no new cards but like 500+ reviews (in another language at that) for three months , and you can’t imagine how bored you can get when you have to sit for two-three hours a day looking at Anki. It gets to the point where your brain seemingly shuts off all the long-term memory to preserve it for something actually good and just puts all your new words into short-term aka “I’m gonna forget this crap in 3, 2, 1…” memory.

6. As other already mentioned, anki cards != vocab learned, if it would work that way, many would already use this method.

   There are so many engaging, fun ways to develope your language skills like: reading(native content/learner content), reading(grammar/language books),listening, watching shows, talking, writing and so on.

   And out of all these methods, some people try to push meaningless anki vocab numbers for words they dont even know how to be used.

   So if you want to invest 2h+ a day looking at single words on flashcards, yes you could try that, but if you actually want to progress, or even more important **want to have fun** I would adivce to not try this.

   Note: With that I didnt meant to say that you shouldnt use anki, but anki should be your complementary study source that should take like 30min at max (atleast imo).

7. If you have the will power, do it. You won’t understand all 100 cards as well as you would 10 at a time at first, but you will end up reviewing them so much that by end you’ll know them better.