(This is purely my own experience and something I found very useful, please don’t take this as anything more than that)
May I just preface this by saying, I know there’s loads of great plugins for Anki, but as someone who is rarely at their laptop I can only really use Anki (for the time required) on my phone, e.g. at work or on breaks. Therefore this is my experience on AnkiDroid which has far less options for personalisation and optimisation than Anki PC as far as I’m aware.
I recently stalled a bit with my one deck Anki deck (Cure Dolly Method). I’m beginner N4 level (Wanikani level 8) and I had added a lot of words that had kanji I didn’t recognize from reading short stories. I add my cards through Takoboto so I can’t customise them as I add them (as far as I’m aware).
Naturally these were quite hard to remember and I found myself spinning my wheels and getting demotivated with Anki.
I tried making mnemonics and writing them on the notes section of the cards and found they didn’t really help much as with the anki format reading mnemonic and then moving on I would tend to forget it quite quickly.
What I’ve started doing now is writing out little mnemonics or stories and accompanying them with an emoji counterpart which tells the story or mnemonic.
I found due to the logographic nature of Japanese and emojis combined with the visual aid of a very easily recognisable format for the mnemonic (emojis are used everywhere and almost a logographic writing system in their own right) I retain the stories much better. Even being able to recall the sequence of emojis sometimes as a visual aid.
I’ve really found success with this and it has helped me immeasurably with memorising vocab. Let me know what you guys think and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
Thanks!