Everyone hypes up Anki a lot when it comes to learning Japanese but it comes across to me as more of a way of solidifying knowledge you gained elsewhere. Is it really something I should be super focused on using like a lot of people seem to say, or should I just throw in new words I find in reading in there for some side review?
Basically I’ve tried using Anki on its own but it just doesn’t seem to work for me like it does others. I completely forget the words and have to essentially relearn them ontop of my actually new words.
3 comments
I’m in the same boat. Even if I need to memorize vocabulary, I start elsewhere (like Memrise, which I think is great for learning and had a review function too) because Anki just doesn’t do it for me. I have been using it now for vocab review to test it out for longer (I tried it twice before and quit after two days) and I feel like I just might stick to Quizlet or some other app instead.
No 1 thing is to spend time with ur target language. Naturally coming across words while reading or listening is definitely enough, albeit relatively inefficient. You can’t guarantee that the knowledge that you pick up in a certain spot will come up often enough for you to remember it well/at all the next time it happens to come up. You can mitigate that by just spending a metric ton of time with ur language to increase the likelihood, but its not necessarily a given, depending on how rare/obscure a word/phrase/grammar structure is.
Anki (or any SRS at that) is just an artificial way to essentially force knowledge to remain in ur head by reviewing it frequently, leveraging algorithms to schedule the cards in a way where they come up as rarely as possible while still aiming for a high retention rate.
In a sense, spending time in ur language and an SRS like Anki feed off of eachother. Pure Anki has downsides that can be mitigated by using the language lots in more natural contexts. But without an SRS the acquisition of knowledge and retention thereof is less efficient, which you may or may not care about. I’d assume most people would like to be more rather than less efficient in their learning, especially with something such as the tremendous undertaking of learning Japanese.
Just spending time with Japanese is definitely the most important tho, as I mentioned at the start. I’d argue that it’s an invaluable tool however, especially in the early stages of learning.
Ideally it doesn’t take up a ton of time too and should be a relatively minor part of your time invested. Put in sentences with new words/phrases/grammar w/e as new cards whenever you learn and do your reviews every day (better than using a premade deck made up of words or sentences that you never come across naturally). If you don’t add a ton of new cards all the time, then the review count is also gonna stay low as a result.
I use Anki extensively, but only to help retain things that I learn elsewhere. It’s not a place I go to learn new things.
You don’t really get the efficiency benefits of spaced repetition unless you have fairly high accuracy on reviews. For me, that means I should have a decent understanding of a word *before* it goes into my Anki deck. If I haven’t seen/used a word a context, I’m much less likely to get it right on a flash card.