I’ve been studying Japanese for multiple years now using Anki among other things and have a deck of over 8000 vocabulary notes which I have Japanese -> English and English -> Japanese cards. Lately now that I have so much different Kanji and words in my deck I often find myself only getting about 75% correct on mature cards, specifically on the English -> Japanese. It makes my reviews pile up and feel like they will never go down. I’ve tried very hard to make cards unique and distinguishable so I usually know what Japanese word it is referring to but I often just fail at recalling the Kanji. This is somewhere inbetween an Anki and Japanese question but does anyone have any advice for helping recall Kanji or using Anki in a better way? There’s so much N1 Kanji that are only used in like one word and are so easy to forget exactly how to write them.
Any advice on how to tackle learning to write and recall a lot of these more obscure and less used N1 Kanji that I have been subjecting myself to lately would be much appreciated.
2 comments
I’m about at that number of notes, I tried a few things and here are some random ideas
1. make cards that show similar kanji and ask you to differentiate them. Example: 綱 vs 網
2. make cards that show you the same word with different kanji, and ask you to recall the nuance. Example: 早く vs 速く
3. Read a lot …
You can put more effort and energy into the encoding part of memorization. Every time you fail to recognize something you have the choice of just letting your brain automatically sort it out by looking at your mistake or you can put effort into memorizing it. This is done with the usual strategies: mnemonics, association, visualization etc. Often the act of putting more effort into memorization alone can already make information stick better. Obviously this kind of strategy is mentally taxing and there is no guarantee that whatever effort you put in will be rewarded. You may have to try many different things before something sticks. But it’s always an option. I personally do this with leeches since it becomes quickly too tiring to do it every single time one fails.
You can also improve the retrieval part of memorization by writing words down that give you trouble and include them in your active vocabulary whenever you’re outputting. This obviously has the disadvantage of only having a very limited capacity of words you can practice. I definitely understand the frustration though. I myself often fail words I may have recognized dozens of times but it seems for long term memory storage nothing is holy. The best thing to do may be to just not let it get to you and continue the grind unbothered.