Hello 👋
As always I googled but only got vague feedback.
Background: done RRTK. Atm only reviewing RRTK and doing Tae Kim grammar guide. 2h immersion /day. Additionally to the grammar guide I do the JLab deck (but very lazy):
After holidays I proceed with the tango N5 deck.
I was wondering if someone tried to speed up the vocabulary learning process by doing like 50-300 cards a day (Anki). Normally this would pile up very quickly.
But let’s say you use it in combination with the retirement addon. Setting a very low retirement (1-2 weeks at max).
What would be the outcome? Of course not as good as if you would take your time and do like 5-15 cards a day. But do we need to know all the core 10k for like 3 months or even more?
TL;DR
Will you progress faster by adding more cards/day even if you do not review them for as long as normal?
Also I could repeat the whole core/tango decks doing it several times. I luckily do not care about anki stats at all!
The intention is to understand more of course and to make immersion more fun.
Very close to the topic but somewhat not:
"Efficient way to acquire passive vocabulary" from LearnJapanese
Also at the end of the link the video is interesting.
Let me know what you are thinking about it.
Cheers
7 comments
If you learn more words per day then yes you will progress faster. You are currently spending two hours a day doing immersion, but don’t seem to be at a point where it would be very comprehensible. Why not spend some of that two hours on vocab instead?
I think the best method for speeding up your vocab process would be to actually learn vocabs instead of using your time to find any%speedrun methods for anki.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not in a hurry or not sure what to do next but was wondering if someone tried that.
I may find the time to even try it myself. I am patient and (as I think) on a good path.
I guess that would be another topic: how to actually learn vocabulary for good. 🙂
I’m not entirely clear about your post; are you referring to adding 50-300 new vocabulary cards per day?
For reference, in full-time Tokyo language school, we eventually were learning roughly 30-40 new words per day (~15 new kanji words, which we were tested daily reading & writing + other words from reading essays, which we didn’t need to know how to write).
If you are not learning to write the words out in kanji, learning more than 40 words per day is possible. But remembering those in a week or a month is a different kettle of fish; SRS reviews pile up fast!
Also, IME, one needs to separate the learning & reviewing process.
Learning requires intensely studying a word first time around; since Japanese words can vary significantly from English words, I usually review a few sentences to get a feel for the words. I use a sentence in SRS vocab cards.
Without a reviewing scheme, all that memorization fades away. You could use an SRS early on and transfer to reading a high volume later on IMHO.
https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm
More words a day and a very quick retirement will most likely equal no retention of the words you studied. Yes you will have less cards in Anki, but the whole point of Anki is to help you take short term information and turn it into long term memory. It would be much more efficient in the long run to just stick with 10-15 new words a day using the N5 tango deck with a normal retirement or no retirement. Immersion is the best but isn’t too helpful until it becomes comprehensible, so immersion for 2 hours a day right now may not give you crazy benefits, instead maybe reading a grammar guide and immersing a little would be better.
I agree what /u/Old-Air-3750 said, you’re trying to speedrun vocab learning. Just do immersion if you already have a decent vocabulary, try watching TV shows, streams, listening to radio, etc.
I’m personally doing 5 words per day for the last 500+ days and I see that I sometimes forget a word that I haven’t used in a while, I can’t even imagine how that would look like with 15+.
I’ve tried to learn 100 words in a day instead of standard 20-30. At the next day I could recall only around 30. I continued with only reviews and it was ~65 and ~90 in the next few days. So overall it’s the same 90 words in 3 days of learning.
However, I haven’t tried to do several review sessions on the first day. Maybe it can improve the result. For example, what if you learn something like 50 words, then watch random youtube videos for a while and do review session? Then have some fun and do review again. Potentially it might be good, because doing reviews in the first 20-120 minutes have a very strong influence on long time retention, but most likely final result would be the same. In my opinion we can’t learn more, because our brain needs to recover resources. That would explain such strong cut off how learning 20-30 words have ~95% retention, but then it completely drops to 0 once we try to learn more than that.
Overall, however, it’s still very fast, because kids and teens usually learn only around 5 words in a day (1-2k in a year).