Iv been reading past posts people make on their experiences with Anki to see if Im doing something wrong, because it doesn’t seem like I’m using the program right. Or my memory retention is just that awful. Most posts seem to suggest they get through thick Anki decks in a time no longer than 30 min. And here I am with only 30 vocabulary words struggling to remember them even after Iv seen them over 10 times. Even for a small number of cards like I have, I notice my Anki registering that I’ll be reviewing cards for upwards to 40 min to an hour, without even getting all the cards right.
I seen one comment responding to a post that was saying that they where having issues with Anki as well, and they suggested to treat every card that you don’t recognize in at least 15 seconds as a failed card, and to come back to it later. Is this what you guys do to go through cards? Or is this not a good thing to do, and just keep hitting “again” like Iv been doing until I learn a card like I have been.
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Your retention depends mostly on how well you have learned new words when Anki first showed them to you. After that, the only thing Anki does is periodically remind you of what you have learned. And yes, each reminder should not take more than a few seconds. After all it only refreshes something you already knew. What do you currently do when you encounter a new word you have not seen before?
I had the same issue with anki. I too made a post looking for other ways to learn kana as it just didn’t seem to be going in with the flashcard method. In that thread I was pointed to djtguide on neocities https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/
It has absolutely transformed my ability to learn and I’ve gone from days of struggling with anki and not retaining anything, to learning all the basic hiragana with ease and I’m just about to move onto katakana.
I believe it’s due to being able to easily select which small set of kana you want to work on. For example only the vowels, then only K sounds, then vowels and K sounds an so on. It seems to be so much easier when you have some idea of the sounds you’re supposed to be working on. Instead of a random selection that could potentially be anything.
Sorry if I’ve used any incorrect terms in my post I too am a new learner.
You’re talking about doing 30 new cards, right? It’s kind of a lot, especially if you’re just starting, don’t know any kanji, don’t know the radicals, and maybe learning some moderately advanced words.
40+ minutes to an hour sounds about right for such case.
What that commenter meant was pressing again on any cards you don’t recognize in X seconds. So it’s not in any way different from what you’ve already been doing.
People generally want to go through their decks quickly for a few reasons. First of all, most people only have limited time for learning Japanese and Anki is just one activity. The second is that Anki is is sort of mentally draining and doing it more than say an hour a day starts to get really annoying for most people it seems.
Also there’s something to be said about not overwhelming your memory – after a certain point too much young material just starts hurting your learning and you end up with dozens or even hundreds of cards that don’t graduate to mature for quite a while.
So a reasonable way here is probably starting slowly and adjusting your limits as you go. It takes about a month for any new limit to settle though, so it’s probably worth changing that new limit slowly. Start say at 5 words per day, do that for a month, if you have both the time and the energy to do more add 5 more, repeat the cycle.
Maybe you’re too eager to mark a card as “good”? If you take longer than 2 seconds to recall the answer, mark it as “hard”. If you take longer than 5 seconds, mark it as “again”.
Only mark it as “good” if you get it within 2 seconds.
Only mark it as “easy” if the strokes have already been etched into your brain for the rest of eternity.
I’ve found it’s far easier for me to initially learn the word if I look it up in an online dictionary and read the extra example sentences I’ll find there. Particularly, I’m looking for examples where I can solidly understand most of the sentence already. I might even modify the card to add another sentence or two, or a picture if I am really struggling. It’s not fast at all when first learning a word, but I don’t ever do more than 10 new cards in a day, and if I’m short on time, or away from my PC, I can always just do reviews and skip on attempting all those new words that day. Since I don’t always need multiple example sentences and photos and junk like that, it isn’t too bad, and it makes the review process much quicker since it works to help me retain it better.
I also found writing out a kanji without a shadow to draw over helps massively with retention (only finding vocab if the card doesn’t have vocab already). I don’t know what all websites and apps exist out there for this specifically, but Kanji Study by Chase Colburn on Android (no iOS or PC currently) is quite useful for me since it has stroke order detection that seems to work pretty well. The feature itself won’t improve your handwriting or anything like that, but you can be real fast about it since it will snap your strokes to the appropriate place as long as you’re close. “Writing it out” in this way is pretty quick and helps a lot with my retention since I’m more easily thinking about the components of the kanji itself and the order its drawn in, though my freeform handwriting is still basically incomprehensible for complicated kanji at this point.
Anyway, good luck, hope you can make Anki work for you!
10 words a day is more than enough for me. I learn 10 new words everday, and always have over 100 cards to review. Just may like you, I can hardly mark “good”, and must click “again” over and over again. A lot of words has been marked as “leech” and I must recover them manually. But after a few days, old words won’t trouble me too much. Still, learning new world is a struggle. Just be patient, you will eventually get it.
If you’ve just started learning vocabulary recently, at the beginning it’s very hard to make anything stick and you feel like an idiot for not remembering something you’ve seen 20 times (my first leech was 忘れる (to forget) as I kept forgetting the reading). At least, that’s how I felt. It gets better with practice, and you should make sure you spend enough time when you first see the word to try to remember it — but ultimately you’ll get better at remembering meanings and readings the more often you come into contact with the word until you can no longer remember not knowing the word.
I personally switched my Anki settings to include the first 24-hours-later review as part of the “initial learning” process so that I don’t leech cards that take a few tries to remember for more than a day.
Also 30 new cards a day is a fair bit, you’re on track for >210 total reviews after a few weeks. When I had that many reviews (a long time ago), it also took me about 40 minutes to do all of my reviews. I would recommend no more than 20 — I do 10 a day at most (and quite a few days I don’t have any new mined sentences so I just do reviews without any new cards) but when I started I was doing between 15 and 20 new cards a day.
anki is good for retention
it isn’t that good for learning
if you haven’t seen these words before, that means you aren’t doing it for retention but for learning
learning them in the first place should probably happen outside of anki
Frankly, I just ditched Anki over retention issues.
Got to be that it didn’t matter how many times I reviewed a card, even in one sitting, I just stopped learning new words off the program..
And I felt like there was no real accountability. If I got sick and damn tired of being flashed a card I screwed up several times that sitting, I just marked it “good”. No one could stop me.
And frankly, I’ve hated flashcards since I was a child.
Don’t feel obligated to use Anki because that’s what it seems like everyone is using. It doesn’t work for everyone. And the reason it’s so popular is it’s like… practically the first free app that came out for language learning.
Honestly, what started working best for me was context….. and no not like the sentences that some decks give you. :/ Most of the time I wouldn’t know all the words in the example sentences on Anki, but like… I had this word.
様子 (yousu) – 1. state (of affairs); situation; circumstances 2. appearance; look(s); air; manner; behaviour; demeanor 3. sign; indication
I saw this stupid card dozens and dozens and dozens of times and never got it.
Eventually I dumped the app and started just picking through the nearest video game with a dictionary. Started playing Pokemon and not long in…
「おや？！（ポケモン）の様子が…….！」
That’s the dialogue you get when your pokemon evolves. I haven’t struggled with the word since.
This isn’t to say you should jump to translating media yet, you may not quite be there either. But maybe switch apps. Try some other things out there (recommended or not) and see if you can find something that works better for your brain.
As others have mentioned it sounds like you aren’t putting enough effort when a card is introduced. I use Wanikani which provides mnemonics. I personally add every card to a spreadsheet with columns for kanji, hiragana, meaning, readings, mnemonic, etc that I type out by hand. Then most times I make up my own mnemonic that will stick. While it takes more time upfront my accuracy is about 99% and each card takes a couple seconds.
I’m not a fan of Anki. I like this app a lot:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-japanese-kanji/id1078107994
Game changer
So it’s only been 4 weeks since I’ve started using Anki to learn Kanji, and I definitely can relate to your problems. But here are some things that work for me.
First of all, don’t compare your stats and ability to complete a deck to others. This will just upright discourage you and cause you to rush through your deck just to achieve a quicker time of finishing.
Secondly, when I first started, I too created mnemonics for every new Kanji that I encountered but by doing so it made remembering even more difficult and it will mess you up when you encounter similar looking Kanji or different readings of that Kanji.
Thirdly, I would recommend that when you re-counter a Kanji and you don’t know what it means, try to dissect the sample sentence that Kanji is in and get a context of what that word may be.
Honestly, the key is repetition and retention. When I encounter a completely new Kanji, some of them stick in my head. But in most cases I’ll keep repeating the card over and over, and eventually I start to remember it.