I’ve been studying Japanese for several years now on my free time, currently I’m around N3. Anki has been a huge boon for me for both Vocab and Kanji (been using Core decks and RTK anki decks respectively).
I’m starting to think it may be becoming a hindrance because of the decontextualized study issue, as well as the timesink – it takes a lot of time daily to go through it. I’m starting to think it might not be worth it to continue especially at the level that I’m at, or maybe drastically change how I go about using it. Maybe I should suspend a lot of cards.
I would love to get the opinion of the community. What should I do? If I deemphasize Anki, what should I replace it with?
Background for context:
It isn’t my only study tool. I use Bunpro daily as well, and listen to at least 1 podcast a day in Japanese, though I only started recently so my comprehension level isn’t on par with my actual “dry” knowledge yet. I also watch some anime every few days and always try to reverse engineer the subtitles into comprehension – i.e. playing back the sentence in my head to see that I understand what it means and how it maps onto the translation. I also try to do this in real-time without pausing to improve my comprehension speed.
6 comments
>the timesink
While Anki can be dry you cannot really call it a “timesink”, since an SRS is the most time-efficient way to review vocabulary. Not using Anki and instead looking up words you have forgotten as you encounter them is almost certainly going to take you more time. And having to do a lot of dictionary lookup is dry and tedious, too. IMO instead of discontinuing Anki, work on going through your cards faster. Aim for < 5 sec per review.
>the decontextualized study
Make it contextual by only mining words you care about from content you care about. You can add the original sentence, a picture, and the original audio if you really want to.
IMO there is a time to discontinue using an SRS but N3 is way too soon. It is especially words in the 5K-15K frequency rank range that you will not see often enough in the wild to easily remember them without an SRS, yet they still show up often enough that looking them up each time will be annoying.
You could try and optimize time spent on anki by timing how long it takes you to give an answer and attempt to lower that as well as cap your overall time spent per day. Personally I don‘t do it, but it seems like a common tool from what I‘ve read.
This is a huge problem I’ve been having with resources for years…
The best use of your time is to study usefull vocabulary, first the ones you use… then the ones required for the tests. It’s a timesink to begin with but I know what you mean. The time spent reviewing will reduce eventually. You just need to stick with it.
If your goal is N2 or N1, your study might be “decontextualised” for the large part because alot of words are ones used in news reports or formal documents or reports. You would encounter them in your life with Japanese, but very infrequently. So you need to decide what is important. If you go all the way to N1 you will end up learning alot of stuff probably just for that test. At least that’s my understanding. I am doing N2 now and already that’s the case. So decided I will stop at N2 and focus after that on just using the language 😉 NOT for reading newspapers though hahaha
EDIT: having said that I have different anki decks I still revise daily and from other apps too (will eventually consolidate) and then I have lists that I add to when I encounter words I can’t read, or words I don’t understand. Studying Japanese is so time consuming it’s almost like a way of life!
> I’m starting to think it might not be worth it to continue especially at the level that I’m at
So in my personal experience N3 is not close to a level where dropping Anki will be beneficial. Although as you improve further you can increase the amount of “immersion” (media you consume and interacting with natives).
If you’re burnt out on Anki and need a change of pace that’s fine, maybe you’ll find a way to make it work for you if you change how you approach it. You can definitely learn Japanese even without Anki or spaced repetition tools, but in my opinion combining 1) reading something that is challenging for you but not too challenging and 2) vocab/sentence mining, is extremely effective. Especially if you review your cards as you read the book/manga/whatever, since the vocab will come up again while reading and your brain will have a kind of “oh I recognize this word” moment and combined with the context of the story you will remember it a lot better. As your level increases, this kind of study becomes more feasible and effective I feel like.
I’m in a similar situation. Been studying on and off for many years I’m like N3 I’d say and as great as Anki is I mix it up with bunpro.jp for grammar and Wanikani for kanji and vocabulary. Overall, this has been very effective. I have a friend in Japan who is fluent and only used those two resources other than living in the country. My only weak area is listening comprehensive. It’s such a fast and slurred language I have a hard time understanding spoken Japanese despite being able to read and speak it fairly well.
I am N3 (or, was when I took the test, lol) and I have also always found doing pre-made decks (core 2k/6k/RTK vocab/whatever) to feel very much like a time sink. A couple changes I have made that I believe have helped me have more productive reviews:
* All my cards now have furigana that is shown when you hover the text. I still mark a card as good if I had to use the furigana, but I try it without first.
* I emphasize sentence mining from content I enjoy rather than relying on pre-made decks. I *loathe* the Core decks; newspaper occurrence is not relevant to me at all, and having context for words by pulling them from books etc I read is so much better.
That said, making your own cards is relatively time consuming, and getting the set up to do that quickly for whatever you’re using can be tricky.
Like others have said, N3 is too early to drop Anki. There are just too many words and kanji that I still don’t know.
My conundrum is this: my vocab is so bad. Just terrible. And I feel like sentence mining from content is not good enough – there are still too many common words that I don’t know. So I *want* to use a pre-made deck *in addition* to my own sentence-mined cards, but not a clue where to start for that.