I’m sure some other people have experienced this, so I’m wondering how I should approach this issue. Very recently (the past week or so), my accuracy on my SRS programs has gotten noticeably worse. Practically overnight. I use Wanikani and Anki (mostly for the Genki 1 and 2 vocabulary which I just finished), and I’ve just now begun using Satori Reader. I recently have found it difficult to concentrate and I often find myself just staring at the screen not really absorbing much. My accuracy in general has gone from around 85% to around 65%-70% over the past few days and I find myself forgetting basic words/phrases that I kick myself over a bit for not recalling, as it seems so obvious after I see the card.
For some perspective, I’ve just about finished the grammar for Genki 2, and I’ve been studying Japanese as a whole for about 11 months now for perspective. I do about 10 new words on Anki and about 15 lessons on Wanikani per day (level 18 out of 60 right now), including all the review and such.
I don’t really know that I’m looking for a “solution” necessarily, but it’s been frustrating and even just typing this feels a bit therapeutic. Wondering if anyone else has hit this wall in their journey. Hoping it will be a short plateau, because I’m really wanting to learn more, but it’s like my brain has built a wall recently.
19 comments
If it helps I’m in a similar situation. I do 5 anki words per day and jumping up to 10 tanks my accuracy. I normally float around 75-85% which I can live with but 5 words a day just feels aggressively slow
How much time do you spend every day doing SRS reviews? Personally when it comes to Anki anything more than 10-20 minutes a day is too much for me, but I know people that do hours (wild) every single day. When I used to do 40 minutes a day my mood was terrible, my retention was shit, and I absolutely loathed the idea of doing anki to the point where I dreaded even opening the app and ended up guiltcrastinating on other stuff instead. It really affected my mood negatively throughout the entire day to the point where it was not sustainable (this is called burnout).
For this reason, I always recommend to reduce the amount of workload until it becomes (mentally) manageable. I’d rather go slower over a long period of time without feeling like shit than force myself to go faster and hate the whole thing.
Try to lower the amount of new cards you do every day (even put it to 0 for a few weeks if you have to) and see if it gets better. Also don’t be afraid of just suspending/deleting **every** single word/card you don’t like in Anki. Just because you don’t learn the word 速度 in your anki deck it doesn’t mean you will never learn that word ever again. Focus on the words that are easy to remember, remove the ones that are hard, and cast a net as wide as possible to catch all the easy low hanging fruits. You **will** learn most of the rest of the words by just reading and immersion once you’re better at the language. The more words you know, the easier it becomes to learn new (even harder) words.
I can’t help with wanikani though, I’ve never done it.
Day-to-day accuracy can vary and it’s fine. Sometimes I get days when I fail up to 40% of mature cards. If you consistently have low accuracy (e.g. for more than a month), try lowering the interval. Otherwise, if it’s at least 70-75%, it’d say just don’t worry about it. Personally, I’d be more worried about doing only 10 new words per day, which is way too slow IMO.
I had a similar thought recently, sometimes its hard mentally feeling like im not getting anywhere.. i study for hours every day and my accuracy is always between 60-80%.. but it occured to me that i can see my srs intervals getting better and im always adding new words so of course im going to be worse at the new vocab im adding… if i never added anything eventually id get to 100% but then im not getting anywhere… when my accuracy goes up i add more, when it goes down i study what i have… that being said, sometimes you need a break? Its healthy to take a day or two off and reset a bit… some days ill log on and i can just feel my brain chugging along and thats how i know that todays not the day… tomorrow is another day..
(This is going to be a bit shill-y)
I recommend you try out [JPDB.io](https://JPDB.io). I personally find that the extra metrics really help motivation, (such as, now I know 484/618 words from ep9 of Bocchi the Rock! = 87% coverage)
as well as learning words directly for a piece of media that you want to watch/read brings extra motivation as well instead of learning from generic deck top 2k.
Also, the dynamic SRS algorithm allows for less reviews, and makes it so that you don’t have to review every day for the algorithm to be effective (It attempts to model the forgetting curve so that the longer you take to review a card, the less it thinks you would be to answer correctly, and therefore if you still remember it, it will push it farther into the back of the review queue)
Alternatively, if you don’t like SRS at all, there are users in the JPDB discord that have been using the [JPDB Browser Reader](https://github.com/max-kamps/jpdb-browser-reader) to review directly from the browser. This allows you to review directly from any media you are reading from (assuming you’re on PC), such as [Videogames](https://streamable.com/ci0az0), [Manga](https://streamable.com/8f0r9d), [VNs](https://streamable.com/jq99lv), or any random Japanese website/ebooks.
Can always join the JPDB discord as well for any questions/just to have a community. The people there are always friendly.
That’s why I eventually ditched Anki and other flashcard type apps.
I had more luck with Duolingo, which taught new words in sentences.
But even there, in the later stages, I stopped learning new words.
Now I get new words from media. I let the media SRS for me and just look the words up until I learn them.
I recently went on a 2 day bender and experienced this, accuracy dropped over double like you. Did you have a crazy good weekend?
Sometimes you gotta take the hit and slow down on new material until your caught back up.
Also with Anki, i feel like I’m learning in a vacuum and new material feels difficult without any context. Japanese is a heavily contextual language, and i intend to soon be able to start reading material and only adding to my decks things i encounter along the road. That way, in my head, i will have something to reference.
I personally think you are doing too much different SRS’ing. If you want to do SRS I would pick either Anki or WaniKani, but not both. Bit too much redundancy in my opinion. What I did when I was just starting out about 6 years ago, was I picked up the nayr core 5k anki deck and did 20 new cards a day. This was after I just did RTK in 3 months using Anki. Definitely don’t recommend this because after a while I had to do about 400-500 reviews every day and my retention really suffered. I would say definitely limit the amount of Anki you are doing if you feel like the reviews are becoming overwhelming or your retention starts to suffer.
I would suggest you try to tackle some of the news articles on NHK easy Japanese. It’s a great way to build up your vocabulary because all the kanji words have furigana, making them very easy to read. It will be a slog at first, but you have to force yourself to push through. If you have learned basic Japanese grammar through Genki, then the articles should be challenging but completely doable. Anki becomes way more manageable when you are reviewing words you have come across naturally in the wild. Most of all, never get discouraged or feel like you have failed in some way because you couldn’t remember something. You just need more exposure to the language. Keep going!
The closest thing I have to a Unified Theory Of Everything^^TM is that absolutely everything goes in a boom and bust cycle.
With language learning, that means that I’ll have periods where I’m on a hot streak, making unbelievable progress and having breakthrough after breakthrough… until I hit a plateau and not only do I stop making progress, but I make obvious mistakes and forget things I really should know.
It’s frustrating to be in the bust part of the cycle, but the boom will come again.
are you eating food enough, water? Exercise? Too many drugs? Idk. Concentration has to do with so many factors, including rest too. I’m not insinuating anything as much as I am tryna throw ideas out there
It’s like you start to slow down swinging and you kick your legs in a tantrum rather than in the rhythm needed to maintain the swinging momentum.. Jah feeel? So just like um stop ‘kicking yourself’ over statistics and study more bro
Honestly, when I start reading about how much and how fast people in here are able to learn… I feel like I’m making zero progress 😅
I’m a REEEALLY slow learner and seeing how fast people are able to learn new words and kanji always makes me feel dumb and unmotivated lol
So…
I try my best to manage at my own pace and I’m still happy that I’m able to see some progress even though it’s veeeery small.
These days I’m not even using Anki…
I try to listen to easy Japanese conversations and I’m slowly going through learning kanji with Kanji Study app. I think I’m adding new kanji once a week or even more rarely 🥲
As long as I’m be able to learn new kanji and remember them… for me it’s still a win.
Maybe I’m not the best person to give advice, but I’d say you should slow down a bit 😉 You’re still doing a good job at learning and making progress. You can go a bit slower… I think it’s fine as long as you’re still doing something which is Japanese-learning related. Even if it’s just reviewing material and not adding anything new for some time… it’s okay 🙂 at least I think it’s fine.
がんばって 🙂🙂🙂
It’s expected and absolutely normal. I’m not sure what is exactly the reason for this, but there is certain amount of units our brain can accumulate for digesting, after which it needs to rest. The interesting thing is that this amount of blocks might depend on how familiar something is. Look at such example, we can read a whole book in one go and if we try to check how much we remember, amount of information is huge. We remember the whole sequence of event,s what happened and how, and if we try to focus on specific situation, we might remember who said what, in which order and sometimes even exact lines. If you look at all these details and compare with something seemingly simple like 30 word pairs English-Japanese, the difference is huge, but it’s exactly these 30 word pairs that load our brain harder. I’ve tried to memorize 100 words at once, but I could recall only my ordinary amount. So if you do nothing outside of SRS and you have 80% retention for 20 words, most likely you will have 40% retention doing 40 new words, which would be exactly the same 16 words (80% for 20). And the more familiar something is, the higher number of blocks would be. For example, if you do reviews, which now operate with slightly familiar blocks instead of completely unknown, then people usually have no problem with doing hundreds of these. You can see how it kinda moves from 20 for foreign language, to hundreds for reviews, and to thousands when it’s very familiar to us. Notice that it’s not only foreign language, the same can be said about science too, but now it’s important to mention another interesting point. Sometimes there is no big difference between learning monolithic and more varied blocks. For example, if you read some article about a single form, maybe you want to learn what は does in Japanese or anything else, information about what is は exactly is almost free to learn. If it’s going to be explained in terms you already know, or situations familiar to you, whole は with all it’s included parts would be still a single block. If you look at how students learn, then usually any advanced subject is taught as a single topic for a lecture, and lectures move rather in depth (what is it in familiar to students terms) than width (teaching multiple unfamiliar units at once). So if you count it like this, then students actually don’t learn so many unique blocks in a single day, rather small amount of blocks with more details about it, quite often in familiar concepts/words.
This is the only explanation I could think about. Otherwise it’s hard to explain why we can memorize almost a whole book in native language in one go, but can’t learn something like N5 in a single day, or maybe even 100 words/daily.
This basically explains, that if you try to learn more in a very packed format like SRS, you simply spend more time without actual ability to recall it. Similar thing happens when people start to combine content with SRS. For me 30 completely unknown words/day with SRS is fine, I have ~95% retention with it, but it’s around my limit and it immediately cuts off after that. If besides these 30 words I would do 2 hours of content (and people using content usually learn 5-15 new words/hour), then I actually try to memorize 40-60 words. If I do content first, my retention in SRS would be close to 0 and it simply signals that my brain needs to rest and digest all this new information. Quite often it comes with physical symptoms like headache, dizziness or simply freezing. It’s worth to consider either lessening amount you learn, or at least mix with rest (when you do no mental activities) or something fun. Sleeping, sport activities or simply walking, listening to music and so on.
If you have free time, personally, I would advice to replace some (or all) part of SRS learning with content. Content is less intensive learning and you can do that much longer, but at the same time besides the meaning of new words, it provides very important context and huge amount of other associations. All of these things are rather familiar to us, like “car” and “food” aren’t alien to us, so it doesn’t take much efforts to learn, but at the same time we integrate 車 and 食べ物 into these. When we speak about any language, it’s not only about word pairs, it’s about our ability to use it. With tools like SRS people can learn N1 vocabulary in ~200 hours, but people won’t be fluent without actual thousands of hours of practice with it. With content you basically get it for free.
I’d say it’s time for a “deload week”. Set your new words per day to 0 for a week, stop doing new Wanikani lessons, and just focus on maintaining for a while.
People say the brain is a muscle, right? So I think we can apply strength training rules here. Sometimes you need to take it slow for a week and give your brain a break, focus on recovery.
I’ve been doing 200 reviews / 2 hours per day on Anki for the last 5 years.
While I’ve never really looked into my accuracy stats, there are definitely days, or weeks, were I can’t seem to remember the simplest words. It’s like my brain is just fed-up, giving up. And then there will be days, or weeks, where everything seems easy. It seems to be an oscillating pattern largely independent of anything I can understand, let alone act upon.
Persistence is key. The only way you can fail is if you give up. Just ride through the downs and look forward to the ups. The reward will come soon enough because Japanese is a language generous with “haha, gotcha” moments that will help you move forward.
Here are a few things you could try (on Anki, at least; I don’t know Wanikani):
– Be “over-optimistic” in the scoring of words you’re pretty sure you know, or words that don’t seem really necessary to know, so as to reduce the overall volume of reviews. Long term, you WILL memorize these words, so give yourself a break for now.
– Be “under-optimistic” in the scoring of words you can’t remember of the life of you, especially important words. If that fails too, try being over-optimistic with these words. Again, it does not matter.
– Try to find pro-active ways to remember words. That will come naturally as you learn more and more kanji. But even 和語(wago, “pure” Japanese words) often have an history, an etymology, that can help remember them.
– In general, be active in the production of your Anki cards. Try and find connections between them, such as example sentences that involve more than one “difficult” word. Add this example sentence to each relevant card. Always read these sentences aloud.
– Don’t be afraid to use anki’s settings to “slow things down”. Better that than giving up.
– Try a new time of the day to study.
Good luck!
I’m new to Japanese but not new to language learning. It sounds to me like you can do it but you’re having to use so much brain power to keep up that it’s burning you out.
Don’t underestimate the importance of MASTERY of lower -level concepts before tackling higher-level ones. You should be able to do the basic stuff in your sleep before moving on. If you’re having to really think or pause to recall stuff that is being built upon, you’re likely just overloading.
Personally, I would take a short break of a couple days or week, go back through some of the simpler stuff while you do another activity (watching tv etc) to see how much you can recall using only part of your brain, and then build your confidence back up.
How good is your sleep hygiene? If you’re not getting a consistent 7-8 hours of sleep per night, your brain cannot consolidate and strengthen the synapses you are recruiting for all that studying. Sleep quality is important too; if you are sabotaging your REM cycles via excessive alcohol consumption, untreated sleep apnea, or uncomfortable mattress/pillows, your memory and cognition is going to suffer.
That said, if your sleep hygiene is perfect, then you may just be overworking your brain. You might benefit from decreasing your SRS volume, increasing your unstructured time, or just taking a whole day off per week to do rest your brain (e.g. no reading, *at all*).
I go through periods like this. Stop adding new items for a while and just concentrate and on the ones you got. I especially experience this when I’m busy, you’re brain is allocating resources towards other things. Keep it going, but don’t beat yourself up. You’re just gonna have to be forced through periods like this with language learning
i just hard limit my longest interval to 30 so this happens less. japanese is too foreign for me to trust my long term mem. I get about 110~250 reviews daily which take about 20-30mins. I just suspend cards manually when im truly confident with recollection.
I have some days like this. I just acknowledge it try to shift to an easier or different thing. The reviews will always be there waiting for you lol.
Also, is it only SRS, or other parts of your life? Some illnesses such as covid can cause “brain fog” so if it’s a sudden onset and not only related to your studying, maybe think about testing for that or talking to a doctor if it’s actually acute and severe and not just limited to hating flashcards.