I have been studying Japanese on and off since the end of 2020. As of the beginning of 2022, I began working onboard – which sometimes makes it hard to catch up on Anki, but definitely means I am packing light and I am living on limited internet. Finding good offline resources other than Anki was a bit hard, and sometimes Anki reviews seemed endless when I could be out exploring wherever we are docked or spending quality time with friends and teammates at the crew bar.
I have been back home since April 16th and decided not only to catch up on Anki and pick out some offline resources like Human Japanese and epubs, but also to better track my progress.
I have created a Google Sheets on which I note all the Anki data and statistics that feels the most relevant to me – amount of new cards, total cards seen and time spent per deck. This is all information you can get directly from the app, but on the sheets, I could visualise it better and I began to log in my info daily.
Tracking the time spent was important to me, as I knew that if I regulated well the amount of new cards, I could ensure shorter study times on Anki which meant two things: (1) I would have more time to check other resources when feeling motivated, and (2) hopefully once I am back to work I will feel more encouraged to take up Anki even in short breaks as some decks take less than 15min.
Having reached one month of consecutive days logged, I also made a new sheet to summarise it. I didn’t use Anki for 30 days in a row – one deck I managed 27/30 days, another 23/30. Missing days means I have to study on average 12min more daily than if I had gotten 30/30 on all decks. In other words, if I were a good girl, I’d spend just aboutone hour on Anki.
I have also calculated roughly when I’d finish each deck if I see the same average amount of new cards per day. I am taking Tango N5 slowly (5 cards a day, though I missed 4 days this month) yet if I keep my current stats, I am due to finish all new cards in october. It may seem like a long way until then, but some of these decks seem like an endless stream of content, and knowing I am progressing and visualizing it this way, thinking “heck yea, come november I will be in Tango N4” – this stuff motivates me.
In other words, this is a long and boring post about someone who is taking their time to learn Japanese rather than sitting down for 6h a day. If I can suggest anything that is to find your way to keep motivated, because honestly even though I spent some 30min adding formulas to my sheets and some 5min daily logging my stats and analysing them, it just makes me feel all the more ready to keep pushing and tackle the next review.
Hopefully I can keep it up even once I am back to work. I want to make that october estimate happen!
2 comments
The one thing I see more and more with myself included is … learning Japanese is also a learning process
The optimal way is to stumble into it by trying things
This better applies to us who are doing it for fun
Kind of reminds me of completing achievements in video games with all the statistics tracking. I realized how bad I am with Anki, as in I do it, and in middle of it I will get distracted and then start reading some random YouTube comments, these are on JP videos so I always learning in the process. I have no issues looking up things constantly trying to read things way out of my range but when it comes to doing Anki I just get easily distracted. I am at the point where vocabulary is the major piece I am missing to moving up to the next level or two. Maybe developing better habits to do it daily would help.