Core 6k in 4 months! Or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Anki Bomb

**QUESTIONS**

>Mature retention rate?

94% (small (~3k) sample size)

>How many were actually new to you?

4.5k pure new, 500 somewhat known, 1k known and suspended

>How many cards a day?

Averaged 40 new cards though would swing between 100+ and 0 regularly

>How long did it take?

111 Hours, so about 1hr a day

>Didn’t doing too many cards crash retention rate?

I found at about new 200 cards, my retention rate the next day would go down about 5% (young card real retention of high 80s to low 80s). No worse than having a drink the day before.

>This is wildly inefficient you should dedicate more time to immersion

Yeah, probably

> You don’t really know these words you’ve just anki memorised them

I’ve memorised them well enough to read them

>Scientifically the only way to acquire a language is…

I’m not trying to say that spending all your time on anki is optimal or even sensible, I’m saying it’s what I did, and I quite like the results

—

**INTRODUCTION**

Half a year ago my Japanese had hit a standstill. I was, despite years of on and mostly off study, a low N4, and nothing seemed to be working. I tried doing a core 2k deck to fix my holes, but nothing was sticking, and it felt hopeless. Then a bunch of people online told me I just needed to watch more Japanese stuff, so I tried that, and quickly wanted to off myself. I had a great animecards setup but still I had no retention rate on them whatsoever.

For me, trying to immerse at that level was:

a) Boring beyond all hell. anything I wanted to watch was so beyond my reach I couldn’t understand a thing and everything I could catch a word or two from was dull and still unintelligible.

but more importantly,

b) it shone a light on just how bad my still Japanese was after all this effort, which just made me more depressed and sucked out any love of or hope for the language I had left.

So I decided something needed to change. I decided to give RTK a go, and quickly found it enthralling. I had tried it maybe 8 years ago and got about 600 words in before it all fell apart. Young me felt he knew better than Heisig and decided that going Kanji to Keyword would be fine. It was not. This time I wasn’t going to repeat that mistake. This time would be different.

I was pumping through lots of kanji in very little time. By the new year I had managed 1000/2200. By February 10th, I had finished it. 120 hours of Anki, writing out the kanji every review (Keyword to Kanji is VITAL), and it all just clicked. For the first time since a decade ago, when 16 year old me [legally acquired] genki, I knew what I was actually looking at. And suddenly the language didn’t seem as scary anymore.

It was then time to emerge from the RTK side quest and conquer my true goal of getting a wide enough vocabulary to read those porn comics from my YouTube ads.

—

**METHOD**

I considered a few options and tested the water with a few sentence decks, but after trying the [DJT deck](https://djtguide.neocities.org/anki) I pretty much instantly deleted the others. It was great for me. It gave a way to move this vague kanji knowledge into concrete kanji understanding. The advantage of the deck is that there’s less of a focus on common use order, and more emphasis on keeping words with the same kanji near each other, which is a godsend when trying to turn keyword association to actual understanding of sounds and meaning.

I went in and I went hard. I did what I call Anki bombing. 4/5 day periods of 100-200 words a day (basically until three of the days stack on top of each other) and then ride out on reviews only for a few days until it’s settled enough for me to load up another bomb. I did this for two reasons: 1) motivation wise, I was hooked on the RTK feeling of big number going down, but I’m not a very driven person, so I have a tendency to not do work I don’t have to. This way, new words were satisfying my craving for defeating chunks of the language, whilst the following days were getting less optional work (new cards) and more required work (reviews). 2) I watched a YouTube video about front loading work. It was after I started this but I’m still going to use it as evidence because it supports my preconceived notions.

This worked wonders, and if I wasn’t quite so lazy and inconsistent (did no Anki on 15% of days, and barely any on many more), I would have had it finished by early May. Alas life happens, but I’m still really proud of what I’ve achieved.

Whilst I’m under no illusion that this was “the most efficient” or effective way to learn Japanese, it’s the one I did, and I’m proud of it. There are people on this sub who’ve gone from 0 to N2 in the seven months since I started RTK. I don’t think I’m special, nor have I ever had a very good memory. I don’t think this is something that other people couldn’t do. But having spent years in cycles of futile efforts producing futile results and eventually giving up, only to be drawn back in. Having spent years watching those around me improve, never able to move an inch. This is something I have spent most of my life believing that I couldn’t do. And it feels very damn good to have done it.

The shocking part is that it really wasn’t that much work. It’s totalled out to 111 hours, about an hour a day, so if I was learning with any real pace or devotion it could easily have been shrunk a lot. Obviously if I had devotion I’d have just sat through reruns of shirokuma cafe until Japanese wormed itself into my brain.

—

**Results**

So how does having 6k words in your anki actually affect your Japanese? It turns out, despite what you may have heard on the internet, it’s actually quite useful. I downloaded Todai news app before I started and remember going very slowly through the easy section looking up most words. Now I can pretty comfortably go through the difficult section looking up only a word or two. I read a trashy article online about the ※ただしイケメンに限る meme early today and pretty much got all of it. Girls don’t mind it when Chad has a beard apparently. I’ve started reading one piece and it’s been pretty comfortable though still definitely helps to have a dictionary at hand. It’s a world of difference from when I had a 1.5k vocab size. Rewatching anime with JP subs is pretty comfortable, again so long as I can look up a word or two every few sentences. Still not as fun as watching them with eng subs. I played through TOTK in Japanese, though occasionally switch to English now if I just want to relax. I tried the N2 vocab section and got mid 80s though struggled with the last section on vocab context.

What it’s not done: I still am not close to outputting, and my reading speed isn’t very fast. Both of these I think will only really come with proper dedicated immersion. Also, my listening is still pretty dreadful.

—

**Future**

Where I’ll go from here: I’m not sure. I think I’d like to keep a more anki focused routine because it feels like it works for me. Obviously I need to increase my immersion, but unfortunately being the quasi-zoomer that I am most of my preferred immersion isn’t on a laptop, so high quality card creation may not be easy. I’m considering turning the whole deck into an audio deck, and just relearning how to listen to the words, maybe adding in pitch accent check if I can figure out how. This may run into homophone issues though. I can’t imagine it’d be bad for my listening overall. I could also turn it into an audio sentence deck.

I may alternatively try and find a 10k deck and polish off the remainder before the new year, or maybe I’ll set myself a more stupid goal. I drunk signed up for N2 in March when I thought I’d be done in early May, so I may try and cram N2 grammar and sneak a pass this July.

From what I’ve seen no one really gets there with Japanese without being a little psychotic for some period of time, so I may do a 5 hour a day challenge or something, and combine this level of anki with 3-4 hours of immersion, though I’m still not sure my dopamine overloaded brain can sit still for that long.

—

**Caveats**

Ok so the caveats: the first big one is that obviously if you read that you know I didn’t start from scratch, so a little less than a thousand words I suspended for being words I knew, and I had some familiarity with probably another 500, but that still works out to 4500 new cards and so works out to about 40 cards per day. Caveat two is that I’m not finished finished, I’ve just got no more new cards. I’ve still got 1500 young cards, but it feels the right time to celebrate anyway. The title should be “Just finished adding new cards from 75% of Core 6K in 115 days”, but it just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. My mature retention is at 94%, though it’s quite a small sample size so I would expect it to drop to around 90%. Finally I do live in japan but it makes very little difference apart from a motivation standpoint. I do very very little talking or reading day to day in Japanese and am frankly a pseudo NEET who makes posts to his internet friends at 5am. Nothing changed in my skills the 6 months I lived here before starting this journey, just an increasing existential dread of putting your eggs into the basket of a country that you can’t improve at the language of.

TL;DR couldn’t sit still reading Yotsuba so I did RTK and have been bombing an average of like 300 words a week ever since. It turns out Anki can make you better at Japanese who knew.

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**P.S.**

Part of my motivation for documenting my journey is that I feel there’s quite a strong dogma growing on the sub about the “right” way to do things. There’s a vague collection of sort of bro-sciency ideas that anything past core 2k is worthless, RTK is a waste of your life (RRTK for 1k most common is sometimes acceptable), you should stick to 5 words a day or your life will fall apart, immersion is the ONLY way to make language gains and devoting time to things that aren’t immersion is silly and ineffective. I’m not saying you can’t get fluent learning a thousand words and listening to stripped love live audio on repeat. If that’s your vibe all the power to you. I’m saying there are other ways of skinning this cat, and my preferred method is 100 words at a time. Also I called it bombing so it’s clearly the cool version.

Good luck to you all on your language journey whatever your method