Not sure how I should feel about that, it’s a lot! I’m wondering how many other people have ever done more reviews than this??
Actually I started using Anki right as it was released back in 2007 or so? I think Damian announced it on the Koohii forums and I picked it up there. I used to live in Japan back then and there was a mobile interface for my Keitai so I could review through the day at work or wherever … and I’ve been doing it ever since!
My Japanese deck has about 24,000 cards, and then I’ve another 16,000 in my Chinese deck. Some overall stats:
Days studied: 3,735 of 5,150 (73%)
Total: 1,014,220 reviews
Average for days studied: 272 reviews/day
Average over period: 197 reviews/day
■ New 17179 25.3% (some downloaded decks)
■ Learning 0 0.0%
■ Relearning 1 0.0%
■ Young 1978 2.9%
■ Mature 38800 57.0%
■ Suspended 10054 14.8% (Japanese production cards I suspended nearly 10 years ago =O )
■ Buried 0 0.0%
Total 68012
If anyone is curious, the Kanji stats too:
Kanji statistics
The seen cards in this deck contain:
2935 total unique kanji.
Old jouyou: 1912 of 1940 (98.6%).
New jouyou: 180 of 196 (91.8%).
Jinmeiyou (regular): 294 of 641 (45.9%).
Jinmeiyou (variant): 1 of 145 (0.7%).
548 non-jouyou kanji.
Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 80 of 80 (100.0%).
Grade 2: 160 of 160 (100.0%).
Grade 3: 200 of 200 (100.0%).
Grade 4: 200 of 200 (100.0%).
Grade 5: 185 of 185 (100.0%).
Grade 6: 181 of 181 (100.0%).
JuniorHS: 906 of 934 (97.0%).
I love my Anki deck, because for most of the last 8 years or so I’ve studied basically no Japanese or Chinese at all, yet I don’t feel like my level (at least my reading level..) has fallen that much because I do mostly manage to keep up with the reviews. If I didn’t have an Anki deck I feel like I’d have given up on both languages, because after years without studying I’d feel like I’d have forgotten way too much. It lets me maintain a baseline fairly painlessly.
I’m aiming to restart and add 30 new cards a day for as long as I can, hopefully getting my Japanese deck to 35,000 cards would allow me to read basically anything without trouble. Then maybe after that can go try and do the same for Chinese 🙂
Anyway sorry if this isn’t very interesting to anybody, I just noticed it was an interesting milestone so thought I’d write about it a bit!
25 comments
You mean to tell me at the time I learned a little Japanese on Yahoo I could have found Anki much sooner and be fluent in Japanese years ago?
Man I suck at life
>I’m aiming to restart and add 30 new cards a day for as long as I can, hopefully getting my Japanese deck to 35,000 cards would allow me to read basically anything without trouble.
Mother of all diminishing returns…
> My Japanese deck has about 24,000 cards
> hopefully getting my Japanese deck to 35,000 cards would allow me to read basically anything without trouble.
24k Cards seems like a ton for me, i am wondering what trouble do you have currently with reading?
Cool stuff! How would you assess your abilities overall? Are you mainly reading-focused now, or has it kept you solid in listening and production as well?
Jesus, I thought my 400,000 was a lot.
Do you have any advice about pausing Anki for a short time? I’m going on a trip next month for a week and one of my biggest concerns is honestly Anki. I really don’t want to come back to a backlog of 1000+ cards and I’m not going to have time to study while I’m gone.
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At this point I’d rather you use the time spent on revising vocabulary/kanji characters(/grammar forms?) via Anki on actually reading books, watching videos, or conversing with people in those languages. You know, the activities that you actually learn the language for.
Wow incredible achievement! I was also a very early adopter of Anki and found out about it from the kanji koohii forums as well! I actually used their SRS system for my first attempt at RTK and actually quit using it because Anki was just so much better!
Man I have to say I’m pretty jealous of your dedication and progress over the years. I’ve restarted Anki too many times to count and can never stick with it for longer than about a year. Are all of your cards sentence cards or are some of them Kanji cards and did you do RTK?
* Me who Just finished Core 2000* 24k? What!?
Sounds like a lot of work.
First of all, most people simply don’t work this hard. So this is unusual, just because of that.
But it goes beyond that: people who do work this hard work toward some goal. Top athletes and businessmen work towards fame and financial rewards, intellectuals work towards wisdom, philosophers towards enlightenment, artists towards beauty, scientists and engineers towards both financial rewards and the advancement of the human race, and so on.
You almost never see someone work this hard without a goal. I’m not sure how that would even be possible. Yet, you don’t mention a goal. Do you not have one, or did you just forget to mention what it is?
I started with Anki in June 2018 and I’m at 613.367 reviews now. And I create more cards now so I guess I‘ll reach the million reviews after 7 years somewhere in 2025.
When I start doubting whether it is worth the time I just look into the gaming statistics of my friends on Steam. When I see that some of them played something like GTA V Online for 500 hours I just smile and think “Took me less time to learn over 2000 Japanese kanji with Anki”. 😄
Wow the dedication is truly impressive.
think about it like this: you’ve been doing anki since i was born, and i’ll be a taxpayer in about 3 years.
>I’m aiming to restart and add 30 new cards a day for as long as I can, hopefully getting my Japanese deck to 35,000 cards would allow me to read basically anything without trouble.
OP’s gonna prestige.
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Nice. What does your non-Jouyou kanji list look like?
I started my current deck about 2 years ago after finishing one of the pre-made Core 2K ones. Stats right now:
114,537 reviews over 719 days
Total 3812 Cards
New 37 1.0%
Learning 51 1.3%
Young 580 15.2%
Mature 3012 79.0%
—
1802 total unique kanji
教育漢字: ~90%
JuniorHS: 587 of 934 (62.8%)
Jinmeiyou (regular): 94 of 641 (14.7%)
120 non-jouyou kanji.
I think at my current pace, I’d have to keep using Anki for the next 15 years to get to a million reviews? I somehow don’t see that happening. That’s some dedication lol. I’d like to switch over to just pure reading in a few years I think.
At how many cards would you say you started to feel fluent?
I don’t mean to be judgmental or dismissive by this, but as one of the people who learned Japanese in the dark ages when SRS/Anki literally didn’t exist, I’m genuinely curious.
Do you not feel like you could maintain your Japanese (reading) level simply by reading a lot?
Again, I’m not trying to dismiss your efforts — certainly it’s an impressive commitment of time and effort — but as someone who never used flash cards of any sort, I can’t imagine wanting or feeling the need to drill flash cards after having studied Japanese for fifteen years, as opposed to just…using the language.
Let me say again that I mean no offense. But I’d genuinely be interested in hearing how you perceive this.
Hoooooooly shit! I AM NOT WORTHY
I have 1.6 million reviews over about 10 years. I may of had a bit more but I removed some decks.
Pardon my ignorance, but what this Anki deck that’s being spoken here. I moved here in May and am attending a language school next month and I’m doing self study through Genki. I have my kana down with a few kanji but this looks interesting what I’m seeing here.
Impressive! A lot of people online do not really “get” it, and that’s fine. I think there is a sort of ideal balance to be struck between anki and using media…because if you want to maintain an expansive vocabulary, anki can be indispensable for making sure you see rarer stuff that might not come up very often organically. Of course, the flip side might say: if they don’t come up that often…why not just accept you won’t understand everything right off the bat? Why not just use a dictionary here and there? Regardless, I’ve used anki heavily and gotten to a very high level in Chinese and am on my way there in Japanese, so I have no regrets. I probably could have made things a little less unpleasant for myself at times, but I did this much, much more quickly than most so…whatever.
I also think that anki appeals to a certain type of person. You mentioned being able to get to 35k words and then not have to worry about not knowing any words…I think a lot of people will disagree with this mindset, but honestly, I was always the same way. I always found it very motivating, the idea that if I grinded hard enough, that I could dramatically reduce my dictionary lookups in the wild. And while I’m still getting there with Japanese (though pretty close, tbh), I’m already there with Chinese and it is amazing! It’s amazing to listen to audiobooks with 100% comprehension, to read books with very, very few dictionary lookups, to know every character in weird wuxia names, and on and on. My wife uses me as a Chinese character dictionary (I’m about to break 9k unique characters in my chinese characters deck alone, though some of those are traditional versions or whatnot) 😛 But this is the Japanese subreddit..
>Not sure how I should feel about that, it’s a lot! I’m wondering how many other people have ever done more reviews than this??
well, since you asked…
I have almost 3 million reviews. And I have done that over the last ~5 years. However, about half of that is chinese (over nearly 5 years) and the other half is Japanese (over 3 years or so). Basically, when the pandemic started and I knew we were going to be in lockdown for a while (I live in China) AND I knew it was going to basically fuck up the world for a long time, I decided to go hard as fuck on Japanese vocabulary.
There’s a lot more to how I studied Chinese and Japanese than anki, but you asked 😉 And again, congrats. It’s very rare for me to see anyone online that even comes close to mine…you are probably the first. Of course, a lot of people think I am insane, which is fine…I’ve reached literacy in 2 languages that are notoriously difficult to reach literacy in. There are many paths to getting there, and this one worked for me. That said, I think it’s possible to get a lot of the benefits that I got while reducing the anki load significantly, but hey, that’s hindsight for you 😉 and honestly, I kind of love being a walking dictionary. But I think you sort of have to enjoy that to use anki like this 😛
Where can I get this deck? I want to try
My deck is in of 3000+ vocabulary it’s in 100~160 (the green number changes often) xD
I still have very very difficult time reading NHK Easy News.
I’m following a channel if a cool dude who talks slowly about common things that I find easier to understand, but it’s still hard tough