TL;DR – the tyranny of the review; struggling to find enough time for new content as reviews get longer .
I was wondering how people balance their revision of Japanese with learning new content.
Like most people on here I’d guess I work a full time job so I can only really manage around 2hrs for Japanese a day, I felt like this was enough time to make good progress.
However the more words I learn (just over a 1000 atm) and Kanji (around 650) the more and more of my time is spent just maintaining or reviewing flashcards and writing practice.
This makes it harder to learn new words but also new Kanji and new grammar points, as I learn more I feel like this just gets worse.
Has anyone had this experience? How did you go about doing keeping up good new progress as you went through your studying of Japanese?
Thanks in advance 🙂
6 comments
How many words you do a day?
Limit your review time so you have time for other stuff…when I used to use anki I had a backlog of over 500 words…you don’t have to review them all daily….i used to add over 50 new words daily…impossible for me to review them all plus keep up with older cards daily…
The only way to “deal with it” is to say “I’m going to review x amounts of cards daily” regardless of how many get added daily…
Reduce the new cards to adjust to your needs, its fine if one day you do 20 and other you do no new cards at all, and if one day you feel energetic do 50.
You don’t need to find a magic number for new cards.
I’m at a similar number of kanji, and my pace has recently slowed down too. The number of old reviews has increased, and the time I’m motivated to study has decreased a bit.
I think the key is to just keep going. A session of 50 reviews a few times a day is much better than nothing. And a week or so pausing on adding new cards can be a great way to reset and bring down the number of reviews coming in.
It just means that it will take a little longer to reach my goals than my initial estimates, which is totally fine.
A suggestion that I’ve seen to help keep numbers down is suspend any cards that have a >1year time horizon in anki. Thought process basically being if that word doesn’t come up more than once a year, what’s the point of trying too hard to force it to stay in your memory?
Just my 2 cents.
I currently have around 6000 cards in anki.
There have been periods where I studied 60 new cards a day , periods where I studied 20 , and periods where I studied 0.
When you start feeling overwhelmed either stop doing new cards entirely for a week or two or reduce the amount of new cards you do daily just to get your daily amount of review cards down as well as to focus on leeches etc. Otherwise they will become much bigger problems later on if you keep getting confused between 2 similar cards and keep messing them up, thus later on reinforcing this mistake.
It isn’t productive to keep adding new cards if they are going to become leeches due to you being overwhelmed etc.