Am I using Anki wrong? I always get frustrated so much when I decide to give it a chance one more time.

20 comments

1. I had similiar problems and switched to wanikani. Since then i enjoy learning again, which is way more important as anki offers more flexibility but to what use if you don’t use it cause you have no fun using it.

2. > You see, when I use Anki and I can’t remember a word for the like 50th time I tend to get so frustrated and I feel like Anki screams at me”Oh you’re so stupid, can’t even remember that simple expression, dummy.”

   Those cards are leeches. Configure your anki to suspend leeches. You can always add/mine the word back again later.

   Think of leeches are words you’re not ready to learn yet — you haven’t seen it in your immersion often enough, or learned the component kanji sufficiently. Either you’ll learn those words eventually if you encounter them often enough, or maybe you don’t really need to know them because they are super rare or obscure. It will sort itself out eventually.

   TL;DR Anki’s leech feature is your friend.

3. Words you get consistently wrong are called “leeches” in SRS’s terminology. When you get a word wrong, it may be a good idea to let that word go (suspend it from your deck) and then re-add it later when you come across it in actual content. Words you can attach some sort of story or place to have much easier time sticking in your brain than just words in isolation. For example, I still remember some words being said in anime I watched maybe 5 years ago, despite never learning them since I began actually studying Japanese.

   Anki has a setting to do it for you automatically (after X failures in a row), but I’m not sure if it’d work in case where you forget it, then guess it right 1 minute later, then forget it again next day. That probably doesn’t count as failures in a row. I’d probably want to do it manually though.

4. >It may sound stupid but the best way to learn words for me is to actually be exposed to them many, many times over and over until eventually they will stick. Of course this is a very slow process and you encounter certain words more often then others and you also can forget certain words if you haven’t seen them for a long time.

   This is entirely how language learning is supposed to work. Kudos to the folks who spend every waking hour on Anki and actually get results, but barring these people whose minds probably won’t be swayed, I would never **ever** advocate anyone ever even try to do things that way. Doing Anki is fine and it’s been quite effective for me, but I don’t see the point of brute-forcing it for hours on end. Half a day spent on *just* Anki is half a day that totally could have been spent on genuine input.

5. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. I didn’t like it in the beginning, but then I restarted again a month ago, and now I’m really enjoying it. There’s definitely some words I always get wrong, but the number of those words is decreasing significantly, and I find myself looking at the card and I’m like “oh no it’s that word again” but I actually remember how to say it! So yeah it definitely helped me, and it also helps to keep me studying at least a little bit every day.

6. The setup and just general ideology behind learning with Anki honestly didn’t work for me anytime I tried to use it for learning. I know it’s a key item in the quest to learn Japanese while spending as little money as possible, or even no money at all, but having access to money, I simply sought other methods that might be available to me. I started wanikani months ago, and I know people have issues with it, but the way it works jives with how my brain learns and that’s all that matters to me. I hate to sound like a fuckin advertisement because I am being genuine.

7. Everyone has their style. I didn’t use much Anki at all.

   Could try adding those difficult words to a deck of their own.. or get a physical flash card deck for that.

8. Try DuoCards. I found that app to be easier and more user friendly than Anki. Maybe doesn’t have all the features, but it’s easy to build your own card decks, add images, it has auto translate and AI too, works very well for me.

9. Your memory is probably just overwhelmed. Use the setting that marks everything you can’t remember well as leeches(as suggested in other comments) and then forget all the leeches and relearn them again, but at a very leisurely pace. Reviews shouldn’t pile up either. You want to limit your new cards to a number where the amount of time you use Anki would stay effectively the same every day.

10. I think the problem is you just aren’t using Anki as well as you could. Couple of ideas:

    1. Make sure you are making your own cards and not using premade decks. The more work you put in, the better your memory will be.
    2. Make sure the words you are learning are coming from sentences with a context that you’re aware of – so from stories, news articles, etc. Knowing context is for some reason magical 🧙 for memory.
    3. Don’t just put the word and it’s definition on the card. Also put the original sentence on the card. Extra points for audio.
    4. Learn words in different directions🙃. Right now you’re learning JP—>EN. This is considered passive knowledge. Also make a card type for EN—>JP so that you’re practicing actually producing the language.
    5. If you notice that your keep forgetting the same card, it means that word is a “leech” and needs some extra help. What I usually do is try to think of a mnemonic and write it on the card. Every time I review the card, I also read the mnemonic.
    6. If the mnemonic doesn’t work and I still keep forgetting it, I change the card (by making a card type specifically for leeches) so that the answer is shown on the front and all I have to do is read it and then click good.

11. This comment is about flash cards in general, not specifically Anki.

    I read somewhere that humans can memorize 7 digit numbers easily, but adding just a few digits makes it much harder.

    What I generalized from that was to work with very small batches at any one time.

    For example, don’t use a deck with 50 cards. Instead, just use 5 cards.

    If you get the card right, set it aside. Now you only have 4 cards. Then 3 cards, then you have just 2.

    So you go through the cards really quickly and get quite a lot of repetition quickly.

    I also worked on just one aspect of kanji. Like, just the meaning (and NOT all the readings).

    I also worked in this order: (1) recognize meaning for each of the 5 cards. Then do (2) “production”—where I have to say or write the meaning.

12. No pain, no gain xd

    This is how memory works. If you can’t remember some word, try using it in a context right after you fail to recognize it in a flashcard. Read a sentence with this word, write your own, think of a situation or a story you could tell someone using this word.

    I, for example, don’t like heisig or wanikani. Reading a completely random, out of context story about something doesn’t help me to remember kanji. But making my own, playing out a dialog in my head seems to work way better.

    And, of course, if you learned something, it must be used regularly. Write, read, say. Anything that makes you fetch it from the memory every now and then. Otherwise it gets forgotten.

13. >But let’s begin from the start. This might not be important but the cards I made usually have the word in Japanese on the front. At the back I have 1) The pronounciation 2) The meaning of the word 3) one example sentence.

    The single biggest piece of advice I can give here is to put the example sentence on the front, not the back. As you say, context is valuable and usually available when recognizing words in the wild. For multiple contexts that are sufficiently different and nuanced you can make multiple cards.

14. It sounds like you’re introducing too many new words each day.

15. I understand what you mean. I have some memory issues (because of ADD) and even if I see and read a new word 20 times in a row I will forget it 2 seconds after the card is gone. It simply won’t stick to my mind.

    I feel what happens is that I need to “thicken” the word first, so my mind is able to grab it. This “thickening” can be done by adding new memory/information involving the word.

    What I frequently do is “analyze” the word and create/perceive relations with other words (in any language that I know) based on meaning or similarity in sound. I frequently come up with some weird fragment of idea/story where someone says something that sounds like the word I’m trying to memorize.

    I do have higher than average difficulty with memorizing/remembering stuff in general and found out this proccess helps. Also, I think my difficulty has a lot to do with problems processing sensory data like sound and apperance, so I try using my strongest ability which is meaning and semantic knowledge instead of brute “sensory” data.

    After the word has been through this process of “thickening” (about 1 or 2 minutes staring at it in this creative process) any time the card shows up again I already have something to work with (even if I can remember the association but not the meaning of the word) and I reinforce the association again. It’s a lot simpler than it might look reading this. It’s basically something I started to do spontaneously when I came back to language learning after my decline in memory since I felt from day 1 that pure exposition/repetition was not working for me.

    Anyways… if it doesn’t work for you just throw Anki away, people have been learning languages for ages without it and though it’s a tool apparently a lot of learners use, what I normally hear is that it’s not super fundamental just a little add on.

16. >In the end I feel like if I know a word during an Anki session I have already known that word before. I never felt like I actually learned a new word because of Anki.

    Yep this is absolutely a thing with Anki that is often misunderstood only adding to the frustration, its simply not an effective learning tool it is for reviewing and memorizing concepts you are already familiar with, the more familiar the better. In that sense its good you are at least making your own cards rather than using premade decks.

    >But when I actually read something in Japanese and I have to look up a word which I then realise to have seen already I am for some reason not getting as frustrated. It’s more like a “It’s okay you just need to read it a bit more times and someday it will stick” feeling.

    In other words this is the part Anki actually helps with, without which you would find yourself using the dictionary much more often.

    >It may sound stupid but the best way to learn words for me is to actually be exposed to them many, many times over and over until eventually they will stick. Of course this is a very slow process and you encounter certain words more often then others and you also can forget certain words if you haven’t seen them for a long time.

    Not at all stupid natural language acquisition is largely subconscious, that’s how it works im afraid more and more this is what science is telling us just keep putting in consistent time (particularly into native content) and avoid as much frustration as possible, ie Anki isn’t an exam don’t treat it like one.

17. Anki blows. It’s really really boring.

    If you don’t mind using it, it is quite efficient and a good learning tool but don’t force yourself to use it if you hate it. I do.

    You say you learn words by being exposed to them a lot. That just means you need to do a lot of immersion. Don’t force yourself to use Anki if you don’t want to.

18. I’d generally only use sentence cards, ideally with native audio. For overcoming repeated mistakes, I have a habit of writing out all review mistakes with a brush pen on paper. Works like a charm, especially when simply going over the mistakes I wrote down after a session or after a day.

19. 俺はロリコンです。

20. You shouldn’t be learning words from Anki, you should be learning them in immersion and then pinning them to Anki to remember them.

    Avoid putting words you’re not ready for.

    90% of your Anki should be easy sailing, lots of correct answers, not too many fails on the cards, little time spent thinking.

    You’re gonna have to go through and start suspending cards you’re failing over and over again. Only practice cards that aren’t super difficult.

    If smoke is billowing out of your head, your deck is too difficult. Have patience.

    Also, use mnemonics to remember words. Even if they’re dumb, just make it memorable and force connections.