Stop adding everything to anki. I usually do reviews for about 25 min a day, and it’s been like that for 2 years with me.
To get here, just keep the number of cards you add under control. You can use that time to read more, or whatever.
In short:
**Anki is good and anki is great, but don’t let 2-hours of Anki be your date**
**Study real long and study real hard, but don’t make every word into a card**
**They might make you late and might make you truant, but flashcards alone will not make you fluent**
16 comments
A great thing for me to keep Anki under control is to do it all in the morning and then at night I go through tomorrow’s due and switch the due dates to that night so I have less to do in the morning.
What a delightful post! And a clever way to get your point across! Thank you for sharing!
I went on a 2-hour date with Anki and the only thing I got in return was a pile of reviews.
I prefer to use a predefined list, and set a target number of words per week. 80 90 or 100. That gives me more motivation than studying by time
I have been doing Anki when waiting for my food to cook and on the toilet. So I do it for about 5-10 minutes a day. I set it to do reviews first so I’m not overloading myself with new stuff and just testing my recall.
i personally keep my anki language deck in 1 hour, it’s easily over exhausting
I’ve pretty much only been adding funny words my friends teach me to anki anymore. I want my reviews to be like 10 minutes at most and I just want to spend the rest of any energy I have interacting with Japanese media or people.
I’m definitely burnt out on SRS at this point.
How would you go with expanding vocabulary more effectively? Apart from searching antonyms, perhaps learning vocabulary by semantic similarity or specific context?
I am on wanikani for 8 months now, I find it easier to follow because it does everything for you and also limits how much you can do at a time. If you find yourself burnt out from anki it might be a good alternative
This for sure is true. I have like 20k+ sentence cards and can read most “standard” novels without the need of lookups/can figure out most new words from context. But all of those vocab cards alone don’t do much for spoken fluency. Now I’ve totally stopped adding new cards and just focus on mass immersion and output.
Definitely should’ve taken this advice. I burnt myself out HARD on Anki and I’ve been off the wagon ever since.
I never used Anki.
Trying to add everything to Anki is what made me quit in frustration. These days, I’ve just been focusing on reading a lot more and with variety to naturally learn words that frequently appear.
Anki’s curse is it’s blessing – configuration control. What we need is a paternalistic SRS. One that doesn’t let you waste your time or burn yourself out by giving you just the amount of review you need to boost vocab retention while you input.
The key: limit yourself to 10 reviews cards a day. Anki has no idea how many reviews you’re doing while inputting Japanese in the wild. It’s one of the reasons it vastly overestimates what you need to review.
Yeah I went against the whole “you need to review 200 cards a day”. When adding 20 new cards. Like if I got at that pace, I’ll be doing it forever
The problem is I’ve found that Anki has been the most efficient way to learn new vocab, grammar, practice Kanji readings, etc. So the question becomes do you want to study the more fun but less efficient way, or the more efficient but less fun way. I think a mix of both is the way to go, personally I get burnt out doing more than 1 hour of anki a day so I try to keep my reviews around that level, and then spend the rest on immersion.