I have 11k anki cards and I’ve been noticing some weird patterns lately

11 comments

1. You’re becoming fluent in Japanese 🤷‍♂️

2. That’s just how learning languages works.

   I remember when I was first learning English, I struggled with prepositions a lot, and had to be extremely self conscious of which verbs would be paired up with which prepositions, but at some point it kind of just clicked in my brain and then I stopped thinking about it. The meaning and the verb+preposition combination just sort of came to me naturally before I could even question it.

   You’re having one of those cool moments when we notice the progress we’ve made and how far we’ve come in our language learning journey. It’s part of why this has become one of my favourite activities. Those small gratification moments are the best.

3. It’s very possible you just learned to take an educated guess at words you might have forgotten (or have never seen) based on the kanji that make it up

4. That happens to me s lot. Could you please share your deck?

5. It’s possible your brain is recognizing the card rather than the content of the card.

   It could cause an issue if for example you’re memorizing a vocab word by itself, but as soon as you see it in a sentence you may not recognize it.

   I’m not saying that’s the case but it could be possible.

   Try to get good input from reading that uses the vocab that you study. A good mix might make you feel better about your decks.

   Edit, kinda speaking from experience where I’ve memorized words before, but had issues when I saw the word I knew in a sentence, and didn’t realize it.

6. >my mouth gets possessed with the spirit of Japan or something

   I seriously can’t wait the day that this happens to me.
   You have pretty fast recollection speed now. Makes whole learning journey worthwhile.

7. I think the answer might just be pretty straight forward. You’ve been reading a lot and for a while now, and it’s just that part of your brain is creating a web of knowledge when they used to be disparate pieces of information. That reflexive knowledge is from all the information you’ve collected from all this time but haven’t yet yet made the full round about connections, until those moments. This happens faster the more you engage in different activities (reading, listening, speaking, writing). The faster these connections get made.

   This is a pretty regular occurrence for me as something I learned in some other way, e.g. writing begins to manifest automatically in registering it in hearing and then when I come across it reading starts to link into it forming a bond with the sound, the word (kanji), and the written context I’ve used it in before.

8. I’m also at 11k+ and I get the same feeling.
   Random words like 黙認、披露、推薦状、or 蟷螂 will flow right throughout a sentence but when speaking to my native friend the other day I forgot the word for “temperature ” 😅

   I’ve just accepted that it is what being bilingual is like.

9. I think people aren’t quite nailing it when they say it’s just what fluency is. Of course it is on the path to fluency. But when I’m fluent, I can say something instinctively and back up and explain why. I think what you’re describing is something that happens with spaced repetition. Spaced repetition works so well it bypasses your conscious mind and conditions you to give the right answer. The previous times you worked to recall with some difficulty strengthened the pathway to that answer in your brain so much that it just activates the next time without you realizing why. IOW, not all types of learning do this, it’s this noticeable and odd when the SRS conditioning is working so well it’s outpacing your conscious knowledge.

   I do it all the time in Spanish…. with words I’ve spaced a few times, but basically only those.

   I’ve also had interference from this effect when, for example, I was making mnemonics for the kanji involving the flowers, rice field, and standing dog radicals and training myself to go through the components to identify kanji… and the next time I saw 猫 I was stumped. *Neko.* I didn’t have a mnemonic, and afterwards slapped myself going, how did I not step back and look at the whole thing?! I didn’t even realize I had gotten into the habit of scanning the components. But anyway, my brain didn’t have a path from those components to “cat.” If I had mentally scanned the whole picture, it would have been instant… but my mind doesn’t always do that. And even if it did at one point, that can change.

   This type of thing is why I think developing multiple mnemonics over time, so your mind has multiple pathways to the same result, can be very effective in solidifying things. You want your brain to take a path to the right answer no matter where it happens to start from. What you’re describing involves having one very effective pathway laid down from prior SRSing, but the reason that feels shaky is because it is—if that one lucky pathway goes, you’ve lost it, and you don’t even know what the pathway is. So, pieces of information you’re at this stage with are very vulnerable to being lost if you don’t keep up SRSing them on the right schedule.

10. I suspect the first instant is System 1 thinking. Those neural pathway are nice and thick, to a point where you recognize the word base on intuition.

    The second one. Mouthing the worth is triggering the neural pathway to the words.

    I would recommend, figuring out how to strengthen the neural pathway of 2nd and attaching it to the 1st neural pathway

11. Possessed with the spirit of Japan hahaha