In April of this year I made a post on this subreddit asking how to memorize vocabulary without Anki. First I have to thank you all for your suggestions because they were helpful during these 6 months. But recently something happened and I came back to use Anki, but I changed my approach and I thought it was necessary to tell you about this. First I have to tell you about something I didn't mention in my post: my goals.

My goal on learning Japanese

My main goal was since the beginning be able to communicate with my Japanese friends in their native language. Right now after 7 years I can have a normal conversation with them, but I also have situations where I lack vocabulary. So I need to learn more words and focus more on kanji that I wasn't taking seriously until recently.

Also recently I started planning to go to Japan next year and this gave me more motivation to study. This put me a sort of deadline because I tend to procrastinate. So I have more than a year to improve my vocabulary that currently is in between N4 and N3 (according to the vocabulary list on the books Tango N4 and Tango N3 that I have). Even if at the end I don't go to Japan, I will surely communicate better with my friends.

Why did I reinstall Anki even if I installed and reinstalled a few times in the past

I that post I didn't tell you about how I was using Anki which is something important. I recently realized that the way you use Anki affects on its efficiency. So my way of using Anki was this:

I had two decks to study Japanese that one was with sentences and other with vocabulary from those sentences. In the verse of the sentence cards, with the meaning of the sentence, there were the words with their meaning while the vocabulary cards only had the meaning without the sentence where the word came from.

You can quickly conclude that making two decks with one only showing words out of context is useless. Also each deck had the option of getting 20 new cards per day making me having 40 cards each day with the cards that I have to review that day. So in the first days it was fine, but every time after a few months I was getting +200 cards per day making me want to give up.

How did I change my method

Some of the comments in that post talked about writing out the words or sentences I was learning. I actually bought a notebook and started learning a bit the vocabulary I noted. But I realized that the thing I was doing was very similar to the sentence cards I was doing in Anki. So I came back to Anki, but this time I questioned about my way of using it and now I'm using another approach.

Instead of making two decks, I only have one where I add sentences that has new words. This changing makes me add less cards and spend less time on Anki, which is what I was supposed to do since the beginning to focus on my immersion.

I saw a few videos saying to keep the "New cards/day" option as default (20 cards), but I thought that this is not a rule carved on stone. So I changed the option to 10 and I'm glad that I did this. Later I found some videos confirming my decision telling that I could choose how many new cards I want per day and that 20 new cards per day wasn't an obligatory option.

I also discovered that in the latest version of Anki there is the FSRS algorithm option. The FSRS algorithm promises to make the user memorise better with less reviews. I was very surprised when the next day I had 0 cards to review even if I hit "good" on every card. Usually on the old algorithm would show everything the next day. For now I have a pretty balanced Anki with a few cards to review per day. I still have to wait some time to see how the algorithm works after a few months, but until now nothing seems overwhelming.

Also, as I said before, other than vocabulary I also want to study kanji and with this new approach I can focus better on that.

How I'm studying kanji

A month before giving up on Anki, I did a post asking ressources to get definitions or history behind the character's origin. I was using RTK that time and I'm still using it, but differently. Remember, I'm in an advanced level of Japanese and a lot of kanji I've seen before during my immersion and I know a lot of radicals. That's why it doesn't make sense to me learning the kanji following the RTK order, but if you're new to kanji you can learn in that order.

I recently found this video about how to learn kanji without RTK. Following the video, I downloaded a premade RTK deck, but I suspended all the cards. Everyday, when I review a word I "unlock" the kanji of the specific word I reviewed. Also, instead of reviewing the mnemonic that is on the card, I edit the card putting my own mnemonic.

I tend to look for the real origin behind the character and for this I'm using kanji books I have and some resources you guys commented in that post (thank you btw). This way I can create mnemonics of the kanji and radicals that work well with me. That's actually what the book RTK tells you to do because the stories are just examples to take reference of.

Conclusion

So even if I came back to Anki after talking bad about it 6 months ago, at least I'm using less and I focus more on my immersion. I already watch anime and read manga in Japanese and I also talk with my Japanese friends. I'm looking for more challenging content like light novels, visual novels or something similar that has a lot of difficult vocabulary. Actually most of the manga that I have in my collection have a basic Japanese that I can understand 80%. So feel free to recomend some stuff in the comments.

I'll keep you all updated with my studies. For now a week has passed and there is still no hundreds of cards to review each day. But we'll see in the future. See you later!