right now the way I’m studying is either playing a game, reading a manga, or watching an anime — slowly going through everything and adding words/kanji I don’t know in my anki deck. I used to add every word but that got a bit out of hand (shoutout yomichan), so now I only do so if that word is in either the wanikani list or this other ‘core 6000’ list, sometimes there’s overlap between the two decks but sometimes certain words are unique to the other.
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This worked fine and was even enjoyable at first, but now that I’m slowly getting better and able to parse scentences easier (still a great wall’s worth of effort to go tho) I’m adding new words/kanji like a fiend. Sometimes it gets out of hand and if I miss even a single day of Anki I’m looking at a huge time sink going through words I forgot and everything. Also I’m definitely not retaining the ‘long term’ words (i.e. the ones that jump from 1 month to 3 months) well at all.
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Is this simply the reality of learning Japnaese — i.e. a languge with very few English cognates? I usually see SRS as a means to “not forget” moreso as a way to actively learn new vocab, it’s still good that I see those words I forget again and again and hopefully throw them into semi-permanent memory, but I’m spending more and more time on Anki by the day. It gets especially bad when I add in a whole list of new words, something that happens practically every time I’m immersing, and then I got 100-200 cards to review in a day.
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Curious what your thoughts are on this. Obviously I’m willing to bite the bullet but if there’s a better, more enjoyable way but I’m simply not sure if any exists.
5 comments
Some people drop anki and others don’t. I think if you read or watch enough everyday then anki is not necessary. I’m personally at a point where I can go through 200 reviews in 15 minues, so it’s just a daily ritual that I don’t mind doing.
It makes a huge difference how long you take to review a card. If you spend 3-4 seconds per card, 200 review only takes 10 minutes. I usually have 500 reviews per day which takes about 25 minutes, which is not very bad either.
Have you tried JPDB? I tried Anki but it’s way too boring for me. Now I just find a show i want to watch, add the subtitles to JPDB and it auto creates a deck i can study from.
>I used to add every word but that got a bit out of hand (shoutout yomichan)
This is why I automate nothing. Having to do everything by myself made me very selective about what I add to Anki. It took longer than if I had downloaded a core vocab deck and been done with it, but in return, Anki wasn’t particularly stressful or time-consuming. I average 50-60 total cards per day (10 new, 40 review) and I can get it done before breakfast in less than ten minutes.
In return, I have more time to interact with real native media. The most I necessarily do now is save unknown words to a custom word list for the manga, novel, anime, movie, or game. The word lists are there just to make myself hyper-aware that I’ve seen a given word before and it might be good to remember it if I keep seeing it in the wild. The actual learning happens through the content consumption. That is the review because I don’t exactly plan to artificially increase exposure with SRS anymore because I can’t be bothered right now.
Mind you, I just started that process less than a week ago, and it does feel like a decent amount of new material has stuck in my head. Granted, I’ve been learning Japanese for close to nine years, though I haven’t been consistently immersing until the pandemic. My passive vocab is close to 8k (based on the 5k actually recorded on Anki and the 3k I must have had to be able to become “N3 conversational” without Anki. I also have a decent grasp of most jōyō kanji and 500 more on top of it, so doing the “just immerse bro + custom dictionary lists” method may or may not pan out for you. Or hell, even for me, in the long run. But for now, I’m happy with the result.
Not an anki person but:
Definitely cut down on how much you look up / add for review. Right now it sounds like most of your time is in intensive mode where you’re letting things you don’t know pause your reading/playing.
Find something you can interact with in extensive mode – you may need to be pickier here as usually this means something easier, or maybe rereading something you know well. Extensive means no pause, no lookup, learn to live with not knowing everything perfectly.
Also, how much are you genre-hopping? Make good use of domain vocab. That 6000 word core list isn’t going to include much in the way of specialised words. If you’re reading/playing fantasy rpg stuff its a very different vocab set to courtroom drama.
攻略 sites for games are a useful way of preloading on critical vocab so you can play without having to look up too much.
Finally, I’m begging all of this sub, stop ignoring nonfiction. It doesn’t mean just read news. There are artists explaining how they draw, interviews with astronauts, profiles of famous swordsmiths. There is a lot of this stuff aimed at middle to high schoolers which is relatively accessible.