Im sure most of you have an Anki deck with vocabulary you heared or read that you want to learn.
I would really like to know if you have the translation or the kanji on the frontsite.
Im learning another deck with vocabulary with kanji first and I kept my own vocab deck the other way round but Im not sure which way is the best and I would really like to hear some opinions about that.
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For me, cause I’m focus on listening at the moment, so I made some changes to the core 2.3k deck template, here’s how my card looks like (front and back): [https://imgur.com/a/LCL6U7t](https://imgur.com/a/LCL6U7t)
Basically, there are two enormous play buttons on the front of the card, nothing else, one plays sentence audio, the other plays word audio. I’ll play the sentence audio first, try to understand it, if I understand the whole thing, word audio will be skipped, if understand neither, I’ll then flip the card to reveal the answer.
It works pretty well as far as I can tell.
p.s. these styles only applies to mobile app since I only do anki on my phone while commuting.
>but Im not sure which way is the best
“Best” for what? Make cards that fit your personal goal, whatever that may be. If your main goal is reading then you want the Japanese on the front. If your goal is EN->JP translation then you want the English translation on the front. Want to practice listening? Put only the audio on the front. Want to practice all of the above, then just have multiple different card types for each note.
Mostly only Kanji on the frontside and reading/hiragana+translation on the backside. Exceptions are when jisho says “usually written using kana alone”. Then it’s Kana on the frontside and kanji+translation on the backside.
My main goal is reading, so i think that’s the best for me. But what’s best depends on your goal.
As others have said, the format depends on what it is you are trying to learn. The key thing is to have **ONE** concept on the front – the thing you want to learn, and all the other info on the back.
E.g. if you want to learn how to read Japanese words, have the word on the front (*I usually stick to the form given in Jisho, and use kana only where is says ‘is usually written in kana only’*). **Nothing else on the front** – nothing at all – your brain will learn to look for any additional clues on the card, so don’t give any. On the back, have any other info you like to help you learn the word – kana equivalent, meaning, audio clips, pictures, sentence examples …etc.
Similarly, if you want to practice listening, have an audio clip on the front and all the details on the back.