I see a quite a few posts where people learning Japanese get really long review times with Anki. Here are a few quick tips, please post your own in the comments.
**Part 1: Priming for Anki**
Before you review a word in Anki, you can take some extra time to learn it. Here are the words I learned yesterday for example:
This is something you can make in notepad++ or whatever you want. Note there are 3 columns. On the left is the word with kanji. Middle is the kana. Rightmost is the meaning.
Hold a piece of paper in front of your computer screen and cover up the right two columns with the paper.
Read down the line until you can read the entire thing without making a mistake. If you make a mistake, uncover the answer, but you have to start over.
Once you finally get it right, copy paste the list around to randomize it a bit, and do it again. The idea is not to only remember it as a specific sequence. Come back to it every 10 min or 20 min, and then again in like a few hours, and you can PRIME yourself for your anki reviews tomorrow.
**Part 2: Goals and timings**
1. Set a goal. I study 2 hours a day and my goal is to have anki take as close to 30 min as possible.
2. When you review, write down how long it takes you to do Anki.
3. If you are WAY above that review time, don’t add new cards. In my example, if I wanted to review for 30 min and it takes an hour, that is way out of hand. Stop adding cards until it gets under control.
4. If you are around the correct time, add between 5-12 cards depending on if you are a bit low, a bit high, or just right. For example, today it took me 24 min to do anki, which is a bit low, so I added a few extra cards.
**Part 3: Settings**
Click the little gear icon next to your deck. Go to Options. Click the “lapses” tag. Set “leech threshold” to something lower than the default of 10. Mine is 4 which is aggressive. The idea is you don’t want to spend time reviewing cards that you have no chance on, so make them leeches.
See screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ax3h0FZ
GL HF
4 comments
There is also a great add-on that lets you simulate your expected future number of reviews: [https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/817108664](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/817108664)
Even people who do not understand the Anki settings (I know nobody reads the manual …) can still use it e.g. to simulate how quickly their reviews will come down if they stop adding new cards for a while.
Sounds good. I think you could probably do part 1 directly in anki. There is a mode where you can study a subset of cards outside the SRS. I think it’s called a custom deck.
part 1 is just flashcards without SRS
> Before you review a word in Anki, you can take some extra time to learn it.
I wholeheartedly agree with this point and want to emphasize it. Actually taking some time to properly study a word before adding it to Anki has decreased my number of failed reviews. As other users have mentioned, there are other ways to do this, including within Anki itself.
“Do not learn if you do not understand.” (SuperMemo, on which Anki is based.)