So I’m trying to make it through the core 2k/6k I’m currently at 1k. I want to grind the remaining 5k with 50 new words per day. I currently don’t have school or a job so I thought might as well see how much I can push it before my soul gets torn to shreds by the reviews each day.
I’m not just trying to grind for the number I mainly want that base vocab to start reading stuff, so I’d be trying to reading every time I’m done with my cards.
It should take me 3-4 months to finish the deck and only need to do reviews after that. Is this manageable for that length of time and what would be the best way to go about it. Like I said I don’t have any other responsibilities aside from like cooking n stuff. I’ll be moving soon so on those two or three days I might be a bit busy but I’ll probably make it work. Id love to hear everyone’s thoughts and advice.
17 comments
EDIT: not sure why downvotes but consider I take about 7 seconds per card and have over 10,000 cards, I have a pretty good idea how the math plays out
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probably unless you are studying full-time
I do like 10 items a day (words, grammar, whatever, it all adds to 10) and anki takes me 25-30 mins usually but that does mean I will only learn around 3000 words a year (10 * 365 * ~80%) plus whatever I passively pickup from reading (to be fair it happens!)
if I was doing like 20 it would probably take me an hour ish and then I would get way more words a year of course but I have things I’d like to do besides anki flashcards
do whatever feels comfortable, you won’t break. if it feels like too much, back it off. there’s no one answer, even for a given person, as one’s priorities and attention span shift over time. it’s more important to self-evaluate at all times and ask yourself what your own personal goals are, and whether the things you’re doing are meeting those goals.
Haha this reminds me of a challenge I did 6 years ago and posted here. It was called **100 Kanji a day**. I did that for 5 days and then reviewed everything. I think I had around 26 mistakes. https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/61qkhj/100_kanji_a_day_for_5_days/
The problem was, doing that long-term would never work and it was just for fun anyways.
Currently, I am doing 30 Kanji a day. Which to me, is quite easy as i’ve been doing this for quite some time now. I’m looking to cover over 1000 after just over 30 days.
If you have done RTK 50 words a day is tough, but manageable in your situation. If not, it may be too difficult because it will take 3 weeks for the reviews to start stacking bad. You are looking at 2hrs of SRS a day as time goes on if you keep the pace.
It depends on how long you take for each card. Keep in mind that 50 new cards a day is going to get you to 200+ reviews a day pretty quickly. Doable if you have the free time, but easy to burn out on as well.
Do the maximum number you are comfortable with and adjust it if necessary. If reviews become too much – reduce or completely stop learning new cards for some time. On the other hand, if you feel like doing more, then by all means do more. If you can do 50 or even 100 – do it. Don’t just artificially limit yourself to a certain number.
If you are speedrunning getting burnt out go for it, on a more serious note I think once you have gotten to 2k plus words. Start spending the extra time you have on immersion instead of spending all time on vocab. I would say you should do max 20 new words per day👍👍 GL with studies!!!
You would benefit much more from using the hours you would spend grinding Anki to instead be reading.
You’re still at quite a beginner level by the looks of it, so the reading materials you can realistically tackle are limited and Anki is, yes, going to be quite useful as a supplement. But grinding away at it for a significant chunk of your day is unlikely to be fun or sustainable.
my suggestion is when u r at 1000-2000 of the core deck, go on jpdb and import your anki reviews and countingue there. Find a light novel/ visual novel you want to read and do the pre-build deck on jpdb for the stuff you want to read. I recommend Kuma kuma kuma bear, it has 20 books, and you only need 2000 words for 90% coverage of the entire 20 books. after reading a few of the kuma LN, and if you are confident enough, you can move on to other LNs or VNs of your choice, either by looking thru the jpdb build-in deck database(sorting by difficulty) or finding some recommendations online.
when your vocab is below 3-5k, the best strategy is to do the pre-build deck for the book you want to read until the known word coverage is at 85% before jumping in. After your vocab is higher than 6k you’d better just word-mine with jpdb-connect as you read instead of doing pre-build decks since the vocab required to push coverage over 90-95% is just exponentially higher.
Another trick is to find audio for the stuff you’re reading. If you are into VN then you are lucky, as many VN are voiced. but for LN you can find a good text-to-speech to voice the LN for you(not many LN have audiobooks). I personally use voicepeak, it cost about 60-70 bucks on dlsite and sounds really good, and there are free alternatives like voice vox.
I started learning 7 months ago, and now I have a vocab of around 11k and have read 35 volumes of LN. I found this way to be really enjoyable as I was mostly just reading stuff I like. If you are only going to grind the core 6k I think it would be not as satisfying as doing pre-build deck or word-mine since the core-deck is mostly based on newspaper vocab. I tried to grind the core 6k once and made it to around 3k, and I’d say I was really demoralized when I couldn’t read or understand mush LN/anime
It’s takes a few weeks for your review time to stabilize after changing the number of new cards.
Initial motivation that may allow you to work very hard in the first few months or so will likely not persist.
So I would suggest to titrate it. Start with 10, and go up by 5 every couple weeks, until you reach the max daily workload you’re comfortable with.
People have different capacities for memorizing words and different tolerances for daily SRS duration. In other words you need to find the answer to your question yourself by doing the experiment.
Overdoing it in the beginning is a good way of not getting anywhere. You’ll be doing this for years if you want to get good, so find your marathon pace, not your sprint pace.
I’ve been doing 28 words every day since I was at 4k (I’m at 15/16k now). Before that I was doing 18 new words a day, and I felt it was too little.
If your retention rate is good, then there’s nothing wrong with doing 50 new cards a day. Hell, if you’re memory is great you can do even 100 a day for a few months. I personally can’t do 50, let alone 100, but you’re not me so you’ve got to find your own learning ceiling.
Even 100+ isn’t a big deal if it’s really what you wish to do with your life. How much time do you want to spend on Anki? How much time you’re capable of spending on Anki? What are your relationships with procrastination? Will you be able to review even when it’s 1 am and you’ve done nothing throughout the day and skipping it will mean reviewing 1000+ cards due tomorrow? (it’s a real freaking torture, would never recommend). As other people said, you can adjust this amount as much as you want and take anything that suits you best
I think that number is really unmanageable; it’s not really a matter of time, it’s a matter of effort
Your brain uses resources and energy to pay attention and learn; if you overwhelm it then it will require rest as it really doesn’t work like muscles
The resources and effort you’re going to put in for just a lot of vocabulary without context seems like a bad choice; take that free time to rest, exercise, use the language for fun stuff. A healthy happy motivated body and mind will be the best language learning tool at your disposal
Hey bro if you can pull it off then you can pull it off
50 new words a day is only going to set you back.
when I found was I made a spreadsheet of all the words in the entire textbook that I wanted to learn. I would learn about 20 at a time.
and then the next week I would do another 20.
then the week after that I would combine those 40 to cement what I had learned previously..
I would mark on the spreadsheet if I missed a word that I had already learned and then add those words to the following week until they were submitted.
then when I got to 100 words I would take a week off and practice all of those 100 words for an additional week until they were cemented.
I would then start fresh with a new 20 not including any of the previous 100 until I got to 100 again. then I would include the previous 100 and the new 100 in a quiz and see how many I missed making a study quiz of everything that I missed to submit those.
50 a day is insane and will not work you might remember them for a week you will not remember them 2 months from now.
That’ll end up averaging at about 500 reviews per day in the long run, if you don’t skip a single day of reviews. Your call if that’s the pace you want to take, but I’d say it’s a bit extreme.
Yeah