I’ve been learning japanese for two weeks now, using immersion method, I’m currently using Anki with the Core 2.3k deck and Refold JP1K. At the start it was easy to remember words and kanjis but as days goes by, there are more cards to review, and I don’t stop until I remember every word perfectly, which at the start I was spending like half an hour on anki and now I’m spending more than three hours a day brute forcing each word. Should I just look at the word and say “ah, it’s that”, or do I really have to learn it? I’m now at 200 learning reviews each day which consumes me a lot of time and can’t spend more on immersion. Should I just do 1 hour of anki max? Or keep brute forcing words? Or what method are you guys using to remember them?
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Thanks!
7 comments
Aim for < 5 seconds per review. If you cannot recall a word within 5 seconds you don’t really know it. 200*5 sec < 17 min, the rest of your time is spent on learning (and relearning).
Reduce new cards a day until you get to a bearable amount. I would say 99% of people will struggle to stay above 40 minutes for very long. Probably do 0 a day until daily calms down for the moment.
Be quicker to fail cards, you can’t force something from your memory, its better to fail a card 5 times in 5-10 seconds then passing it than spend a minute on the card before probably failing it anyway.
Remember, language learning is not a straight path….there is no way you can learn perfectly one word and never forget….you will learn and forget…then learn again and forget again….the time it takes you to forget a word gets prolonged the more times you learn it….meaning you retain it for longer
When I was constantly using anki, I learned all my vocab through immersion (no prebuilt decks) and in my vocab I would have repeated cards…. I would remember I had seen that word, but the meaning wouldn’t come to mind…so I would just look it up again and re-add it…, and re-review it….and so on and so forth I remember I would create on average 50 new cards to review each day….I wouldn’t review all of them (had over 1k in backlog at one moment). I would review 250-500 cards daily (only about 30 new cards daily)….was about 2 hours….until one day (a couple of years later) I realized I no longer had to add as many cards and a ton of words already just “made sense”….even for some words sometimes I could not think of their English meaning….. they just made sense as I read them…
If you don’t have 2 hours to just do anki or just don’t want to do it for that long that’s ok….you can always pace yourself and even have a huge backlog of words….that’s not a problem…just keep learning and relearning….
Three hours a day on anki is unsustainable. Way too early to try to learn from native materials IMO. Walk then run, not let’s just sprint from Day 1.
How many new words are you trying to learn a day?
I would let leeches suspend and just focus on building quantity over quality. As time goes on unsuspend the leeches and try again when you’re familiar with more kanji. Immersion is supposed to reinforce what you’re drilling in Anki by seeing words used in different contexts. But pick immersion material that’s not too difficult. Make a separate deck for i+1 sentences and add single vocab with kanji that are easy to remember. Lots of them will not be in the core 2k but still used very frequently by natives. Don’t forget also to go over grammar.
Anki is not for learning stuff, it’s for retaining it.
Take the new words and learn them without anki. Build mnemonics, write them down a dozen times. Connect them to other words.
If you initially learned them go back to anki.