Need help with my routine. My retention seems to be declining.

8 comments

1. Just keep going.

2. If you feel like something is not working for you, then just change it up. Just keep your input at same level and there shouldn’t be an issue. Different people like different tools.

3. ok so I’m gonna be real

   1 hour of Japanese a day is going to lead to an early plateau where you forget a lot of what you learn, and the rate of forgetting will start to catch up with the rate of learning

   they way you are studying is totally right, but the number of hours you are studying is only 1 per day, so this is kind of what will happen

   you somehow, some way, need to push that up.

4. Honestly sometimes just taking a break helps. When I start to feel like I am not learning any of the new cards I have added to my Anki deck, I’ll take a break from studying them from a few days to a week. And then when I come back my brain is fresher and starts to remember them again. I keep watching things without subs as fun whilst I’m on the break though.

5. I’m no expert in Japanese but I have developed quite a few skills overtime and as long as you are working on it everyday and you are consistent you will improve. It just feels like you aren’t making big leaps which will make it seem like you aren’t improving at all. But you actually are. You’re also not studying a huge amount, but certainly enough to see improvement over time. Just keep your studying light and fun and don’t be scared to try something new.

6. What’s your routine like when you wake up? Are you drinking water when you get up first thing? Taking cold showers? Going outside and getting immediate sunlight within fifteen minutes of leaving the bed and doing some form of physical activity for three minutes? In addition, are you taking time to focus on something directly in front of you intently for 30-40 seconds without blinking (this takes practice) between each 20 minute activity?

   Little steps like this will also increase your memory and retention. It’s not always about the material your consuming. How you treat your body and mind also plays a part in your routine.

7. How did you finish all of Satori Reader with only 1200 vocab? Or did you manage vocab separately in that app? Just curious since I’ve got higher known numbers in JPDB but even the most basic stories are still tough for me, both vocabulary and grammar wise. I’m just starting into Genki II grammar though so maybe that’s why I’m struggling there.

   For JPDB when I felt like my retention was getting a bit low overall, I changed the review interval to be one step shorter, so I get more reviews. That seemed to help in general. Now I hover around 90% retention for known, 75% for learning and doing 20 new cards a day.

   I still have cards that I just don’t seem to remember the readings for. I might get them for a couple of days then the next time they come up I draw a blank. Once I discover those I take specific actions for that. Usually it’s making a list of those words in a word document and then just reading it over and over and hammering it into my brain through rote memorization. If that doesn’t help, I’ll add a sentence and say it out loud a few times and that can help. Basically keep adding more and more context until it sticks. The words I remember the best are ones I’ve seen in real reading or listening, so just reading and listening more is like the ultimate cheat code to me for remembering things.

8. Based on the tools you list it sounds like you’ve gone through a similar arc as I have. I like jpdb *way* more than Anki— it’s just hard to beat the huge ui improvements. My retention in jpdb got much, much better once I started actually mining vocab (i.e. looking up unknown words in jpdb and adding them to a deck when I encounter them in media). Trying to brute force learn words from a frequency deck did not work for me *at all* (if I was going to give you one piece of advice it would be this one: stop grinding a frequency deck and start mining!!)

   I still have a backup deck in case I run out of mining words, but it’s a list of the wanikani vocab in order so it’s kind of in difficult order— but I still try to get all of my new vocab from media.

   I’ve also never had a good experience with bunpro despite trying multiple times. I’ve had much better success just consuming whatever grammar resources catch my interest and not minding rereading the basics. Highly recommend Japanese the Manga Way, Sakubi, and A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (it’s meant as a reference but it’s surprisingly fun to just read). Even then though, I’ve found my grammar knowledge comes more from consuming content and getting used to seeing common structures in use than from reading grammar texts.

   It’s easy to get discouraged, but the most important thing is to keep going! Change stuff up if it’s not working, but if you keep putting the work in to doing good learning you will see results