I’ve been studying Japanese for about 4-5 months now, and occasionally find myself in periods like right now where I just have a much more intense motivation than normal. Normally I’ll do my daily Anki and WaniKani, do Genki for a little bit, a little bit of immersion and kinda call it a day (about 1 hour all in all). But I’m graduating college this week, have way more free time, so now I’m finding myself wanting to do more and more and I’m wondering if it’s dangerous to try to add a lot more vocab training with Anki/WaniKani or whether I should go for it assuming I have the time to memorize it. Because obviously short term memory is simple enough, I just don’t want to screw myself on future reviews if it’s not possible to generate medium/long term memorization by simply having more motivation and time.
3 comments
Go for it. Worst that can happen is you forget some of it down the line and have to relearn those things, but you’ll also remember many more things too.
Imo I’d recommend spending the motivation on reading or watching content. Find some graded readers, use satori reader, bilingual manga, animelon, etc. You’ll naturally see recurring words and pick them up that way as well.
You can still increase your new anki cards but I’d say maybe increase it by 5 and see how it goes. Keep in mind it takes around a month for you to see the increase in new reviews.
I think you’ll be fine. I had a week or so where I did like 5x the number of new cards compared to normal. It was a bit hairy for a while but then it settles down. There’s also no shame in taking a few days of no new cards or not clearing your review queue every day. If you think about doing one card a day or two cards every other day, it works out the same in the long run. And the ratio is probably more favorable IMO, doubling your cards for a week might mean taking one or two days of no new cards just to flush out the short term reviews then things more or less stabilize again.
There’s also lots of other things to do with more time. Extra Genki exercises, graded readers, listen to podcasts, etc… that don’t result in review debt in the future.