and practice makes it easier so this makes comparison even harder
also people exaggerate online to garner validation
also depending on what you do with each card, it can take more or less time
don’t compare yourself to others, just self-evaluate and decide if something is working *for you* right now, and if it isn’t adjust
you can never keep up with the kardashians, they’re always greener on the other side of the burned bridge
There are a whole lot of factors that could be making your case and the other person’s case different. The comparisons are not equal, their reasons for doing 50 cards are unknown, they coulda been studying numbers for all you know.
what are you learning exactly? do the words have kanji in them? do you know kanji?
A number of factors can work towards faster anki cards.
1- pc vs phone: writing anki cards on pc is much faster than on phones
2- content of cards…keep the content to a minimum. I usually do the word on the front, pronunciation + max 1-2 meanings on back
3- extension: there are some extensions on a computer that will auto create an anki card
It’s not clear if you’re talking about creating 10 Anki cards or reviewing 10 new cards or reviewing 10 old cards, but assuming you’re talking about reviewing 10 new cards, I suspect the deck you’re using might be too advanced for you at the moment.
If it’s taking you 1 hour, then I suspect that you’re either doing a lot of in depth studying for each card or you’re hitting a very high fail rate.
If it’s a high fail rate, I would recommend decreasing the limit to something smaller like say 3 or 5 cards to start with and gradually bumping the number up as you get faster / more comfortable while maintaining a ~80-90% pass rate when reviewing old cards (by increasing or decreasing the daily review limit as needed).
If it’s a large amount of in depth studying, I won’t discount the effort you’re putting in since it has value, but I want to emphasize that early on in the learning process, you won’t be able to efficiently or effectively understand things to a high level. Part of learning is reviewing the same material over and over with a greater level of understanding each time. So, you don’t need to know everything about a word / kanji right now, I think it’s more effective to review it again later when you understand the language better. At the beginning, I think it’s more important to establish a basic foundation by being exposed to a lot of different words / kanji / sentences, so you have a greater pool of information to draw on when you encounter new information in the rest of your learning.
If you’re talking about *making* 10 Anki Cards, that’s actually about right. 5 to 6 minutes per card, if you’re getting fancy with them or doing them by hand, is pretty normal.
If you’re talking about *reviewing* cards, then to be honest, I’m not sure what you’re doing with that time. 6 minutes per card is almost unbelievably long. 50 per hour is perhaps even a tad slow, but may also be pretty reasonable if they didn’t remember a chunk of the reviews.
When you see a card, you either know it, know something about it but not everything, or don’t know it at all. This should be a pretty much instantaneous judgment. If you take several minutes to recall the word, you don’t know it. Per card, before you hit the “show” button or whatever its called, it really should only be measured in a handful of seconds.
If you know it, then great, hit the relevant button and you’re on to the next card. If you don’t know it, take 30 to 60 seconds to read the back of the card, figure out what you got wrong, and put it back in the pile. You shouldn’t have to close Anki to go research the word you got wrong: All of the relevant info should be *on the card* (And I know for a fact that it is on the Core Decks, having done them myself)
All told, you should be going through 1 review card in maybe a minute if you got it wrong, and less than 30 seconds if you got it right.
I’m genuinely curious to hear what you’re spending the additional 5 minutes on.
Nobody “learns” 50 new cards in an hour. They either already knew / had decent exposure on the words, or aren’t retaining them. 10 completely new cards with kanji you’ve never seen isn’t crazy. I do 20 per hour, but usually 3 or 4 are self-explanatory / easy, 5 or 6 have kanji I’ve seen before / pronunciation I can guess, and maybe 10 are completely new.
Just keep trucking, you’re doing fine. Maybe work on your retention rate for less new cards. Come up with pneumonics / look up radicals. It’ll help get to that 85-90% ideal rate
I feel this. I got called “brain damaged” when telling people i need 90mins for 10 new cards a day (with about 150-200 reviews) because of my low retention rate (70% on mature cards). I guess this just a difference in peoples memory vs “ours”. I just can’t remember cards when using autofail extension, speedrunning reviews like some do to do 20 new cards in 30 mins.
Tbh i don’t mind. I almost finished the core 2k and jp sub only immersion is already working. Just do your thing and stay consistent.
Also, keep in mind immersion is much more important than anki.
So I had the realization that my ADHD was really kicking my butt with monkey. I’ve come to realize that it’s just going to take me longer than other people, but what I did do is start to figure out how to make my focus on the cards better. One of the ways that I’ve done that is to write stuff down three or four times. It takes longer, but I don’t have to go back to the card as often.
It can be super hard, but what I did is I just sort of tried to look at what my brain was doing when I was looking at flashcards. But my brain is doing is essentially trying to think of all the ways it could use the word. It’s almost like I’m daydreaming how to use a word. 😅 That isn’t to say that I don’t think that imagining the ways to use a word and trying to think of ways of using it in the sentence are bad, but if I don’t dial it back some and focus on the actual characters and the word they are associated with I just struggle more.
I like to separate learning and reviewing. I put a lot of effort and concentration into learning a new grammar point or word. Once I know the item deeply, it goes into reviews. I don’t remember how to do this with Anki.
I also found those core decks boring and painful. I would seriously consider one of the popular beginner textbooks recommended here.
I wanted to mention this since it may save you a lot of time, hopefully it is relevant. If you are failing a lot of cards you may want to change your settings to make sure you don’t get stuck reviewing the same things over needlessly (some people call it ease hell) if you haven’t already. This video discusses it.
Aim for 10~15 seconds per card. Don’t be afraid to hit again.
Also, I suggest adding more learning steps (e.g. 3 days, 1 week, 18 days) before a card ‘graduates’ to mature to prevent ease from dropping and avoid burying yourself under a mountain of reviews.
12 comments
first of all it’s not a race
also some words are harder than others
and practice makes it easier so this makes comparison even harder
also people exaggerate online to garner validation
also depending on what you do with each card, it can take more or less time
don’t compare yourself to others, just self-evaluate and decide if something is working *for you* right now, and if it isn’t adjust
you can never keep up with the kardashians, they’re always greener on the other side of the burned bridge
There are a whole lot of factors that could be making your case and the other person’s case different. The comparisons are not equal, their reasons for doing 50 cards are unknown, they coulda been studying numbers for all you know.
what are you learning exactly? do the words have kanji in them? do you know kanji?
A number of factors can work towards faster anki cards.
1- pc vs phone: writing anki cards on pc is much faster than on phones
2- content of cards…keep the content to a minimum. I usually do the word on the front, pronunciation + max 1-2 meanings on back
3- extension: there are some extensions on a computer that will auto create an anki card
It’s not clear if you’re talking about creating 10 Anki cards or reviewing 10 new cards or reviewing 10 old cards, but assuming you’re talking about reviewing 10 new cards, I suspect the deck you’re using might be too advanced for you at the moment.
If it’s taking you 1 hour, then I suspect that you’re either doing a lot of in depth studying for each card or you’re hitting a very high fail rate.
If it’s a high fail rate, I would recommend decreasing the limit to something smaller like say 3 or 5 cards to start with and gradually bumping the number up as you get faster / more comfortable while maintaining a ~80-90% pass rate when reviewing old cards (by increasing or decreasing the daily review limit as needed).
If it’s a large amount of in depth studying, I won’t discount the effort you’re putting in since it has value, but I want to emphasize that early on in the learning process, you won’t be able to efficiently or effectively understand things to a high level. Part of learning is reviewing the same material over and over with a greater level of understanding each time. So, you don’t need to know everything about a word / kanji right now, I think it’s more effective to review it again later when you understand the language better. At the beginning, I think it’s more important to establish a basic foundation by being exposed to a lot of different words / kanji / sentences, so you have a greater pool of information to draw on when you encounter new information in the rest of your learning.
If you’re talking about *making* 10 Anki Cards, that’s actually about right. 5 to 6 minutes per card, if you’re getting fancy with them or doing them by hand, is pretty normal.
If you’re talking about *reviewing* cards, then to be honest, I’m not sure what you’re doing with that time. 6 minutes per card is almost unbelievably long. 50 per hour is perhaps even a tad slow, but may also be pretty reasonable if they didn’t remember a chunk of the reviews.
When you see a card, you either know it, know something about it but not everything, or don’t know it at all. This should be a pretty much instantaneous judgment. If you take several minutes to recall the word, you don’t know it. Per card, before you hit the “show” button or whatever its called, it really should only be measured in a handful of seconds.
If you know it, then great, hit the relevant button and you’re on to the next card. If you don’t know it, take 30 to 60 seconds to read the back of the card, figure out what you got wrong, and put it back in the pile. You shouldn’t have to close Anki to go research the word you got wrong: All of the relevant info should be *on the card* (And I know for a fact that it is on the Core Decks, having done them myself)
All told, you should be going through 1 review card in maybe a minute if you got it wrong, and less than 30 seconds if you got it right.
I’m genuinely curious to hear what you’re spending the additional 5 minutes on.
Nobody “learns” 50 new cards in an hour. They either already knew / had decent exposure on the words, or aren’t retaining them. 10 completely new cards with kanji you’ve never seen isn’t crazy. I do 20 per hour, but usually 3 or 4 are self-explanatory / easy, 5 or 6 have kanji I’ve seen before / pronunciation I can guess, and maybe 10 are completely new.
Just keep trucking, you’re doing fine. Maybe work on your retention rate for less new cards. Come up with pneumonics / look up radicals. It’ll help get to that 85-90% ideal rate
I feel this. I got called “brain damaged” when telling people i need 90mins for 10 new cards a day (with about 150-200 reviews) because of my low retention rate (70% on mature cards). I guess this just a difference in peoples memory vs “ours”. I just can’t remember cards when using autofail extension, speedrunning reviews like some do to do 20 new cards in 30 mins.
Tbh i don’t mind. I almost finished the core 2k and jp sub only immersion is already working.
Just do your thing and stay consistent.
Also, keep in mind immersion is much more important than anki.
So I had the realization that my ADHD was really kicking my butt with monkey. I’ve come to realize that it’s just going to take me longer than other people, but what I did do is start to figure out how to make my focus on the cards better. One of the ways that I’ve done that is to write stuff down three or four times. It takes longer, but I don’t have to go back to the card as often.
It can be super hard, but what I did is I just sort of tried to look at what my brain was doing when I was looking at flashcards. But my brain is doing is essentially trying to think of all the ways it could use the word. It’s almost like I’m daydreaming how to use a word. 😅 That isn’t to say that I don’t think that imagining the ways to use a word and trying to think of ways of using it in the sentence are bad, but if I don’t dial it back some and focus on the actual characters and the word they are associated with I just struggle more.
I like to separate learning and reviewing. I put a lot of effort and concentration into learning a new grammar point or word. Once I know the item deeply, it goes into reviews. I don’t remember how to do this with Anki.
I also found those core decks boring and painful. I would seriously consider one of the popular beginner textbooks recommended here.
I wanted to mention this since it may save you a lot of time, hopefully it is relevant. If you are failing a lot of cards you may want to change your settings to make sure you don’t get stuck reviewing the same things over needlessly (some people call it ease hell) if you haven’t already. This video discusses it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XaJjbCSXT0
Aim for 10~15 seconds per card. Don’t be afraid to hit again.
Also, I suggest adding more learning steps (e.g. 3 days, 1 week, 18 days) before a card ‘graduates’ to mature to prevent ease from dropping and avoid burying yourself under a mountain of reviews.