Using anki for vocab: should I do English to Japanese or Japanese to English?

12 comments

1. Japanese to English

2. English to Japanese won’t be sustainable because too many Japanese words have a similar English meaning. Soon enough you will read an English keyword and there will be a dozen possible Japanese words that could be the answer. Also, many Japanese words have multiple English meanings, often surprisingly different from each other. It will be impossible to maintain cards your way. Use this instead:

   https://animecards.site/ankicards/

3. J->E this is your passive vocabulary

   E->J this is going to contribute to your active vocabulary (but it’s more complicated than that)

   most cards are gonna be J->E

   but…some cards you might want to do both ways

4. Both really.

   Japanese to english trains your recognition

   English to japanese helps your recall.

   To put it in some practical sense:

   If i show you a picture of a pizza and ask you what it is, thats recognition. If i ask you to discribe a pizza from memory, thats recall.

5. I always have both. I can’t explain it as scientifically or succinctly as some of the others here, but I just find it’s always easier to me to go from japanese to english, but the other way around is more difficult for me so I like to cover both bases. For instance, it’s really easy for me to read “senshyuu” and think “last week”. I think this is because japanese really likes to build off of other words and there is like a logic to it. I know shyuu get’s used for week a lot and sen get’s used for “last” when we are talking about time a lot, so it’s easy to deduce that senshyuu would be last week. I don’t have to think about all the different ways of saying “last” or “week” when I read though.. When I go from the thought “last week” to “senshyuu” instead of the other way around though, it’s really hard for me though. I’m sure that’s because I’ve trained my brain my whole life to express the thought of last week using english.

   TLDR: Since I struggle the most going from english to japanese, I always try to have cards that go both ways to cover my bases.

   Edit note: I’m not sure what happened to my paragraph, but it hardly made sense at all. :’D I tidied it up…

6. I work for “recognition” first, and that’s Japanese to English.

   After you are perfect with “recognition”, you move to “production”. That’s English to Japanese.

7. You can do both. In Anki there’s a setting to have cards be doubled when you add them. So it creates two cards for one entry, front – back and back – front.

8. Never do English -> Japanese. It’s a waste of time, it’s not helpful, it’s often cause of misunderstandings or mistakes (it activates your “English brain”), it’s not 1:1 (lots of words in English can map to different Japanese words depending on context, like know -> 知る/分かる) and it’s just not a productive use of your time. Focus on learning **Japanese**, not learning how translate English into Japanese. Stick to Japanese -> English or Japanese -> Japanese dictionary definition.

9. I have it to japanese to english.

   But I believe you can make your note to have 2 versions of cards

10. I did Japanese to English for close to a year, but I found that in Japanese class I struggled to remember what words to use even though I’ve learnt them before.

    So I now use 2 decks – my general one where I mine from Anime and other sources is Japanese to English, but words from class I do both directions in a different deck.

11. You can set up conditional cards in Anki to let you choose which words will go both ways. I’ve found that if I have recall cards for everything, it gets exhausting and confusing. But I do find it useful to use recall cards for those words that I struggle to remember in conversation despite looking them up multiple times.

    Make a field called “recall” or whatever and populate it with a character while reviewing (via the edit function, which you can sticky to the top on the iphone app). Set that field to be the condition for the recall card.

12. Personally, I use E -> J because my main goal was to learn to speak as quickly as possible, as I’m living in Japan right now.

    However, as others have pointed out, many Japanese words can be used to describe the same English word, so at a certain point, E -> J becomes a little ambiguous.

    I know roughly 600 words and plenty of grammar, but feel like I’m getting to the point where I need to switch to J -> E, as I’m able to speak and construct sentences quite well, but struggle with reading and listening.

    So essentially, my advice is to build a very basic vocab of around 500 of the most common verbs/adjectives/nouns using E -> J, then switch to J -> E and develop listening skills from there.

    Obviously if your intention is to read and not to speak, then solely J -> E makes the most sense.