I was looking at my anki stats over the last year and noticed these 2 graphs:




I thought that I'd post them here before they disappear in a week.

A year ago I made my first trip to Japan in over 10 years. I went to do 2 things: 

1. give a 30 minute talk (in Japanese) at a technical conference 
   
2. Take the N4. 
   

As you can see from the first graph, I was studying my butt off. It looks like I spent ~7 hours that week doing Anki vocab reps. And that doesn't include Kanji reps or time actually spent working on my presentation!

It all went well, and when I came back I was like "Now what? should I continue with this? I certainly don't want to continue at this intensity." So I backed down quite a bit. But what's amazing is that the number of mature cards just continued to grow. I don't feel like my memory is particularly special. Maybe above average, but faaaaaarrrrrr from being the best I know. And yet the total number of mature vocab cards seems to have increased about 50% over the last year: from ~3,000 to ~4,500.

My takeaway is that daily anki usage is amazing for vocabulary building.

My only regret is that, in retrospect, I focused too much on increasing my vocabulary over the last year. I did this because vocabulary flash cards are second nature to me: it's what I did when I was a kid. Only recently did I start using anki for grammar, and the results have been great.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I took the N3 practice test a few months ago and got a solid B on vocab but was borderline B/C on grammar. So in the next year I plan to focus even less on vocabulary, and more on grammar.

right on ariariari!  What I'm struck by is the smoothness of your graphs.  my charts are much more up and down, especially if I look at individual decks like you are doing.  slow and steady is the way to get there though.

Congratulations on all your progress! I hope I can keep it up like you!

I've recently hit a bit of a low and haven't been studying. I just got back into it today to bring down my pile up. But I've still got quite the pile up to go through.

[Zgarbas]

Congratulations and keep up the good work!
Writing about small achievement is a great source of motivation =) feel free to post about your milestones over here

(2015-11-26, 9:27 am)Zgarbas Wrote: Congratulations and keep up the good work!
Writing about small achievement is a great source of motivation =) feel free to post about your milestones over here

Thanks dude. You're right - I've always seen that thread, but never posted there. I should probably start posting there.

(2015-11-25, 7:59 pm)yogert909 Wrote: right on ariariari!  What I'm struck by is the smoothness of your graphs.  my charts are much more up and down, especially if I look at individual decks like you are doing.  slow and steady is the way to get there though.

Thanks man. Can you post your weekly vocab graph (either "achievements" or reviews)? I'd love to see it. 


BTW, if you look at my monthly/deck life graph it is much more jagged:



So you can see that I started with anki 18 months ago for vocab. That was when I picked Japanese up again after a 10 year break. In my first time studying the language I finished about 2 textbooks of Japanese. So when I started with anki this time, I kinda rushed thru adding in all that old vocab. The downside of doing that is that everything I accomplish after that first few months seems small in comparison!

(2015-11-26, 1:24 am)Wovaki Wrote: Congratulations on all your progress! I hope I can keep it up like you!

I've recently hit a bit of a low and haven't been studying. I just got back into it today to bring down my pile up. But I've still got quite the pile up to go through.

My advice is to set your max reps for the day to something managable. Maybe even small, something that won't even feel like a challenge. As long as you do it every day, the results will happen by themselves over time. At least, that's what I've done when I felt overwhelmed by it.

I'm always most struck by the amount of red I see when people post their Anki stats. 

This is what my collection (29.5k notes) looks like:



Not a lot of red, though maybe it's due to me using Anki for things I feel I will remember rather than using it to learn new stuff.

(2015-11-26, 11:55 am)Roketzu Wrote: I'm always most struck by the amount of red I see when people post their Anki stats. 

This is what my collection (29.5k notes) looks like:



Not a lot of red, though maybe it's due to me using Anki for things I feel I will remember rather than using it to learn new stuff.

I'm red-green colorblind, as are about 7% of men. I really wish they would use different colors :/

Can you post a monthly/all time graph, and include the axes? I wonder how long it took you to get to 29.5k notes.

(2015-11-26, 11:58 am)ariariari Wrote: I wonder how long it took you to get to 29.5k notes.

 
(Lies! I've never missed a day, I think messing with my system clock once messed this up)

This Progress Graph probably shows best how long it took. I'm at a point now where the words I add aren't so common so I tend to do them in bursts according to my interests, whereas for the first 20 or so months it was a daily activity for me to be doing vocabulary. The reason for the gap in this last year is this (Skritter):





Writing. I didn't put much time into it until this year, the graph above shows where my study time has gone. I already knew most of the 19k words I've added so I was just using Skritter to learn how to write them all from memory. Retention rate is closer to 96% now on a weekly basis, especially after I got done with the 3k+ yojijukugo nightmare I foisted upon myself... Still, doing those really did work well for bringing my overall level up.

@Roketzu, that's awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Here's mine, it's a little more inconsistent in terms of adding, but I still have that 99% days studied so it's not so bad. As you can see I did a bit of cramming during the times when I added. If you notice the add spike between the 15-20mo range I remember adding 100~ words a day for a few months. That was kind of fun. Nowadays I just do what Roketzu does and just wait until I have about 100 words from reading to add and just add them all at once.

@Roketzu I just saw that you spent up to 148 hours a month studying vocab in anki! Thanks roughly a full time job. And to think, I thought that I went overboard by spending over 40 hours in my second month



@kameden, Can you share your time spent graph as well? I'm just kind of curious.

Neat. I'm posting my duration stats here just for comparison



It looks like the biggest difference is that you've been at it for twice as long as me (1102 days vs 573 days). After that, it looks like the big difference is that you're more efficient than me (6.7s/card vs 9.8s/card).

Thanks Kameden.

I love how the number of reviews in my genki 2 deck has decreased over the last year:



Ditto my Minna no Nihongo 1 vocab deck:



I'm expecting a rough time on the N3 exam next week. It's nice to see that at least I've really moved past the beginer vocab

Here's my full collection.  I averaged 1hour 15 minutes/day, but lately it's been over 2 hours as I'm pushing to finish RTK before year's end.  It says I skipped 6 days, but I lost some data the first year when anki didn't sync properly.   I've actually only missed one day in the last going on 3 years, and I'm very disappointed to say it was 3 days ago.  Somehow I forgot to study in between meeting with relatives and eating thanksgiving turkey.

All that yellow is the result of a few creative usages of anki that were probably just big mistakes.

Keep up the good work!!!

you inspired me. I think I should also start using Anki right now

Here's another fun one. Weekly, total time studied over the last year:


As you can see, my anki trauma is quickly becoming just a memory. (11+ hours in a single week?). I think that I unsuspended all my cards in preparation for N4 or something. 

Around week -30 I switched my kanji deck from keyword->kanji to kanji->definition. That probably accounts for the decline from 8 to 5 hours a week.

I'm looking forward to a 2016 where I don't see numbers that high again!

Here are my stats for the past year:


Ignore the first two, those are only relevant for my Chinese decks. It might be interesting for some people to see the results of Anki for someone doing it not as regularly as one is supposed to do. It's really impressive in my opinion if you can keep up doing all your reps every day of the year. It's something I'm trying to do myself but I always get thrown off track after a while and drop it pretty much completely for a week or two.
It's still a very important part of my studies despite not being as consistent with it as I should be. Without it I wouldn't have gotten as far.