I've been wanting to give something back to this community for a while, and here it is.
If you've been using Anki to study vocabulary, you may want to stop until you take a look at this. It's a shared deck called 2-Step Japanese.
It's basically an Anki hack, which makes a radical improvement (I'd say) to the program.
I’d been wanting to do this for years, and about 6 months ago I finally completed it, and have been testing it ever since. It’s a bigger improvement than I ever imagined. I've been using it every day, and you can probably tell I'm excited about it, so let me explain:
In normal Anki, you only have 1 step. So your cards either look something like this:
Front: 鉛筆 Back: えんぴつ Pencil
or like this:
Front: これは鉛筆ですか？ Back: えんぴつ Is this a pencil?
That is, you’ve either only got vocabulary with no context, or a sentence, which is good for context, but makes it too easy to guess the kanji.
Enter 2-Step Japanese
This method solves that issue. The cards are presented differently than normal. Like this:
Step 1: The kanji is shown. 鉛筆
Then, when you click on the kanji,
Step 2: The sentence is shown. これは鉛筆ですか？
At this point, you’re back to regular Anki. Either click “Show Answer” or the spacebar, and the kanji with furigana will appear, along with an English definition. (You’ll need to install the “Japanese Support” add-on to see the furigana.)
Just reading about this, it may be hard to imagine what a difference this makes. Download it and try it! I think you’ll like it. I wouldn't study vocabulary any other way. But then I came up with it, so I'm kind of partial.
This is a sample deck with only 288 cards at roughly the JLPT2 level, so feel free to delete the content and add your own material. The content is far less important than the 2-step method.
You’ll note that when editing the cards, the fields are not in the order they are shown when reviewing the cards. This enables you to use multiple example sentences for the same kanji without having to turn off the duplicates checking. It also makes it easier to paste in sample sentences. It feels weird at first, but once you get used to it, well, maybe it’ll make sense. You could always re-order them if you want, but try it this way for a while and see.
I’ll also eventually be uploading a 3000+ card deck using this 2-step method after I get that cleaned up.
Let me know what you think.
Enjoy!
If you've been using Anki to study vocabulary, you may want to stop until you take a look at this. It's a shared deck called 2-Step Japanese.
It's basically an Anki hack, which makes a radical improvement (I'd say) to the program.
I’d been wanting to do this for years, and about 6 months ago I finally completed it, and have been testing it ever since. It’s a bigger improvement than I ever imagined. I've been using it every day, and you can probably tell I'm excited about it, so let me explain:
In normal Anki, you only have 1 step. So your cards either look something like this:
Front: 鉛筆 Back: えんぴつ Pencil
or like this:
Front: これは鉛筆ですか？ Back: えんぴつ Is this a pencil?
That is, you’ve either only got vocabulary with no context, or a sentence, which is good for context, but makes it too easy to guess the kanji.
Enter 2-Step Japanese
This method solves that issue. The cards are presented differently than normal. Like this:
Step 1: The kanji is shown. 鉛筆
Then, when you click on the kanji,
Step 2: The sentence is shown. これは鉛筆ですか？
At this point, you’re back to regular Anki. Either click “Show Answer” or the spacebar, and the kanji with furigana will appear, along with an English definition. (You’ll need to install the “Japanese Support” add-on to see the furigana.)
Just reading about this, it may be hard to imagine what a difference this makes. Download it and try it! I think you’ll like it. I wouldn't study vocabulary any other way. But then I came up with it, so I'm kind of partial.
This is a sample deck with only 288 cards at roughly the JLPT2 level, so feel free to delete the content and add your own material. The content is far less important than the 2-step method.
You’ll note that when editing the cards, the fields are not in the order they are shown when reviewing the cards. This enables you to use multiple example sentences for the same kanji without having to turn off the duplicates checking. It also makes it easier to paste in sample sentences. It feels weird at first, but once you get used to it, well, maybe it’ll make sense. You could always re-order them if you want, but try it this way for a while and see.
I’ll also eventually be uploading a 3000+ card deck using this 2-step method after I get that cleaned up.
Let me know what you think.
Enjoy!