super proud of these graphs

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.