Every day, I dedicate at least a few hours of my day to studying Japanese. A regular schedule for me is as follows...

- 30 minutes in the morning to review kanji/vocab
- learn new kanji in RTK (just going over the kanji not included in RTK 1st Edition)
- 45 new words in Core 2k
- reading NHK News Easy
- another batch of 45 words in Core 2k
- reading a lesson in Tae Kim
- reading stuff in Japanese, watching videos, etc.

I've only been studying Japanese for three months, mind you, but is there anything else I should be doing right now? I kind of feel like I'm going at a rather slow pace. Among my main questions are...

1.) When reading, should I be adding vocab that I don't know to Anki? Or is it just repetitive considering that I'm already doing Core 2k?
2.) Should I be using subs2srs? I've been eyeing this for a short while and I am also a fan of anime, but just how effective is it?

Your pace is fine, you probably just thought it was going to be a shorter journey than it actually is.

saikkun Wrote:is there anything else I should be doing right now?

Probably more listening. I made the mistake of ignoring it, and it becomes really frustrating when you can read stuff pretty fast and understand it, and then not be able to understand the same thing when spoken. So just try not to neglect it, reading helps, but they are still seperate skills and you need to practice both.

saikkun Wrote:1.) When reading, should I be adding vocab that I don't know to Anki? Or is it just repetitive considering that I'm already doing Core 2k?

What I did when I was initially learning vocabulary was I got the core6k and suspended everything and set the new card limit to 1000. That way I could read and add new words to my deck without having to deal with any sort of interference from the deck order or anything. I would just do a quick search on Anki to see if the word was in the deck, if it was, I would just click unsuspend, if it wasn't, I would just add it to a text file to import later that day. If I didn't get enough words for that day, I would just unsuspend cards in order. Also sometimes if a kanji wasn't clicking, I could search the deck for the kanji and unsuspend other words that included it to drill the meaning / reading into my head. I didn't do RTK or really any kanji stuff beforehand so you might not have this problem as much.

Looks fine to me. A consistent pace is better than a fast pace.

1) I wouldn't - you can if you like, but I like to keep reading and SRS separate.
2) I think subs2srs is the best thing ever, so yeah. But it's an extra load of Ankiing and too much time in Anki isn't much fun, so prioritise. Or if you're only three months in you might still be supermotivated, so maybe you'll be okay.

[s0apgun]

What are your goals?

My advice is to drop the amount of 'new' core cards. I do 40 a day and thats pretty excessive. It seems like you're doing 90 new cards a day? That will not last long. My SRS time to complete reviews and new cards is 1 hour. I spend the rest of my study time reading manga and novels for about 2 hours.

Ah, thank you for your guys' advice ^^ It's nice to know I'm going on a steady pace.

s0apgun Wrote:What are your goals?

My advice is to drop the amount of 'new' core cards. I do 40 a day and thats pretty excessive. It seems like you're doing 90 new cards a day? That will not last long. My SRS time to complete reviews and new cards is 1 hour. I spend the rest of my study time reading manga and novels for about 2 hours.

I'm trying to develop my Japanese to the point that I can understand books, anime, video games, manga, etc. with ease. I practice speaking but just being able to understand right now is my top priority.

Would 45 core cards a day be suitable? By next year I would like to understand around 50% of Japanese since my family's planning a trip to Japan around that time.

saikkun Wrote:Ah, thank you for your guys' advice ^^ It's nice to know I'm going on a steady pace.


Would 45 core cards a day be suitable? By next year I would like to understand around 50% of Japanese since my family's planning a trip to Japan around that time.

If you have the time to do 45 cards a day, keep going. You dedicate a lot of time to studying the language, that's great. Since you have the motivation right now, don't be afraid to put it up a notch. Since you're feeling as if you're going at a slow pace, perhaps you can add more cards than usual each day until you find your "comfort zone."

If you add "too" (different for everyone) much everyday, you will be bombarded with hundreds of reviews (I learned the hard way, and still am :o) But hey, it's not that bad doing hundreds of reviews while watching some anime.