Just get ready to wake up to this every morning.



And then remember that it's only reviews, and that new words will be additional to that workload. And then remember that this doesn't go away on weekends. And then remember that if you miss even a single day you'll be buried for a week.

The last deck was my original deck for learning random kanji. It quickly became a sentence deck which I use as a catch-all for random words I want to learn, troublesome vocab reinforcement, grammar, etc. It has about 4200 mature sentences in it.

Go get 'em tiger.

I am disappointed in the low amount of core2k/6k reviews you have. Back in my prime I was rockin' 1300~/day minimum core2k/6k reviews. Why bother doing Anki with only that many reviews.

(I'm not serious about the "Why bother doing Anki" part or the "I am disappointed" part in case it's not obvious).

Yeah but I have a full-time job, my own apartment (i.e., chores, errands), cats (i.e., chores, errands), and a girlfriend (i.e., chores, errands). I get like an hour of free time a day, man!

EDIT: an hour of free time after studying, that is. Studying is my second full time job.

A good reminder to everyone else to keep your new cards under control.

Excessive anki'ing has been linked to burnout, and even the development of certain types of cancer(*).

*shudder* No thanks. I'd rather move at my super slow pace and enjoy my Japanese time rather than have to slog through an Anki deck.

[s0apgun]

I think this thread might be over exaggerating it a bit. I time box for one hour everyday in Anki and I usually move through 400-600 cards in core10k. More than 1000+ reviews per day might be overkill especially if you don't have time for it but I can see doing that fine if you have 2 hours for flashcards.

Edit: I don't recommend doing any more than 40 new cards per day. You only need to do 28 new cards per day to do 10,000 in a year.

s0apgun Wrote:I think this thread might be over exaggerating it a bit. I time box for one hour everyday in Anki and I usually move through 400-600 cards in core10k. More than 1000+ reviews per day might be overkill especially if you don't have time for it but I can see doing that fine if you have 2 hours for flashcards.

Edit: I don't recommend doing any more than 40 new cards per day. You only need to do 28 new cards per day to do 10,000 in a year.

Core reviews: 1.5-2.5 hours depending on material and state of mind
RTK reviews: 20 minutes
Sentence deck reviews: 45 minutes to 1.5 hours, depending on material and state of mind

Also keep in mind with 100-200 new cards per day, 75% of my review cards are less than a week old. New material can take a lot longer to review, especially when Core decides to throw 4 or 5 synonyms at me in a week.

Then it's on to new material, which takes about two hours.

Then that night it's sentence mining for new words/grammar I find in Core example sentences, every day use, on the side of my shampoo bottle, etc.

Why not more than 40 words per day? Is 10000 per year some sort of maximum? I have no set goals or daily-limits. I learn what I can with the time I have, which works out to more on some days and less on others. I'm doing standard Core order so sometimes an example sentence will have four unknown words in it, other days I'll know half the cards already. Yesterday I decided to learn all the names of the planets, the solar system, etc, that was a dozen words out of nowhere right there. If my retention was suffering I'd consider slowing down. But I haven't dropped below 95%.

That said, I do spend 90% of my day feeling like my brain has been microwaved.

40-60 new words that I had mined/seen somewhere was my norm. There was a point where I was doing 100-200 new Core6k words, but thats mostly because I knew a lot. There's nothing wrong with this. The only reason that its cautioned against is that your reviews start to stack up.

[Zgarbas]

I used to be a mass reviewer like you, but then I took a break to the study (I've always been a fan of multiple decks, but I'd rarely have under 1000 daily reviews total)

Just remember that this is what happens if you ever take a break.

That being said, I rarely ever spent more than one hour doing Anki reviews.

Set anki to limit yourself to no more than 200-300 reviews a day per deck. That's what I did even though I was learning +50 words a day, and the only effect is that it takes a bit more to mark all cards as mature, but you retain your sanity and social life.

There is barely any impact in success rate, as it always gives priority to flashcards that need reviewing the most, which usually are the most recent ones. Cards that you don't have to review in a month aren't magically forgotten if you review them a month and a day later; also, if you answer correctly, the SRS will space them further than if you answered them as soon as they expired.

Hahaha. NO WAY am I going to do anything close to 700 reviews per day.
I'm impressed you can make it. There's a whole lot of discipline there.
But just how many cards do you keep per word? I do 35 word/day and get ~110 reviews per day.
I integrated listening and production in one card, and I think it works great. One card per word. As long as I focus and do new reviews properly, retention is no problem.

I found a good number for me personally is 20 new cards a day. Right now I'm doing 150 reviews a day + 20 new words, and this takes around 1 - 1.5 hours normally (I do English -> Japanese and always write all the words on paper every time so I'm a bit slow with reviewing). The rest of the time I have for Japanese studies a normal day I'd rather spend on consuming native material honestly, since that is the main reason I'm even learning the language in the first place.

Northern_Lord Wrote:Hahaha. NO WAY am I going to do anything close to 700 reviews per day.

Its not that bad if you review at your optimum time of day and do more during the day. Most people have a good time of day to review. Anyway, if you figure your answering time on cards will run 5-20seconds, and take the average 12.5seconds/card. That's only 2.5 hours. If you are OCD-ish about Anki and use the mobile and pc version and sync, that's doable. The way you optimize is by knowing what your average speed on cards is, maturing rate, and number of matures in the review each day. If that's 400 cards of matures, then you will get through them quick probably. If its too much, then you back off on new cards.

Anki has good graphs to help you figure out if you are aiming to end up with too many reviews on your plate.

Edit: Should have added that it also depends on the type of card. If its a reading only card then it can be quick, but if you have to listen then maybe the review time per card goes up.

I'm actually kind of curious as to how this cramming would work out in the end. Has anyone here done the vocab cramming and then gone on to consume native material and seen really good results?

I've never looked at Core and the like so I don't know anything about them. I went with about 20~25 words per day (starting after 1 year of class and 1 more year of sorta kinda sentence mining) but took quite long breaks (up to 1 - 2 months) here and there to keep reviews under control and focus on other things.

I gathered all my words from the things I was reading/watching so my main focus was constantly on native input and I ended up with a native-like understanding of Japanese. This all took ~5 years. Certainly not lightning-speed but I think it's pretty reasonable...

I'm vaguely considering learning another language in the future so.. curiosity GO!

I've been doing 50 new core cards a day for a month or so. in addition to 20-30 new grammar cards a day, as well as however many mined cards have become i+1. Granted I work at a small eikaiwa so I have a good amount of free time, which I use to study. So I spend something like 3-4 hours reviewing through out the day broken in to small bits. As far as the 50 cards a day goes, its ok if you stay on top of the reviews. However if you basically go a day without zeroing your reviews they snowball to a stupidly high level of reviews very quickly.

this all seems like a good way to build a foundation for the japanese language house you will eventually build and inhabit, but nothing more.
It's really easy to control the anki-ing part of the process, which is why I think we spend so much time talking about it... but then you've got to actually build the japanese house on top of that foundation through exposure, talking, reading etc.
that's the hard part guys, that takes more time, that's what I think should deserve most of the attention.

being good at the anki game is not the same as speaking/reading/writing a foreign language.

dtcamero Wrote:being good at the anki game is not the same as speaking/reading/writing/listening a foreign language.

FTFY

Meh, it all depends on WHAT it is you're learning. 50 new cards / day doesn't have to translate into 700 reviews.

It will, if you are trying to learn words you've never seen before, and aren't likely to see outside of Anki, but there are steps you can take to reduce the number of reviews:

1. spend more time on reading and listening than on Anki; it will make it much easier to remember words you encounter, allowing you to pick easy a lot
2. suspend cards that are too difficult, either right away, or whenever else they start giving you trouble; an alternative would be to just set your leech threshold really low, but I'm not a fan of that; there are several upsides and no real downside to doing it manually, on an individual basis
3. suspend cards you know already (thanks to immersion). Don't keep reviewing "この本はとてもおもしろい" just because it's in your cue. It's not helping you get better at Japanese.
4. choose your decks carefully to begin with, make sure the material is appropriate for your level
5. use context, even within Anki: don't do words, do sentences; have audio, maybe even pictures
6. add cards only after all your reviews are done every day, and add another learning step (30 mins, for instance); learning new cards will take longer, but reviewing old ones will take less; this way, if you get bored and stop early, it doesn't make the next day that much more difficult, it actually makes it easier (since you stopped yourself from adding new cards, not from reviewing old ones).


Obviously, point nr. 2 will result in a percentage of words you simply won't learn. But that percentage will be significantly smaller than the percentage you reduce your time spent on Anki, number or reviews, or frustration coefficient by. So it's well worth doing. If you suspend a card right away, it won't count towards the number of new cards added.

And if you're worried about suspending cards after you added them (because it's cheating, you're not really learning 50 cards/day), you can always just replace the cards you suspend with new, easier ones, or even edit the original card to make it easier ( i.e. by adding furigana to the problem-word - assuming you're doing sentence recognition; or by adding in the first syllable and/or Kanji as a hint, if you're doing clozed deleted production). Do that, and next time the word pops up, in another sentence, you will have less trouble learning it properly. Or, if it doesn't pop up again, then it probably wasn't that common a word so who cares.

Like a lot of people in here have mentioned, it's definitely doable. My optimum work time is in the morning. I wrote every single university paper of any worth starting at about 5am. Studying is the same way for me. The sentence and RTK reviews I'm lucky enough to be able to do at work. Sentence mining is done at night because it doesn't require much brain power and it's all I have energy for.

Like Stansfield mentioned, I add new cards last so I don't get flooded. If I finish reviews and have no time, then no new cards, easy as that. I've got a different strategy for dealing with words that don't stick: write them out, with furigana, hit hard, see them again. They eventually get learned. Fully agree with using context. For easy cards you only need to hit easy about 4 or 5 times so I don't really bother suspending stuff.

dtcamero Wrote:this all seems like a good way to build a foundation for the japanese language house you will eventually build and inhabit, but nothing more.
It's really easy to control the anki-ing part of the process, which is why I think we spend so much time talking about it... but then you've got to actually build the japanese house on top of that foundation through exposure, talking, reading etc.
that's the hard part guys, that takes more time, that's what I think should deserve most of the attention.

being good at the anki game is not the same as speaking/reading/writing a foreign language.

This is definitely true. Speaking and listening are my strong points because of my work environment. My grammar isn't wonderful but I'm conversational and can express what I need to usually. I also understand most of the conversations around me, albeit these are kids and the context isn't usually difficult. I'm hoping to leverage Core and this massive amount of work to start reading novels by about summer when it's too hot to be cooped up in the house.

drdunlap Wrote:I'm actually kind of curious as to how this cramming would work out in the end. Has anyone here done the vocab cramming and then gone on to consume native material and seen really good results?

You can do a hell of a lot more with vocab than you can with grammar. New grammar is infinitely easier to understand when you understand the words and concepts it's operating on. I'd say yeah, go ahead and slam vocabulary and only do grammar as needed. 8 months ago I knew a few hundred words and couldn't communicate or understand anything. I can hold a conversation and understand most of what's happening around me now. I can't remember the last time my boss tried to speak English to me.

RandomQuotes Wrote:I've been doing 50 new core cards a day for a month or so. in addition to 20-30 new grammar cards a day, as well as however many mined cards have become i+1. Granted I work at a small eikaiwa so I have a good amount of free time, which I use to study. So I spend something like 3-4 hours reviewing through out the day broken in to small bits. As far as the 50 cards a day goes, its ok if you stay on top of the reviews. However if you basically go a day without zeroing your reviews they snowball to a stupidly high level of reviews very quickly.

Seems we're in the same boat. I'm the only teacher there and 100% of my prep time just goes into studying Japanese. My boss not only doesn't care but likes it--I fully teach in Japanese now and she just compliments my progress. So it's tons of study/practice time for me at work, which is nice.

Lots of good tips in here. But I'm dead serious about the cost: getting out of bed some mornings is torture. I go to sleep every night physically and mentally exhausted. But Japanese isn't a hobby for me, it's more about a quest for self--it's been three years since I've been able to communicate with anyone and I was starting to feel like I wasn't even a person anymore. Studying Japanese for personhood? Yeah, that's motivation. Not too worried about burning out.

Anyway, 9am and I haven't started studying yet. 766/64/130 today, I think I'll add 100 core cards and 100 new sentences.

dtcamero Wrote:this all seems like a good way to build a foundation for the japanese language house you will eventually build and inhabit, but nothing more.
It's really easy to control the anki-ing part of the process, which is why I think we spend so much time talking about it... but then you've got to actually build the japanese house on top of that foundation through exposure, talking, reading etc.
that's the hard part guys, that takes more time, that's what I think should deserve most of the attention.

being good at the anki game is not the same as speaking/reading/writing a foreign language.

This is why I don't like Core- because it's like a little colony of Japanese hiding away on a deserted island.
But I'm curious as to whether or not slamming thousands of words into your head over a short period of time and then switching gears to Homebuilders101 would be effective. Everyone I know (warning: not a lot) who has a good grip on Japanese seems to have done it they way I did and gathered words and grammar from their surroundings as they went along.

I know most people don't seem to stick around on these forums after mastering the language but if anyone's done it the cramcramcram way I'd be interested in hearing about it. 8)

Stansfield123 Wrote:3. suspend cards you know already (thanks to immersion). Don't keep reviewing "この本はとてもおもしろい" just because it's in your cue. It's not helping you get better at Japanese.

Haha, what a coincidence. That card just popped up in my reviews. Luckily my easy interval put it at two point something years. Maybe you're right and I should just delete stupid stuff like this.

drdunlap Wrote:I know most people don't seem to stick around on these forums after mastering the language

... or maybe they have actually burned out and given up. :-)

fzort Wrote:

drdunlap Wrote:I know most people don't seem to stick around on these forums after mastering the language

... or maybe they have actually burned out and given up. :-)

On Japanese or on talking about Japanese with Japanese learners..? :x

Core reviews done. Studied 671 cards in 92 minutes (related cards buried until tomorrow). Today was relatively fast because my retention was relatively good (96.1%). I had to edit two cards to add Japanese definitions, which took a couple minutes each.

The good thing about studying at this level is it's relatively rare to come across a word that you don't know at least half of: you either know the kanji's basic meaning, or know the reading from previous vocab, or with many compounds you already know both kanji, both readings, and it's just a new combination. 60 words a day at beginner level would be pretty awful (you don't have much of a foundation to build off of), but at intermediate level and above it's not so bad.

I never really learned with flashcards. Well, I did, to some degree, but not SRS, but by making decks on Quizlet, where the cards don't pop up again.

It does work because you only have to see a word ONCE in MANY cases and won't forget it anymore. Or you really forgot it, but do a rep cycle when you have the time, and then it's back after having failed it that one time. Some words may need 10 encounters.

Learning vocab for me was always "encounter a word and get what it means" and then noticing it when I come across it in the wild. Even "I know this word, I learned it" was enough for me to count it as a success, because when I then looked it up again, there was something clicking and I had the word.

I also wrote some words I found useful on stickies and put them everywhere in my room, like 反射、たまむすび、優先順位、乾燥機, and I didn't actively look at those stickies, but mt eyes met them naturally again and again.. and I used them when I had the chance, and that's how they came to life for me.

Doing vocab with ANKI really is painful, because ANKI is painful for me. I'm right now fighting my way through the RTK deck, and Kanji are nothing like words, they're "items, made of items", and I need ANKI for this, but ONLY for this.

I do have Core6k. What I plan to do with this is kill the front side with the question, then flip the card, write the sentence by hand and hit easy every time, because I know most words, some will click at once (especially with 常用 under my belt), and those that won't stick I didn't hear in over 3 years and hence are unlikely to be useful for me in the near future. They may even pop up in some context that's relevant for me, like, ya know, some tentacle porn or so, and then they will stick.

TLDR:

ANKI is way too めんどくさい to bother for me. I got the language to a fluent level without it, so it's by no means mandatory, at least not for vocabulary.

However, I won't say that my way works for everyone.