@Inny Jan
Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that article before, a great read!

"The sole problem here, from the psychologists' perspective, is that
the user's sense of achievement is exactly what we should most
distrust."

When I use ANKI, my sense of achievement is admittedly quite low and it's caused me to give up on more than one occasion. I was hoping to read more on somehow hacking a great initial impression to make memories more durable from the get-go but it seems like that is up to the user and the input. For me, CORE decks have been hard to impress a solid initial memory to aid in later recall, which is why lately I've been sort of a proponent of creating your own decks. It seems to make the review process a bit less mechanical, a little more enjoyable.

kazuki Wrote:When I use ANKI, my sense of achievement is admittedly quite low and it's caused me to give up on more than one occasion. I was hoping to read more on somehow hacking a great initial impression to make memories more durable from the get-go but it seems like that is up to the user and the input. For me, CORE decks have been hard to impress a solid initial memory to aid in later recall, which is why lately I've been sort of a proponent of creating your own decks. It seems to make the review process a bit less mechanical, a little more enjoyable.

I had trouble with my initial studying in Core too, as it seemed I needed a little more initial study time to cement the word. For a while I was doing daily drills on Quizlet for the previous 100 new words but after a while this seemed to be taking as much time as actual reviews.

After finishing RTK I make sure I write out new vocab, with furigana. This seems to work as well as quizlet. I also write out failed cards. This has had the further bonus of slowly transforming my RTK English keywords into Japanese ones, as well.

Aikynaro Wrote:I don't think there's a reason you couldn't start reading after Core6k and do Core10k as well. Just ease off on adding cards a bit - I think it would be well worth it.

Agreed on a lot of Core's word selection. I don't really need 5 words for reform and 6 words for business administration, but I'd sure like to know what a door bell or windshield is.

I actually just bought a book a couple weeks back. I don't have too much time for it but I'm 20 pages in and it's not too brutal. Although it's aimed at older elementary school kids it's still got a massive amount of vocab that I'm not familiar with. I think I'll probably be doing as you said and running Core10k concurrently. I'm just looking forward to the day that "studying" is going to a park and reading. Jesus that sounds nice.

dtcamero Wrote:chrysanthemum is a national symbol so it gets used fairly often as flowers go in japan.
As for TB, well I've heard the word once or twice in movies or books or something.

core10k is pretty basic vocab. reading books would be hard without it. you could and should be reading manga, but novels, especially good ones, would be best after 10k I think. murakami books are pretty easy to read then. they would be a good place to start at that point in my opinion.

I don't read anything except my sentence deck and the back of my shampoo bottle. And that book I mentioned to Aikynaro just a bit ago. I agree with you about 10k still being basic--at 6k there's still a lot of basic stuff I don't know, so I'm sure it's going to stay basic. I just would love to sub all of Core's business/political vocab for round-the-house stuff. I guess that's why I use my sentence deck, but still.

Just as an aside, but for some reason I remember reading the 10k deck's audio wasn't as good as the 2k/6k packs? Am I making that up?

But the problem with the Core series is not the content, but the lack of it.

A native speaker doesn't usually use the top X words used in Japanese media. Natives have those words passively. They'll know them when they come up. They DO use only 2000 words, and those consist of the vocab they need for their personal situation, some of those job-related, or interest-related.

Some words you'll need more often in your life, like ドライバー, some not so often, like 前頭部 (there you have your forehead, the medical term, but the normal word would be おでこ), and what would you need to have certain words active for? You only need certain words in your passive memory.
There are words I can clearly understand in my mother tongue I only ever heard 2 or 3 times in all of 38 years and not even used once.

So how do you sort all these words that are necessary, to then make them active? I'd say read related literature, watch related films or movies or documentations. If you like baseball, watch baseball. Then use them. I learned much of what I know in English by using it in game related forums on the internet in the late 1990s and reading Stephen King. And ya know, I can read Stephen King and almost understand everything, but there WILL be the odd word I don't understand - and most of the time, it doesn't matter.

I know it sounds hard to read when you don't feel ready. Well. See if you can get the text as plain text and copy & paste it into Yomichan or WaKan. I never used Yomichan, but in WaKan, you can paste your text and let it generate readings and, if you want to, meanings, too. Then it would look like this (in this case, without definitions, those would pop up below the word in question in a small box):

By the way, neither Core 10k, nor 6k are actually basic. Like you already noticed, you get X different words for "work" or "produce" and so on, much is political, and so on. You'll probably never see some of these words outside of ANKI, unless you actually bother to read newspapers or are interested in certain topics, like economy or politics (which I am not) - means, you'll end up with a lot of superfluent vocab, while still lacking vital vocabulary for your personal situation.

That's why I wouldn't really recommend the 10k. Maybe the 6k, many of those are actually useful, I'd say about 5000 of them.

Core can be used as a bank of pre-made cards you only learn as you meet new words in a real context. You just need to suspend everything and then un-suspend the words you meet as you go. You get crystal-clear audio and a relatively good example sentence without having to put any effort into creating the card, and the words should stick better than just doing Core cards in whatever order.

That's actually a very nice idea.

Andikaze -- appreciate the reading advice, and I think I'll try to get around to it sooner rather than later. I think I will also do Core10k simultaneously. You've made your misgivings about Core/Vocab slamming clear, but although I can see what you're saying, you've got to take my own experience into account: before Core2k/RTK/Core6k I couldn't understand a word of what was happening around me, and in 7 or 8 months I understand most of what is happening around me. I don't think I could have made that progress so quickly without vocab drilling. Yes, those words need to be "unlocked" by hearing/using/seeing them, but you've got to remember that I also run a large sentence deck that really helps with context. Anytime I hit a word with multiple definitions or a meaning I don't quite grasp, I add a few sentences to the deck. The next time I hear the word in the wild, it's mine, I understand it.

Mulling shooting for N2 this July. That would be sub-N5 to N2 in a year. That would be putting my money where my mouth is. That would be some brutal reading practice that I just don't really have time for during the part of the year I'd most regret being cooped up inside studying. But still thinking about it.

I finished Step 05 of Core6k a couple days back. I ran a new parse of my Core and sentence deck (approximately 5,000 sentences, tons of i+0 grammar/context cards) with cb's excellent parser and have some definite numbers for the past month:

In 31 days my decks went from 5100 to 6300 words, which is 38 words per day. I've had a rough month with being sick a few days, a couple nights out that I really regretted the next day, and just generally being busy with the new year (which is now in Japan). More than once I added zero new words to the decks, but I do my reviews every day regardless.

This of course doesn't include words I pick up passively from hearing/seeing Japanese every day. Those can't really be quantified, and my actual vocab is likely to be a good thousand or more words higher. But those words are going to be stuff like とんかつ, たまねぎ, アソコ, random 外来語, and crap that just generally doesn't need be studied.

Here's my current Anki stats. I actually didn't properly start using it until about 10 months ago. Those first three months (and the reason my "Days Studied" is whacky) is because I originally downloaded a Core deck and soon deleted it, followed by a Genki vocab deck which I also soon deleted. Then it was several months of Rosetta Stone and random sentences like "ネコはいすの上にいます。" I'm sure you can guess the point where Core2k came into play and I've been mad busy ever since.

Telling from your stats, ANKI seems to be a fun activity for you. This is a great thing and maybe a blessing for vocab acquisition, but it doesn't work like this for me - I get tired quickly when doing ANKI and I can barely stand my reps on many days, with not feeling like adding anything at all. And this adds up over time. Still got quite some Kanji left in my RTK deck, I also fail more. My learning cards are actually a bit over 80%, not 95%. That's where my mature cards would sit, if I didn't deliberately fail them from time to time when I feel I have to reconstruct them from a story. I don't wanna dismiss them for half a year prematurely, so I sometimes just reset their timers.

ANKI is not a bad thing per se, but it's just not fun for some people, and those who can't stand to sit down for hours doing "silly vocab quizzes" have plenty of other options - some of which are useful way beyond what you can actually learn with ANKI. That's what I was trying to convey here. Give other methods some time to show their power.
Well I guess you'll get there when you feel ready for it.

Hahaha "fun" is definitely not the right word. But I did spend more than a couple years of my life wasting hundreds (if not thousands) of hours on a certain type of video game, so maybe the sort of grinding patience and dedication required for serious Anki work does in some way suit my personality. I'm also a man of habit, which is almost definitely the biggest consideration of all when studying.

I'm sure you had a lot more fun learning Japanese than I have, but then I wonder how long it took you to get decent with pure immersion and not too much studying?

These days it's hard to qualify my progress. Some days I'll sit down to an hour-long conversation and feel like my Japanese is amazing, then the next day I'll be trying to listen to somebody and understand next to nothing.

I think a lot of us who don't dislike/like doing anki reps do so because they've been working on making it more enjoyable, not because we were born with an SRS-enjoyment gene. There are a lot of things you can try before giving up altogether, and given how efficient SRS is, it would be a shame not to. Obviously if you like the idea of spaced repetition, you'll be more likely to stick to it (the same way if you like the idea of mnemonics, you'll be more likely to stick to RTK even when it seems unpleasant).

What worked for me was making easy cards (using the minimum information principle and adding only material I'm already familiar with - I never study in Anki; failing only the occasional card turns SRSing into a long string of small rewards), experimenting with reviewing at certain times/a certain number of times in a day (it turned out I like reviewing when I've just woken up much better), having fun cards thrown in the mix (subs2srs and other cards with audio/nice pictures), and occasionally reviewing all my subjects in one filtered deck at random, the variety making the whole thing much less repetitive. Sometimes I'll also timebox my reps or review while watching something, which is slower but feels more like a break than studying. Other people find statistics/gamification motivating. Ruthlessly deleting leeches or cards you don't like can also be a good idea.

+1 to what Heron said. SRS technique is very important and makes a huge difference to both the experience and effectiveness of using one. I abandoned Anki for a long time (and I'm glad I did since it got me out of a rut and allowed me to make progress in an enjoyable way), but I kept trying to come back to it and eventually found ways to (mostly) overcome the things I didn't like about it.

I find posts like some of these a little demotivating sometimes. I use anki and srs a lot but it can feel like a chore sometimes. That's why I can't add too many words per day. But then seeing the results people post makes me want to step it up a lot. I know that I wouldn't be able to maintain it though.

I think a major factor that needs to be addressed here is the big old question of why you're studying Japanese. If you're doing it as a hobby, then I can see how a lot of the more extreme methods would not appeal. I mean, if Japanese is supposed to be fun for you (as hobbies should be), it doesn't make sense to punish yourself over it.

On the other hand, if you're studying the language because you have to, petty things like motivation hold a lot less weight. When the language is something you need to keep you from going insane in a world where you can't communicate with anyone, ever, it's a trivial matter to spend a lot of effort on it. Whether or not it is fun is non-material when you'd really like to eat dinner tonight but still can't order food. It doesn't matter how mentally drained you are when you'd really love to ask that girl out but the best you can manage is "Good day I like your face."

I don't wake up excited to see 1000 Anki reviews, and yes, it is damned hard to do this everyday for months. I'll be in Australia for 10 days this coming week, and you can be damned sure my alarm will be set everyday at sunrise to get this shit done and out of the way. It sucks. But stopping? Going easier on myself? Never once entered my mind. I don't study to read manga, I study to live--studying for me is not a hobby but an existential crisis.

I'm not "learning by immersion" in a sense that I'd just flood myself with stuff.
I do it methodically and systematically.

I found that the least intrusive way to do that was by chatting a lot with Japanese friends on first Twitter, then smart.fm (where I simultaneously drilled vocab with an SRS) and Lang-8 (where I at that time wrote a lot of texts to be corrected by native speakers), now on Facebook (where I observe and mimic).
I'm still doing that, despite living "in the middle of the action" now, because it provides me with both production and with reading practice, which does a lot for me nowadays.

Because of the nature of chatting, which is interactive and requires you to understand and react properly, you learn pretty fast. You'll recognize certain patterns, you'll be able to discriminate with whom you're chatting by looking at the text, to a point where you wouldn't even need the name of the person.
One of the guys I'm acquainted with uses a lot of ～つつある、相当, another one uses a lot of 余計 and certain casual patterns such as みな. I picked up expressions like ピンとくる, because it reverberated somehow and I only had to see it once.

While this sure is immersion in a sense, it's also "study", because I actively try to make sense of every little detail, or I'd mistake things being said to me and couldn't keep the conversation going properly. I asked for clarification a lot of time in the past, and had people explain to me things grammar books didn't tell me.

Yea, I also did oldschool grammar studies. I sat down with Michel Thomas, Japanesepod, Tae Kim, IMABI, several books and other websites. Sometimes to try to find out how to express something specifically, sometimes to learn something randomly. And reading grammar books from cover to cover is just fun sometimes.
I eventually grew out of those shoes and now just use the language and get more by osmosis.

Only when I'm interested in a new topic, I'll search for a list of terms on the net, and sometimes in German or English, when the Japanese isn't available, and then translate them into Japanese (with the aid of natives) and drill those lists on Quizlet.
I don't do that to make it active vocab, so I don't give a ***** about how certain things are being used, or when, and when not. Making flashcards for me has to be as quick as possible, too, as to not waste time with the creation process and technical details, because I don't wanna get good at making cards, I wanna get good at understanding new words.
Deeper nuances don't worry me so much. I just learn them with an initial hook and then let my encountering these words in my chosen subject texts teach them to me in more detailed ways.

SRS really is a chore.
It doesn't matter for me if there's a need to learn, I never worried about that, to actively prevent burnout from happening - and Kanji studies brought me pretty close to that. Even now, with RTK, I sometimes just stop and read stuff for a while, maintaining my decks with reviews of past stuff, without adding anything new. The other day I watched a series on how to write beautifully on Youtube, which taught me the concepts of とめ、はね、はらい, because I found my characters to be extremely ugly and Japanese people told me "yea, they look good, but they don't look like a Japanese person had written them", which bothered me more than learning more Kanji at that time.
The result is that I learned 1400 Kanji in 2 months, then 200 more in the next 1 - my acquisition rate went actually down by 500 words a month.
I sometimes wonder if I should just drill the rest of those Kanji in one go, only to get done with it, and then really learn them in-depth via other methods.

SRS has failed me, because how effective something is for you depends on a lot of factors, and one of them is expectation. I expect a long, boring review session with frustrating fails and that's exactly what I get.

Sorry for going off-topic, but do you have the link to those Youtube videos on calligraphy? Thanks in advance!

Yes. I'm watching the videos of this user:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAFThN...p6qtoOeHWw

I actually started with the hiragana, because even those looked horrible

andikaze Wrote:Yes. I'm watching the videos of this user:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAFThN...p6qtoOeHWw

I actually started with the hiragana, because even those looked horrible

Oh! He writes in a very beautiful semi-cursive style, and his instructions are simple and clear for a beginner to understand. Thanks a lot!

Hey, I was wondering if I can do 80-100 a day with Core 10k for recognition.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/702754122

My daily routine is 30-40/day and I really want to boost up my learning speed(I am on about 3500). I also have been watching lots of anime and reading VNs(with translator) lately for immersion. Also I have finished RTK 1 and still doing it but in recognition now when before I was doing production until finishing RTK 1.

Anybody tried this.....would you get like 2000 reviews per day?

Also Ive heard of doing all the due reviews after doing the new cards is better. I have been doing it in in order card added and mix the review and new cards together. What is logic to this?

kasugano Wrote:Hey, I was wondering if I can do 80-100 a day with Core 10k for recognition.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/702754122

My daily routine is 30-40/day and I really want to boost up my learning speed(I am on about 3500). I also have been watching lots of anime and reading VNs(with translator) lately for immersion. Also I have finished RTK 1 and still doing it but in recognition now when before I was doing production until finishing RTK 1.

Anybody tried this.....would you get like 2000 reviews per day?

Also Ive heard of doing all the due reviews after doing the new cards is better. I have been doing it in in order card added and mix the review and new cards together. What is logic to this?

What's your failure rate? If it's less than 10%, you can do 80/day. Even more, if it's a lot less than 10%. Otherwise, 80-100 new cards is not sustainable.

As far as the mixing of reviews and learning, depends. If you spend time learning the material on your own, without Anki, first, then it's fine to mix the new stuff once you add them to Anki. But if you're learning with Anki from the start, then the learning process should be very different from the review process. It should be approached with a different mindset, and you can't do that if they're mixed together.

When learning new material, the pace should be deliberate, and the focus should be on fully understanding the contents of each card before you move on. I often look up words in a dictionary, or search the Core deck itself for different occurrences of a word or Kanji - because I find that it helps remember them if I know exactly where I've seen them before. Or I look up the grammar in an example sentence, etc.

When reviewing, on the other hand, the focus should be on keeping up a quick pace, and either passing or failing the card (and moving on) within a few seconds of seeing the question. Racking your brain about the answer, or trying to memorize it, is a bad idea. It's tiring and time consuming, without any real benefits. You commit vocab to memory by repeated exposure, not by staring at it for 30 seconds. You can focus on a word for several minutes, and forget it within days. Meanwhile, if you look at it 10 times, for 5 seconds at a time, over the course of a couple of months, you'll remember it.

Well, seeing results like this is inspiring.

I think the thing that makes a difference is spending some time on memorizing the words before you Anki the sentences, e.g. with Iversen method.

Of course doing that also takes time - about 30 minutes for 50 words, but once it's done I get my Anki failure rates down to 3~5% range.

Stansfield123 Wrote:What's your failure rate? If it's less than 10%, you can do 80/day. Even more, if it's a lot less than 10%. Otherwise, 80-100 new cards is not sustainable.

As far as the mixing of reviews and learning, depends. If you spend time learning the material on your own, without Anki, first, then it's fine to mix the new stuff once you add them to Anki. But if you're learning with Anki from the start, then the learning process should be very different from the review process. It should be approached with a different mindset, and you can't do that if they're mixed together.

When learning new material, the pace should be deliberate, and the focus should be on fully understanding the contents of each card before you move on. I often look up words in a dictionary, or search the Core deck itself for different occurrences of a word or Kanji - because I find that it helps remember them if I know exactly where I've seen them before. Or I look up the grammar in an example sentence, etc.

When reviewing, on the other hand, the focus should be on keeping up a quick pace, and either passing or failing the card (and moving on) within a few seconds of seeing the question. Racking your brain about the answer, or trying to memorize it, is a bad idea. It's tiring and time consuming, without any real benefits. You commit vocab to memory by repeated exposure, not by staring at it for 30 seconds. You can focus on a word for several minutes, and forget it within days. Meanwhile, if you look at it 10 times, for 5 seconds at a time, over the course of a couple of months, you'll remember it.

Thx for the quenching my doubts

My failure rate for mature cards is 12% but I have noticed a lot of words I know here and there and I just suspend the katakana words. Today I also did my review with the due cards first and then the new cards, doing is much more better also before I sometime don't know which is new or due card since I turn off the option to see how many cards are left.

Hmm I also did 100 yesterday and today and ill keep o doing with. I dont really mind if my failure rate would be 70-80% since through sheer repetition and connections of the pronunciations and meaning will get me through. but if things get out of hand ill lower the new cards

kasugano Wrote:Thx for the quenching my doubts

My failure rate for mature cards is 12% but I have noticed a lot of words I know here and there and I just suspend the katakana words. Today I also did my review with the due cards first and then the new cards, doing is much more better also before I sometime don't know which is new or due card since I turn off the option to see how many cards are left.

Hmm I also did 100 yesterday and today and ill keep o doing with. I dont really mind if my failure rate would be 70-80% since through sheer repetition and connections of the pronunciations and meaning will get me through. but if things get out of hand ill lower the new cards

They will get out of hand. If your fail rate is above 10%, you'd be better off spending the extra time on immersion, or grammar, or graded readers, or even working a little more on the content of the card you add, before you start reviewing them, rather than adding them to Anki and hoping for the best.

You'll burn out, and even if you don't, Anki isn't magic. It won't help you learn 3000 words a month. That's an unreasonable goal. You can add 3000 words a month, but only if you've seen most of them before. (The way to measure how well you know the material you're reviewing is by looking at the failure rate; as long as you're answering honestly, of course)

Stansfield123 Wrote:They will get out of hand. If your fail rate is above 10%, you'd be better off spending the extra time on immersion, or grammar, or graded readers, or even working a little more on the content of the card you add, before you start reviewing them, rather than adding them to Anki and hoping for the best.

You'll burn out, and even if you don't, Anki isn't magic. It won't help you learn 3000 words a month. That's an unreasonable goal. You can add 3000 words a month, but only if you've seen most of them before. (The way to measure how well you know the material you're reviewing is by looking at the failure rate; as long as you're answering honestly, of course)

I just feel so powerless not able to review more, also in my core deck there are so many similar words of the same kind. My current reviews are 400 a day and I would be able to do 1000 a day for reviews since I have so much free time for the next 6 months. Ill do this routine for a week then ill go to learning new cards 60-80 day.

I don't see what's wrong with adding a bunch of new cards until you get up to the level of daily reviews you feel comfortable with. Just make sure you can finish your reviews each day - doing 2000 reviews the next day probably wouldn't be much fun! And you'll want to stop adding well before that 6 months is over to let the reviews taper off to a manageable amount if you anticipate not having time to review as much.