Hi I am having doubts on suspending some of my cards in my Core 10k deck. . . . So I need your opinions

All that I have suspended are just most of the katakana loan words which accumulates to about 300 suspended cards. I am now thinking on suspending some more cards.

So to those who have suspended cards what standards have you set to suspend them?

Types of cards I need opinion. . . .

-cards where they just add a 1 kanji. Like musekinin(irresposible) and sekinin(responsibiity). Would some suspend cards like that.

-very simple cards just written in hiragana like mou, and aa. Do you suspended them

-cards relating to business and politics.


Just for reference I do my core 10k in recognition where the front is the kanjified vocab then when turning the card a test myself for pronunciation and the meaning.

As far as the most easy words, you should only suspend obvious katakana words. Definitely not something like 無責任. And, I at least, delete them rather than suspend them.

As far as suspending complicated words, or words that aren't relevant to you right now, you should absolutely do it. I suspect most people don't suspend enough of them. For a beginner/low-intermediate student, I think they should suspend at least a third of all notes in Core, at first. What matters isn't to learn every word in Core, it's to learn as many words as you can, as fast as you can. An easy word has the same value as a difficult word, but it takes far less time to learn.

Later on, the difficult words will start becoming easy (because you encounter them elsewhere, or because they share Kanji with words you've already learned). At that point, you can go over what you suspended and unsuspend some of it (that's why it's a good idea to delete the katakana words you already know, instead of suspending them: gives you less to go over the second time around).

The biggest mistake I made, early on, was wasting my time trying to learn every single card that came up in Core (the optimized version). Just because it optimized, it doesn't mean it's ordered by difficulty. Far from it. For one, not everyone will find the same words difficult, it depends on what each person knows already. Second, I don't even think the optimization was meant to order words by difficulty. It was just meant to make the deck closer to n+1.

Lately, I've even been skipping ahead in Core6k, searching out words near the back of the order that I think will be easiest to learn (because happened to come across elsewhere, in manga or songs). If it ever get into trouble with the example sentence (because it has words I skipped or haven't seen yet), I either find a different sentence or I add the word I skipped to the front of the review queue. It's very easy to do.

I wouldn't worry too much about it and just go through the deck. If it's a word you know, just mark it easy. I went through Core 10000 and never considered worrying whether a word is "good" or "bad" in terms of will it appear in the native material I am interested in. Just set your daily new word count at a brisk pace (I do 33 new words a day) and you'll get through it. You need to build up your vocabulary anyway. After your finished with core, I would suggest adding words to a deck from native material. I always just add the word if I don't know it without thinking of its relative frequency of appearance. You need to build up your vocabulary a great deal if you want to read with minimal look ups. I'm at around 22,000 words now and am looking to get to 30,000 as a mid-term goal.