I was wondering what other people are doing for going through sentences. Up until now I have been using a deck with two cards per fact - kanji card and a listen card. I have been going at the pace of 40 sentences per day - which is 20 new kanji. I do all the new card reviews after the normal reviews. This pace has been fine but I get the feeling that others have been doing much better - adding more kanji per day.

In a day I usually review around 500 cards, which is about 350 old card reviews and 150 of the 40 new cards - a couple of times each since I usually fail the new ones alot.

I want to proceed quicker so I am trying to figure out what the best strategy is. Could I remember more cards if I lose the listen cards and do 40 new kanji per day instead of 20? Can you remember more new cards if you do them scattered in the old reviews instead of all lumped at the end? I am looking for other peoples experience with this so I can possibly increase the amount of learning per day.

From my experience, in attempting the Core 6k set with audio, I found listening and reproducing made it more difficult to remember the cards. I'm attempting to grind through all of them in a timely fashion with hopes of retaining around 60%. This seems unfeasible with the audio portions.

The audio in that set was too slow, and way too easy to pick apart. You could better approach your listening practice with background Drama/Anime. Or, even better, transcription of Drama/Anime.

I'm able to better focus on the meanings of the sentences and grasp the nuances of the words by reading them. As I said, this is from my own experience which consists mainly of reading lots of books and manga.

I am just now getting my listening skills up to the level of my reading skills by transcribing. This is helping tremendously, and I really do recommend it, but for sentence grinding I suggest dropping the audio.

Looks like a good pace to me.

in the beginning the amount of sentences you should do is small, build up the stamina to do them in routine. So start small in everything and slowly increase. Eventually you should be able to handle a certain amount depending on you. A good piece of advice is do everything in chunks of 5-10mins. It helps keep you alert and will help your memory in terms of attention spans between each chunk of time.

And lastly do reps daily. Personally the only way I've been able to improve is to keep everything consistent. Sure there were some days I didn't do my reps but the next day I would do them no matter what. I don't want to get behind in reps ever. Doesn't take that long even, it will save you so much trouble and you can actually be lazy in the long run. In around two months or so I'm estimating that I will almost know all joyo kanji+some extras. If I keep up on my reviews/addition of new cards.

I read your post and still don't understand, what is 'sentence griding'?

Here's what I do: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...9#pid97049

Think he/she meant grinding. Like in a RPG.

I think he meant "grinding" as in repetitively doing something over and over to gain skill, like grinding a character in an RPG video game to gain experience points...not that I play those or anything...

Oh. Hmm, that makes it sound like doing sentences is a Pyrrhic chore. Definitely not the right approach, I'd say. Find your 'flow'!

yeah it sounds pretty boring to me also, but probably more mindset than method...

I did not come to discuss the benefits of enjoying reviewing sentences vs not. I am only trying to determine the most efficient way of doing so.

I was looking for responses along the lines of - "Instead of doing 40 reviews at the end after normal review, doing 20 before and 20 after will help with retention." or "I was able to do more cards by abandoning 'Listen' cards - they did not seem to help with retention."

I was looking for examples of reviewing strategy - like if someone did 100 new cards a day and failed 80% of them, but in the long run it was much more efficient due to exposure, etc.

To increase efficiency of study, even 10% per day, over a year long language journey, is a huge thing. I have not been able to find anyone or any groups on this forum that have done such a study for maximizing study performance.

If it is found that someone was able to study twice as many sentences by writing the day's kanji on their palm and looking at them every few minutes, it is a method to consider.

sikieiki Wrote:I was looking for responses along the lines of - "Instead of doing 40 reviews at the end after normal review, doing 20 before and 20 after will help with retention." or "I was able to do more cards by abandoning 'Listen' cards - they did not seem to help with retention."

I was looking for examples of reviewing strategy - like if someone did 100 new cards a day and failed 80% of them, but in the long run it was much more efficient due to exposure, etc.

To increase efficiency of study, even 10% per day, over a year long language journey, is a huge thing. I have not been able to find anyone or any groups on this forum that have done such a study for maximizing study performance.

Then maybe you've already found your answer

lol I love how people think they own a thread just because they were the OP... and get mad at anything that deviates from direct discussion of their question as they think it should be answered.

The most efficient method is to enjoy the method. You learn more, faster, and keep at it longer...

It's kind of difficult to answer as we don't fully know how or what you're reviewing.

However: Always add/review new material at the end of reviewing previously studied material. This lets the time you set aside determine how much new stuff you learn. Others and myself have tried adding new things consistently even when there's items left for review. Usually that ended with lots of items to be reviewed that kept building up.

You should not be failing a lot of new items. That's an indicator that you're not learning it first. It's learning the material on a card that should be where a majority of your time is spent on it. Don't try to force the SRS to be your learning aid after the fact (not a hard rule, but useful to keep in mind). If you're using Anki, you should be seeing any newly added card the next day which should be passed 70 to 80 percent of the time on average. If it's lower on average just spend more time with the card before you click on the space bar or press "2".

If you're comfortable with the prospect, you can remove your "kanji" card (I assume this is your reading/recognition card for your sentences). However, I don't know how you're doing sentences or studying so this could be bad advice. I do vocabulary cards using sentences as an aid, so removing the recognition cards did not have a big impact on me.

PS: As you notice, members on this forum don't like being told how to hold discussions. Many a thread will get derailed especially after it appears that the original question was answered, but the results are usually beneficial. The advice about not approaching learning as a grind, which sounds like a negative term, is sage advice.

I think you should take a look at this. Probably the most influential part of my Japanese study was BlackMacro's post about re-examining your SRS workload. I almost doubled my amount of kanji learned in a day with this method. If your to lazy to read, the idea is to switch gears from reviewing old material and studying new kanji. However the key was to do about 30 reviews and study 15 new kanji, 30 reviews and study 15 new kanji, and 30 reviews and study 15 new kanji... till the end of the day. The point of his method was that you wouldn't get bored during long reviews but at the same time you would be able to accomplish something for that day. Not only did it increase my efficiency, I learned much, much more in day.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...1#pid59261

Sikieki, I'm new at this, and I have some of the same questions you do. Right now I'm using mainly the Core 2000 shared Anki decks -- both sentences and vocabulary. By far the biggest time-consumer for me is when I listen to a sentence (written only in kana) and then try to reproduce some or all of it in writing, using kanji and kana. I have no idea if this is a good use of my time. Is that what you mean when you say you do "listen" cards?

Also, I thought I'd add that I don't fail anything near 80% of my new cards. I pass more than I fail. If I do fail one, I spend a lot of time with it so that I usually pass it on the second look. I would think a high initial failure rate would be inefficient, but what do I know.

Sorry if I'm not being very helpful; just thought I'd offer my own (limited) experience.

I'm not sure how useful it can be to you, since these things seems to vary greatly from person to person, but this is what worked for me.

I did core6k mainly for vocabolary acquisition, so my first concern was getting new items in my reviews to have a basic exposition to new words and how they can be used. I skipped items that I felt were too easy, with no new vocab or new sentence patterns. There's a lot of (unneeded imho, unless you strive for keeping it i+1) repetition in the core 2/6k series, and I already had some basic vocabulary from previous courses so I ended up skipping a good 20% of it (mostly core 2k).

What I did was suspend all the cards, then I would keep lists of new words encountered while reading or watching stuff in japanese and use the sentence filter to look for sentences using those words and unsuspend them. After going through said lists, if I felt I could study some more sentences, I would go through them in order and unsuspend those with new vocab or that seemed interesting. Note that this is only for reading cards, not listening cards.

At this point I would start my review routine, leaving the new cards for last.
About midway through core6k I tried messing around with various settings to see if I could speed up my reviews, since I often found myself hacking away at a pile of 400-700 reviews due a day, which usually left me with no energy for doing anything else in japanese. A couple of things I found especially effective:
- disabling "show due count and progress during review" and "show next time before next answer" from the settings menu; turns out that checking how many cards are left and when I would see that particular card next was taking away a lot of time and concentration in the long run. It also made me trust the srs algorithm more, which resulted in less strict card evaluation (it is a good thing, or at least it was for me).
- Using inactive tags settings to separate reading and listening cards during review. I found it was much easier to plow through a large number of cards quickly if the format of the questions stayed the same.
- Reviewing cards from largest/smallest interval, not sure why but it seemed to help in keeping a good pace during the review time.
The above changes to default option took me from an average of 12s per answer to somewhere around 7s per answer, which is quite a lot of time saved when you have hundreds of reviews per day.

After finishing reviews + new cards, I would unsuspend the listening part of the new cards of the day, and reschedule them randomly through the following 2-7 days, so that they would get a bit of distance from the reading cards. Personally I found listening cards useful, but more as an introductory listening exercise than to reinforce vocab retention. If I could go back I would still do them, but probably at a more relaxed pace and possibly on a separate deck with modified intervals. The audio is really good if we're talking learning resources, but it's still nothing like trying to listen and getting the meaning out of a radio program or a podcast or w/e.

Another thing I noticed is that the number of new cards added in a day didn't seem to affect much retention rate at all. I went from days where I would add 20-30 new cards on average to the last 20 days when I tried to go all out at 100-200 new sentences (x2 with listening) per session with no noticeable changes in retention, though mental tiredness from going through 600+ reviews occasionaly took its toll.
Relying on the srs more by using 3 and 4 when appropriate instead of mindlessly hammering the "hard" button made a difference in retention, though unexpectedly (or maybe it was just me being skeptic) it showed an improvement instead of a lower rate.
To clarify, I still mark a fail as a fail, but my default choice for the cards I know is now the good button instead of the hard button. This change helped a lot in reducing (unneeded) reviews, and raised my retention rate from the 90-95% area to the point that I often score hundreds of reviews without a miss. My guess on this change is that by using the hard button too much I would often get sick of seeing always the same silly sentences and skip them without really reading; it also was also probably taking away the feeling of being tested on something worth testing, I was like "of course I know this, I read it, like, 2 days ago, duh!"


Oh, wow, I wrote a lot of unintelligible stuff before realizing it, I kinda feel sorry for anyone reading it.
tl;dr : disable "due/eta" and "next review in.." from settings, start hitting the "good" button if you aren't already, find a confortable pace and stick to it, leave the audio out if that would make time for more native media immersion.

I always rate it according nowadays, not always hard. It seriously get's soo annoying. The srs will do the work, so no need to rate it soo hard always(I've done this, and it's not good at all, your reviews will always be bigger later down the line) .Although personally my review load are steady nowadays.

Seizar Wrote:- disabling "show due count and progress during review" and "show next time before next answer" from the setting menu; turns out that checking how many cards are left and when I would see that particular card next was taking away a lot of time and concentration in the long run. It also made me trust the srs algorithm more, which resulted in less strict card evaluation (it is a good thing, or at least it was for me).

This was helpful for me as well.