I am relatively new to anki, well not really new but only recently I decided to use it every day, anyway, I want to know how many retries/reviews it takes you to remember a newly added card?
There is no need to be shy just be honest. For me sometimes it takes a long time, there are a lot of words that I still can't remember even after reviewing many times for a week.

Some words it's once or twice, especially since I'm using a pre-made deck. Other words? Weeks and weeks and they just don't stick. Those I suspend for now and plan to try again once I've gone through the rest of the deck. There's about 20 of those right now - I tend to confuse similar words with opposite meanings, since mine is a production deck (one of Nukemarine's Core2000 beginner).

It depends on the word.

I wonder if I will ever remember the whole deck (I also got a premade deck, a HUGE one) I hope Anki will help me.

SRS is (originally) a tool for remembering, not learning. I personally don't put anything in it until I already know it.

As an aside, be careful with the large, premade deck. Most of the value of using SRS comes from having sentences you value and want to learn. Otherwise it becomes very tedious and very demotivating very quickly. Go ahead and keep doing what you're doing, but if you detect symptoms of demotivation, remember that it may be the method, not you.

Sometimes I learn a word right away (rather know who to read correctly and kind of know the meaning). After a few reviews I usually learn it properly.

Other times, I can't seem to learn a word for the life of me, doesn't matter how many times it comes up in a review.

I'm currently going through KiC. It's much harder than I anticipated. There are a bunch of words in sentences that I can't manage to remember. I just keep hitting 2-hard and the interval creep up so slowly (about 1 day) After the interval becomes 10 days for hard, I usually know it or almost-know it. If not, I fail the card and let the interval creep back up. Eventually, I learn the cards.

I find that after I learn the correct reading, I learn the word soon after.

Honestly, I think it's best not to count. I agree that the number of repetitions can vary hugely.

But you do eventually learn it right ?

Speaking for myself, I have never been able to learn something by failing it and seeing it again over and over. You have to actually DO something to learn it, then seeing it again is a review of something you already know.

loverkanji Wrote:I wonder if I will ever remember the whole deck (I also got a premade deck, a HUGE one) I hope Anki will help me.

I get the impression that with Anki the idea is not so much to try to remember *everything*. Instead, it makes it easy to learn large quantities of vocabulary, so it doesn't matter that there are some words that don't make it (ie get suspended as leeches or which you keep forgetting once the interval gets out to a month or two). Even 80 or 90% of 6000 is still a pretty big number.

mafried Wrote:As an aside, be careful with the large, premade deck. Most of the value of using SRS comes from having sentences you value and want to learn. Otherwise it becomes very tedious and very demotivating very quickly.

I think that kind of depends. I started out with a deck of sentences I add to from things I read, but now I'm also going through the Core6K deck (about 60% of which I'm just suspending immediately as already-known). I think I'm making much better progress through Core6K because I'm always pushing through another 20 new words a day, whereas the effort needed to find and put in sentences means I never reliably got into the habit of updating the sentences deck every day. Plus there's a pre-set 'finishing line'. So for me the premade deck is actually more motivating.

mafried Wrote:Speaking for myself, I have never been able to learn something by failing it and seeing it again over and over. You have to actually DO something to learn it, then seeing it again is a review of something you already know.

So what's the thing you 'do' to learn a new word? It's all just looking at the word, in the end, surely?

Is there an easy way to manage premade decks? I find the N+1 rule really helps but if the deck is premade it's hard to keep this rule. Also, what is better to do sentences or vocabulary ? anybody got experience with both and can give his thoughts about it?

I find learning new words more difficult when they are chosen randomly. What I find useful, though it may not work for everyone, is to choose which words come next in the vocabulary or Core deck by prioritising those new words I have just come across in my textbook (or other source of audio). Repeated listening to the audio helps with the learning process. The SRS also helps and takes care of the long term recall problem. Selecting the words out of the vocab deck is a little bit of work, but I find it a lot quicker than adding them. You could also use the same approach with a grammar example sentence deck if you wanted - reviewing grammar points you have just studied.

Instead, or additionally, you could make your new words come back more often, by fiddling with the intervals, under Settings, Deck Properties, Advanced. If you make the 'hard' or even 'good' intervals shorter, you have to remember to choose 'easy' more often, when appropriate.

If I fail a card more than about 4 times I add a sentence card containing the word. This gives some context and means the word comes up twice as much.

In the beginning I was using mnemonics to help remember stuff, especially verbs.

@loverkanji

I started with sentences. Some were from Core2k from smartfm, and some I got from Japanese pod101. I found that the stuff from jpod was better (easier to remember), because they came from a story/lesson. But they took a lot of work to make, where as the pre-made ones took no effort.

Sentences were great for getting a feel for grammar, but for me were not very good for learning individual vocabulary words. I would learn the words inside the particular sentence, and encode them in a chain. And I would find that I had memorized the sentences after a while, but had little to no mastery of many of each of the words.

Now I just do vocabulary that I get from Jdorama and anything else I come across. Sometimes I get them from jpod 101. I downloaded a huge pre-made deck of vocabulary words that I un-suspend from, and if a word I want to learn is not there I just create it. There is a plugin someone made that can download audio for single words and put them on the anki card, and this is really helpful. I do reading and writing cards (separate decks), and if I feel like it will read the example sentence that is on the card. I also will add picture cards for nouns with out any english. These take a minute to make but are worth it. I also listen/watch the jpod lessons and dorama I mine from multiple times. I don't use SRS for this (ala subs2srs), just review when I feel like it. In this way I study the individual vocab and the source sentences they came from.

I spend about a half hour to an hour mining my cards a day. And then I put them into a short term deck that has a learning algorithm, which I do on my ipod touch. This takes maybe an hour of review time for me to learn 20-30 words, but it can depend on how hard the individual cards are so sometimes more, sometimes less. Some stick right away, and the more Japanese I learn the easier it gets as I know more and more readings of kanji, and see more patterns in the language. Also, the reviews are done in several short sessions throughout the day - 10 minuets here and there - usually by the end of the day the cards are "learned" and then go into my regular anki deck. However there is a deal of forgetting later on. Not all cards are equally learned. I think there is a lot of variables, and it's hard to say when something is 100% learned, especially if SRS is the only contact for information. So more contact and input/output is really important then just srs. Also, in learning mode I usually am walking aroud, so I don't focus on writing. Later in the writing deck I usually get this part fairly quickly.

Someone on this forum once said that learning is a process of remembering and forgetting. I find this to be true for me. There are some words I have failed a ridiculous number of times, and then at some point I pass it and just get a feeling that I really got it now. Then again, some cards I pass and they are super easy, but someday they pop up and I fail it. The SRS is good, but not perfect, and the process of learning the language is fluctuating and dynamic, in my experience.

If I started all over again, knowing what I know now, I would do it this way from the start, and not use pre-made sentences to learn vocabulary from (did that for a good six months). CONTEXT is so much better to learn from, where-in the sentence comes from a larger story. Then by breaking it down to bits it can become comprehensible after some study.

If I was to use say Core2k/6 sentences exclusively, I would forge ahead a few days on the individual vocabulary from each sentence, and study them in a separate deck, then use the sentences as reading practice. For me getting a new sentence with sometimes 4 new words was just too much, and ineffective. I would have to learn the phonetics and meaning of each word, plus understand the grammar. By breaking it all up first it would flow better later in the sentence portion, and I would know the words better. Plus you get the root of the word - then in the sentence you can see it conjugated.

That's just what I think about it from my experience. Everyone has their own custom method, and it takes time to find what works for each individual. I still tweak/revamp my method every month or so.

EDIT- Just wanted to add that I also add nouns on my own, not from context. Latley Ive been mining from this picture dictionary and using pictures from google for the meaning. Today I did all the planets!

pm215 Wrote:

mafried Wrote:Speaking for myself, I have never been able to learn something by failing it and seeing it again over and over. You have to actually DO something to learn it, then seeing it again is a review of something you already know.

So what's the thing you 'do' to learn a new word? It's all just looking at the word, in the end, surely?

The thing I 'do', primarily, is see it in context many, many times until it jumps out from the sea of unknown words and I grasp its meaning. If I want to be sure I then look it up in a dictionary, but often I don't feel the need. I do not then add it to Anki--I save my SRS for just things I want to remember; it is not a complete log of everything I have learnt. What I do add are sentences, phrases, or unique words that I find interesting and really want to remember how to say. For example, the most recent card I've added is 'kein anderer als ...' which is how you say 'none other than ...' in German. There's nothing grammatically or vocab wise that's difficult about that sentence. I had no trouble understanding it the first time I read it. But it stood out at me because when I read it I thought "hey, that's pretty cool. I want to remember how to say that!" And so it ended up in my SRS.