I know there's been various discussions about this and if you think there is one that answers my questions feel free to point me at them, but I can't find one that exactly discusses my problems.

I'd like to learn the readings for kanji along with the vocabulary, in context. So what I set up with my core Anki deck was kanji, sentence in kanji and audio on the question side, and meaning and kana readings on the answer side.

Because I have the audio set to auto play, it essentially gives away the reading of the Kanji, so if I know the meaning of the word I give myself a pass and move on. However, this raises a weird issue...

I often know the meaning of the word from the reading (as given in the audio), or sometimes I won't know the meaning from the reading but I will recognise it from context (for example if it's 'I __ the book on the desk' it's kinda obvious that the word is 'put', or I will remember the sentence as a whole rather than the individual word meanings), and sometimes I will recognise the word through the kanji without knowing what it was from the reading or from the context.

Should I be failing myself if I don't get the meaning through the reading, or if I haven't sussed out the reading before the audio has read it out for me?

So I tried removing the audio thinking that it gave me too much of a hint, but then I don't really even manage to learn the readings because it isn't really reinforced and I just fail cards over and over again, where I think maybe if the audio is played as I read the kanji, the readings are more likely to stick... but am I making it too easy for myself? What should count as a success... simply recognising the word no matter what triggered the recognition?

So I'm not really sure how I should structure my question/answer cards most efficiently for learning vocabulary, their kanji and their readings. Or when I should fail or pass myself.

Can anyone tell me what method worked the best for them for retaining vocabulary (spoken and written)?

Regarding failing and passing, you always get what you put in. It's pretty obvious, but if you pass yourself on meaning, paying no heed to reading recognition, you'll fall behind on readings, and vice versa. I pass myself when I get the reading right, since my ability to associate heard readings with a meaning is great, and even on words I don't remember the meaning of, I'm confident I will learn in time.

I have my audio playing with the answer, not with the question. Having it play with the question is basically having the reading served, and since I already recognize a lot of words by hearing thanks to 5 years of anime, the same often goes for the meaning. Even if you don't think the audio is helping you that much when answering, you aren't losing anything from playing it with the answer instead of the question.

Regarding fail rates, I'm facing the same problem of making a load of mistakes. I just push regardless - the joy when a card is finally mature will be that much greater when I look back and remember that I failed it 10 times in a single day two months ago.

I think you're hurting yourself big time by having the audio play on question side. If you do it that way, you never actually have to learn the readings, because they are read to you every single time. This will hurt you when you move on to real material.

kachii Wrote:but am I making it too easy for myself?

Yes.

kachii Wrote:So I'm not really sure how I should structure my question/answer cards most efficiently for learning vocabulary, their kanji and their readings. Or when I should fail or pass myself.

On the question side I have the word/sentence in kanji, nothing else.
Then on the answer side I have the reading, meaning, audio etc.
If I can read the word/sentence and know it's meaning, it's a pass. Otherwise fail.
I sometimes remember the word's reading through the sentence, but I don't let that bother me.

Something related to this that I've been wondering:

Are people generally using different cards for word and sentence, or only sentence cards?
Using both obviously doubles the reviews, but should at least help to prevent recognizing the word only through the sentence.
Is it worth it doing both, or should one go with just sentence cards ?

I will actually dissent here a little bit. I don't think you necessarily need to learn the reading and meaning and kanji all together at the same time; and I think that seeing the kanji with the kana or audio is an excellent step towards learning to read the kanji by themselves.

I wasn't using an SRS when I first started learning Japanese vocabulary, but I was reading a lot of manga with furigana. And almost all the vocabulary I learned that way transferred over when I started reading novels and manga without furigana. (Even in that earlier thread on 躊躇 -- 99% of the time I've seen that compound, it's been with furigana. I've never deliberately studied the word, beyond looking it up once or twice. But when I saw it without furigana, I recognized it instantly.)

So, you know, what's so bad about making things easy on yourself?

I don't know if this is too much work or if there'd be some way to automate this, but you could try having audio on the question side for your young cards, and audio on the answer side for your mature cards. Or you could try marking cards as "hard" if you need the audio and "good" if you don't, so that they don't cycle out of the regular rotation too quickly.

As has been said, the question needs to be silent. Hopefully you are reviewing with a deck that has the key word bolded in the deck, that way you can review in a fashion where its like having a single word. Nukemarine's spreadsheet is setup like this. I'm against the idea of single word reviews.

Honestly, if you want to do audio. Create a card template for reading recognition where reading is question on front (silent) and answer on back (silent or not, your choice). Then make a second template called "Listening" and make the question front blank, or have it say *audio.* Since I don't do listening recog. myself I can't say what is best here but you could just have it read the sent and then you check sentence meaning comprehension and hope you got the key word correct. Or you could play the sentence and after the sentence have it play the key word as well so like: "これはペンです。”　”これ"

Is it more reviews this way? Ya. But if you really want the listening recog. practice its probably the best way.

Thanks for the advice folks, I have switched to only playing audio on the answer side and I am failing a lot more but it's probably better for me to learn this way.

[Zgarbas]

I made more cards. One where I do audio recognition(blank card), one with kanji recognition (I already knew most of the vocab so I skipped vocab recognition). That way I also know where I'm lacking.

Zgarbas Wrote:I made more cards. One where I do audio recognition(blank card), one with kanji recognition (I already knew most of the vocab so I skipped vocab recognition). That way I also know where I'm lacking.

That's pretty much my setup as well. I have two types of cards:

One is:
Q: (audio only)
A: (kanji) (reading) (meaning)

The other is:
Q: (kanji)
A: (reading) (meaning) [it's only for the lack of time that I don't add audio here]