Hi
I'm currently doing Japanese corePLUS in anki, and I'm not sure if I'm doing this In the most effective way. Right now the deck shows the question in kana and the answer in kanji. But isn't the way we READ Japanese is to see the kanji and try to remember the pronunciation and definition? However doing it the current way has the benefit that when i see the kana i have to remember the definition and how to write the kanji.
As in ねこ=cat／猫
So how is everyone else SRSing? Kana to kanji, or kanji to kana?

If it matters I'm about 300 cards into corePLUS with 12000~ cards. It also has the audio.
I guess you'd say I'm doing core/wrote hybrid, in that if I miss a card I'll right it out 10 times so it "sticks".

When I went through core6000, I did kanji->kana (and of course, the meaning of the word as well).

I believe some people will say that you shouldn't do kana->kanji with core6000 because it is too slow to have to write two or three kanji for some of the longer words. This is part of the reason why MCDs started to get really popular.

There are also some people who focus on sentences instead of individual words. So for instance, the front of your card would be "猫が走った。", and the back of your card would have definitions like "猫＝cat" and ”走る＝run".

If you read more of the posts on this board, you will find a lot of other formats.

My advice would be to try a bunch of different formats and do whatever you like the best. I personally use single vocab words (for easy nouns that map one-to-one with English, like 団栗), sentences (for most verbs, adjectives, and 熟語), close-delete (for grammar), and MCDs. In all honesty, it doesn't matter what format you use, as long as you consistently do your reviews everyday (and occasionally add new stuff).

Good luck.

I think it makes the most sense to do kanji->kana/meaning if you're trying to focus on reading, and kana->kanji if you're trying to focus on writing -- but Core6K, as it's set up, isn't really good for the latter because it gives you just the word, without any context to disambiguate. (For writing, I think kana in a sentence is better, as in: 物事をタンジュンに考える, where you have to write the katakana word in kanji.)

Thank you both for the excellent posts! I think I will switch over to a kanji ->kana style deck. I do however think that learning from kana->kanji would be usefull to someone that wants to read a lot of young children's Japanese. Seeing as most of the kanji words would be in kana.

ありがとう(^-^)/

Saiga Wrote:Thank you both for the excellent posts! I think I will switch over to a kanji ->kana style deck. I do however think that learning from kana->kanji would be usefull to someone that wants to read a lot of young children's Japanese. Seeing as most of the kanji words would be in kana.

ありがとう(^-^)/

Although I wouldn't recommend to do specifically "kana to kanji", I do think that there is some value with that approach. For this very reason my deck/collection has cards for both: "kanji to meaning" and "pronunciation to kanji" (the latter is what "kana to kanji" is trying to achieve). So, for example, for 捨てる I have two cards:
1.
Q: 捨てる
A: す・てる (to throw away)

2.
Q: (audio)
A: 捨てる (す・てる, to throw away)

Unfortunately, getting the "audio" part can be difficult at times, so some vocab is "kanji to meaning" only.