Yeah I definitely get and understand your point. Those connections you mention are already made for me, though I might have to make them with upcoming harder Kanji.
I exaggerated when I meant learning Kanji individually is the most annoying thing I’ve been doing as I’ve given up more annoying things already.
Learning Kanji individually, on top of my regular sentence mining and reviews, works well for me at the moment.
I will try to integrate vocabulary in the cards later actually this could be good.
I’d say I’m really satisfied with my study method at the moment, and rarely having problems with consistency, I’m mostly just planning ahead at the moment as I encounter difficulty spikes occasionally like Bunpro grammar which has been taking more time recently.
I think you are pretty much doing what I am doing but with extra steps and much harder than necessary. First of all and while risking to sounding preachy, learning Kanji should be something that you regard as a useful skill in case you ever want to live in Japan or you plan to read books and manga in Japanese. Learning them simply for JLPT seems a bit much for me personally, unless you really need it somehow.
As for my personal learning method, I don’t really give a damn about what kanji in what order makes the most sense to learn first. I learn Kanji with vocabulary, and the vocabulary in my first deck has the order of the textbook I used most recently, Jbridge. While I really don’t recommend that book as I also don’t recommend Minna no Nihongo which is just ever so slightly better. What I recommend instead is creating a deck based on the media you’re most interested in and the frequency of word in that medium. Which jpdb.io just lets you do.
As for writing Kanji, I use Japanese notebooks that are made to write kanji in them and use them alongside my jpdb.io SRS. Which is pretty much like Anki (you can even import your progress from it) and has a much better UI while being less customizable it still has plenty of options and is a more pre digested experience. Also, you can create decks much easier, and you can import whole books and TV shows (anime and such) or just the top 10k and so on from its database. I highly recommend it.
As of progress, I have learned around 580 Kanji and 822 words within the past 87 days, while I try to maintain 24 new cards per day. I also have to say that it teaches me subvocabulary and radicals as well, therefore the total number is actually higher. In my stats it’s 1787 as of today.
While my method seems really tedious at the beginning, because you learn a lot of kanji and radicals first. Kanji also start to make much more sense way quicker and are getting much easier to read and understand using my method. If you feel like its too much work as I usually need 1–2 hours per day for reviews, you could just try my method with 12 new cards per day which would be enough to reach N1ish 10k vocabulary in roughly 2 years. But with my current progress, I’m positive that after I learned most of the kanji, new vocabulary will take less and less time and get easier.
I’ve done essentially the same thing myself, and assuming you enjoy learning and writing kanji, it will be very effective. The only changes I would say would be don’t use “hard” on new reviews. “Again” is okay, and it won’t trick the system into thinking you know things you don’t.
Also I’d only suggest easy for kanji you don’t struggle to recall at all. Using it for a really well shaped kanji could mess with your intervals.
But even as is, your method will work very well if you stick to it
Yeah I already had doubts about hard and easy but I think it’s easier to implement them with the workload as I’m invested in learning Japanese long-term.
They can reduce the workload especially since I’ve started an internship which gives me less time than at university.
I imagine I won’t be using hard very often in this method, I already use it sparingly if my translation of the meaning is close but still different for vocab decks.
For easy, I agree that I need to have a really good grasp of the Kanji to use it.
I see using notebooks is interesting I’ll consider it.
I’ve already got a good foundation and learning method for reading Kanji, and I learn vocabulary at the same time so I usually recognize the Kanji I learn instead of discovering them. So for the JLPT I’m pretty much covered, it’s also because I do want to live in Japan.
Thanks for the resources!
According to the FSRS people, as long as the way you use hard and easy is consistent, then it won’t negatively impact the algorithm. Using hard as a passing grade is what really messes up the algorithm’s scheduling. If you don’t really care about stroke order and just about the kanji looking right, I think it’s fine to mark it hard if you get the stroke order wrong, but if you are wanting to actually learn stroke order, it should be marked again or it’ll break the algorithm. (Remember that marking a card hard increases the interval, so it’ll be longer until you see it again than it was the last time. A lot of people don’t realize this.)