Ditching Anki for Bunpro?

Japanese
#1

I’ve been using Wanikani for close to a year now, and bunpro for a little while now (i had some big breaks periods but now i’m managing to stay consistent with it), with anki started around the same time as bunpro (initially bunpro was only for grammar, but i’ve been starting using it for vocab too)

I’ve got to admit… I feel like Anki doesn’t really work for me. I’ve tried multiple decks, starting with the Core 2K/6K to end up with the Wanikani mod Core 10k deck which imo is really amazing! built in IME so you can type in the answer (optional), every vocab is there three times (audio comprehension, JP->EN tl and EN->JP tl), there’s audio and example sentences etc… Obviously it’s a very VERY big deck, since it’s not only a core 10k and everything is there multiple times, and it also has example sentences cards which i decided to remove because at first they had too many unknown words for me to really work imo. The deck is divided into 10 3k cards subsets (when the sentences have been removed), and i’m almost done with the first one, which is 1000 vocab points.

And i feel like it’s not really working that well, compared to WK/Bunpro. The deck is amazing, don’t get me wrong, but i think it’s anki itself that simply does not do it for me. I’ve tried tinkering with the settings, but i feel like it’s just FSRS or whatever anki uses that does not work for me. I feel like the intervals just never work correctly, i really like how WK and Bunpro just drop you one grade when you fail (or more for bunpro if you want), and i can’t quite replicate that in anki. I think it also suffers from quantity over quality if that makes sense? Like flashcards are so quick to go through you tend to do more but at the cost of good reviews, idk.

I’ve started the N5 vocab deck on bunpro, and it feels soooo much more suited for me. One thing i’d love to be able to do (as a sidenote, if any of the devs read me), would be the ability to select multiple ways to review a deck, ie. being able to say “i want my vocab review to be translate manual answer, fill in manual answer and reading”, and every time you get a review it’ll be one of those three options instead of just always being whatever your set review type is set as. But even without that, i think it works way better for me: i change my deck review type every now and then to try and get every kind of retention going, and i feel like it works pretty well! Anki did help me consolidate what i learned from wanikani and i did learn a few words, but i feel like the time investment isn’t as optimized as what bunpro offers me.

I know everyone online swears by anki, but i’m thinking that once i’m done with the first set of my deck, i’m gonna stop getting new reviews from it and just review what i already learned from it and only use it for mining, once i’ll be starting immersion; while at the same time keep going through vocab on bunpro (using the N5 deck or one of the community core? not sure yet)
I know ultimately the decision of whether or not i should drop anki is up to me, but i’d rather get some second hand opinion. Has anyone here gone through a similar situation? Is there a hidden benefit to anki i quite can’t grasp, or would focusing only on bp/wk work better for me?

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#2

I use the three as well (Anki, Bunpro and WaniKani). It took me some time to integrate and recognize the value of Anki in my daily SRS-based Japanese learning routine.

From my humble opinion, I found Anki to be a good complement when used to learn words I encounter in the wild—e.g. when reading—and that are not already included in WaniKani and/or Bunpro. In this way, it sticks much more than using a pre-made deck and I know exactly what to expect when opening Anki, as I know what to expect when going to WaniKani. Regarding settings, I have never changed anything, as I found the defaults suiting my need—reviewing a couple of vocabulary cards every now and then.

As a final note, this series of articles on Anki really helped me to grasp how it works and how to use it effectively. It might help you as well.

3 Likes
#3

Bunpro is weaker when it comes to learning more advanced vocab.

Check out the updated jpmining note setup, helpful for making high quantity context specific cards based off media you watch or listen to. Image/video+audio sentence+your choice of dictionary. Kind of a pain to set up, though.

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#5

I’m curious as I’ve been using Bunpro only for a couple months now and it has been doing wonders for me, both in grammar and vocab. So why do you think that it becomes a worse option for advanced vocab in contrast with Anki?

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#6

It’s mainly in the customization of content I think.
In Anki if the phrasing on the card’s front doesn’t work for you, it only takes a couple of seconds to change it to anything you like, in Bunpro it’s impossible.
Anki can automatically suspend leeches, in WK/BP there’s no suspend at all. You can remove a word from reviews, but the Lessons feature will try to teach it to you again, unless you create a custom deck.
Anki’s card browser is very powerful with searching, replacing and mass actions.

Also customization of format. Adding pictures, links, hiding distracting info, things like that.

#7

Anki is great. I used it for quite a long time and I love it a lot but personally I feel that Bunpro is better unless you’re mining. Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to add words to your review list on Bunpro except to save them to a list and make a custom deck or something and paste them in on the import screen.

The problem with Anki is that you never actually graduate from words, they just keep getting pushed back forever and you have to manually remove them from your collection whenever you feel comfortable doing so (byebye metrics). It’s a fantastic tool but that one detail feels like a shortsight. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but eventually if your deck grows large than over a long stretch of time your review count will grow to a ridiculous rate simply due to the size of your deck. I eventually deleted my deck because after thousands of cards I couldn’t be bothered anymore.

My personal opinion (bias warning: I really like Paul Nation and Krashen): it’s better to use Bunpro and just study words in order of frequency. Do lookups during immersion if you need to but don’t bother with mining unless you have already learned the most common X-thousand words. Save mining for specialty vocab, which only ever make up 20-30% of a text at most, and don’t mine the common stuff (you don’t need the context from the media, anything with sentences is fine just go in order by frequency). Anki is great for mining, but consider your personal feelings regarding the lack of graduation and if you prefer Bunpro than remember that you can import your words from Anki.

Anki has a huge advantage in that it’s highly customizable, so even if you use Bunpro for vocab instead of Anki you may still find ways to use Anki alongside Bunpro such as if there is something highly specific that you want to work on. It’s ok to use multiple tools, just consider what your purpose is, what your goals are, and be careful not to overload yourself with SRS. SRS is fantastic, but it’s important to remember that language learning also requires input, output, and fluency training. Don’t overload on active study or SRS or else you may not have enough time in your day for the other things.

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#8

I think there may be an addon to change this.
Manually suspending them should not be too hard.
prop:ivl>300 -is:new -is:suspended
Might need to adjust the number a bit I don’t know exactly how ilvl is calculated, but at least for me this mostly shows card due 2026 that I feel very comfortable with. I would be fine suspending these for myself or moving them to a deck of graduated cards for organizing (or just suspend+tag to keep deck position?).

The problem with that is cards also get suspended of you keep failing them. So your graduated cards and your cards that you struggle with will get mixed together unless you apply tags somehow. It doesn’t make Anki unusable or anything, I’m just saying that I feel Bunpro has a slight edge in this area.

My leeches are set to tag only, I haven’t had one after switching to FSRS. Either way this is also a non-issue. You can just move them to another deck if you want to never look at them again or go to “tag:leech” and suspend/unsuspend, separately from the rest that you could tag “learned” or whatever you want before suspending, then you could look at all your suspended cards except “-tag:learned”.

That said it’s okay to have preferences, I just want to point out this can be solved.

#9

If a word is due for the next review let’s say in 5 years, is it really that much worse than graduating? 18k cards each due once in 1825 days will require 10 reviews per day to maintain, which is, ok, more than 0. But theoretically it is also a useful refresher (they are due after all), and if they are truly easy I should be done with them in 20 seconds.

I think I’m more in the opposite camp, not quite understanding the point of “graduating” or “mastering” cards. I’d rather just self-grade them as easy which increases the review interval by ~5x.

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#10

The problem with that is cards also get suspended of you keep failing them. So your graduated cards and your cards that you struggle with will get mixed together unless you apply tags somehow. It doesn’t make Anki unusable or anything, I’m just saying that I feel Bunpro has a slight edge in this area.

Well eventually you will have to review it and that takes time. I prefer to knock my reviews out first thing in the morning and I’ve had those days where I woke up and suddenly have a bunch of reviews and most of them are words that I learned a while back and know very well.

I would rather do less reviews and more reading. If you like or prefer to review those cards again and again even after you have already mastered the word than that’s absolutely fine - it’s not like there is a wrong way to do this or something - but personally I would rather have more time to read a book or write in my journal or something and would prefer to save reviews for stuff that I’m still learning.

#11

I was using the three (WaniKani, Bunpro, Anki), but deleted Anki after switching to Bunpro for vocabulary. I don’t need two decks for vocabulary. And it’s true that N5 vocabulary in Bunpro was much easier to follow, understand, and memorize than any Anki decks I tried.

#12

I use anki to create my own decks, and limit to 10 new words a day. I aldo have a deck for sentences, but I focus on some key words there as well I have put the most of words I cannot understand in simple texts. So I expect Anki to be hard. Wanikani is harder because I left it alone around level 18 and when I came back I had more than 2000 reviews due. Now I am in the 1700 range.
As for bunpro I am in the trial period and want to see.
Myself I have always been an advocate of mixing methods, since any has its pros and cons.

#13

Once you start adding vocab for rarer frequencies, there aren’t complete examples and you have to type in the exact English meaning. There are a lot of vocab you can’t add in Bunpro, even when you try to look up a word that appears in a quiz sentence. For vocab in general, there aren’t nuance hints/sentence constructions that disambiguate the answer nearly as often. For a lot of vocab, there are multiple correct answers and you have to run through them all trying to mastermind the right one (as evidenced by many of the Bunpro memes). Some of his can be alleviated by switching to reading mode and turning off ghosts, but still, all of this slows you down when trying to add lots of new words.

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#14

I understand, and I faced the issue about the lack of sentences for the vocabulary that is outside the Bunpro official JLPT decks (those that are labeled with Anumber or Enumber). But for those vocabs that are JLTP labelled, I think the sentences used to cover the several nuances are quite comprehensive (even if sometimes not reflected in the hints).

I don’t know about more advanced terms, but on N5-N4 when using Cloze if I write a word in Japanese that would apply to the context, a warning to try another way to say it would trigger, instead of marking my solution as wrong. I think that’s actually a cool feature to keep in mind the different options to recall. Sometimes the warning gives you a nuance tip too.

I tried several Anki decks, some clearly made with Yomitan and well known templates like Lapis. But even with all the information and context that they provide, I couldn’t find anything of value that is not on the Bunpro equivalent. Maybe if I made my own decks and tried to personalize them, I would enjoy more Anki, but even then there are features that I find difficult to replicate.

So my plan was to stick with Bunpro for the JLTP vocab, and immersing without caring much about mining, as I’m already learning a ton of JLTP words everyday. Then in the future, if I face the Bunpro issues that you mention, I will consider switching to Anki just for the more advanced vocab.

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#15

Anki is great if you make it great, but making Anki great can take a lot of time and effort.

I have custom decks, plugins, Migaku, and a collocations deck I converted myself with the help of another person.

So as both an Anki and Bunpro user, I see where you’re coming from. Thats why you’re paying a premium, for all the great software updates and configuring you don’t have to do with Anki. At your level, I think you should be fine for a while, but I would probably consider revisiting Anki for vocab cards sometime down the line.

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#16

Why does Anki not work for you? Or what do you mean by not working? What is your mature retention rate? Failing cards increases the interval properly in my opinion. It’s all based on FRS.

I find that Tango style decks (n+1) sentences with one target word building upon prior words to be the most effective. (Mature retention for me is 92 percent). The Kaishi/Core decks that sentences full of unknown Kanji to be the least effective, I get a lot more leeches in those and my mature retention rate is lower (70s).