How to get off Anki

Japanese
#21

The part about added cards is just how many cards you have made in Anki, not how many cards you have learned. I haven’t learned 39,000 cards. I just have so many because of sentence banks from morphman if you know what that is. I probably only know like 6000-7000 words.

The main reason is that there are many words you will need to know to live in Japan (if you want to) that probably won’t appear much, if at all, in your immersion. For example, “health insurance card” and so on. Each specific domain has its own set of vocabulary, so unless you immerse in a wide variety of domains regularly, you won’t be reviewing vocabulary from other domains when you immerse. I also want to do the JLPT for employment purposes and you also need a lot of words for that which won’t often appear in anime or whatever you immerse in.

I also found that, especially in the beginning, reading and listening to isolated sentences taken from immersion many times rapidly in Anki every day improved my reading and listening speed a lot compared to only doing normal immersion. I had audio and reading cards for each new vocab word in i+1 sentences and native audio. It’s like spamming ideal comprehension zone content for listening and reading in a timed and tested environment. If I didn’t understand almost immediately I would fail the cards.

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#22

you mean 保険証?

I don’t think this is kind of word you really need to put into anki if you are well accustom to kanji. I would added it now, to train kanji reading, but it not looking like something you can’t just remember after seeing it once or twice. It use most common readings of all kanji and even use its meanings. You would just press 5-6 times “easy” in Anki I believe.

Yeah, I can imagine that. I kind of use bunpro for it :sweat_smile:

Edit: actually I will add it now since I happen to know those kanji and have not many words with them. Looks like nice use case for them, thanks :hugs:

#23

Yeah I mean, if you are already good at reading Japanese and you know a lot of words, of course you will be able to learn those kinds of words much faster when you need to learn them so you should be fine. For me though I needed to know them from the beginning, because I started learning after moving to japan. There are a lot of words related to money and banks and things like that, super boring. It’s also easier to guess their meaning when you see them written but harder when you only hear the word or need to say the word yourself.

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#24

Glad you don’t intend to hit me with breaking news that I will have to use anki to the end of time xD

#25

okay, unpopular opinion time. Anki is boring as hell, learning/reviewing Kanji by themselves even more so.

You can learn words from immersion. You can learn kanji from words. It’s ok to forget words. Words will appear again later, so immersion has a natural repetition system that also provides much more context than a flashcard, even a sentence card.

Burning out on anki made me stop studying Japanese for long stretches of time. And I see it all the time, language learners that spend too much time on anki when they could be watching stuff, reading stuff, playing videogames or generally doing the things you really want to do with the language.

Learning a language is a messy process, your unconscious does most of the work for acquisition. It is hard to quantify or measure. It is hard to feel the progress some times. Anki is measurable, has statistics, graphs, you have immediate feedback. That’s why it is so tempting.

Starting immersion is hard. You’ll feel lost, you feel you don’t understand a lot of stuff. Don’t worry, accept the ambiguity and move on. A visual medium like comics/manga or movies/TV/anime will help with understanding even if you miss a lot of the language. Looking for graded content (especially for reading) can also help; not as exciting as “real” content but may be more manageable.

I’m not saying to drop anki altogether but really to think if it’s necessary to spend so much time on it. Anki can also be used to review words you learned by immersion, in my opinion one of the better ways to use it. But not many words at a time. Remember: it’s ok to forget words, they will appear again and you’ll remember them eventually.

In the limit, you can learn the language without using Anki at all. I learned English basically by reading/watching/playing videogames and never had to flip a flashcard during the whole process. Immersion by itself works, anki + immersion will be more efficient; however, anki by itself will never teach you a language.

This may be a contrarian opinion but I hope you think about it a little.

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#26

For me, a little bit of Anki + a lot of immersion seems to be the best way to do it (as opposed to immersion only - though yeah, that would still be better than Anki on its own). I do agree that flashcards are kinda boring, but they are, to an extend, also very effective.
The thing is - as beginners most of us are going to be slow readers, which means you can only get through so much content in a day (assuming you don’t have that much time). Which means that even common words might not come up that often in the beginning.

I personally always add words that contain a new Kanji to Anki because those are pretty hard to remember from exposure alone (for me, at least). If I already know all the Kanji in a new word (or even better, the readings as well) I’m a lot more likely to remember it without flashcards.

(But then again ‘no Anki at all’ is not what you said, so I’m not disagreeing here)

I personally shoot for 5-10 new words in Anki a day, that puts me at 10-15 minutes of reviews per day. (Usually it’s closer to 10) That’s more than doable. I wouldn’t wanna do an hour or more every day though, I don’t have the discipline for that :laughing: Definitely agree that spending time with actual content is much more fun, and incredibly helpful.

I learned English basically by reading/watching/playing videogames

I learned most of the English words I know that way too, but IMO that’s not quite the same. English doesn’t have Kanji, and I highly doubt I’m ever going to consume as much content in Japanese as I do in English.

Immersion by itself works, anki + immersion will be more efficient; however, anki by itself will never teach you a language.

Agreed!

@MacFinch

I will for sure suspend any word with interval longer than 6 month. Probably I will go with just 3 and if necessary I will just re-add it.

I do that too! If the word is important/frequent enough I will probably see it in the wild over the next couple of months and review it that way, and if not… oh well, who cares. Relearning things you’ve learned before is pretty easy anyway.

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#27

That’s looking to me like very very popular opinion xD

100% agree. But in my case it would be suboptimal. First: learning to write kanji is not that hard to me (at beginning when I had not much reviews I added 110 kanji in one day without a problem), I like it actually, second: I am challenging myself now and putting more effort upfront will fore sure pay off. It is paying off already to be honest.

That why I started it in day one (actually from “week one” but it sound not sound like proper English for some reason…) xD

Here is my first ever piece of Japanese I manage to understand. It took forever though:

プリベット通り四番地の住人ダーズリー夫妻は、「おかげさまで、私どもはどこから見てもまともな人間です」というのが自慢だった。不思議とか神秘とかそんな非常識はまるっきり認めない人種で、まか不思議な出来事が彼らの周辺で起こるなんて、とうてい考えられなかった。

I think we don’t disagree much :hugs:

#28

After what time you bury them? I can’t make up my mind. 6 month looks like bit long time since there will be 4 month interval before that. And I am not sure if I want to bother myself with a word after 4 month. If I remember it it is waste of time, if not then maybe it is not that important word in the first place and it is better to wait for it to reappear somewhere?

What’s are your thoughts?

#29

I used to retire them after 7 (months) I think, but I decided to lower that to 3 about a month ago to lower my review count.

My reasoning is that every word I’m learning right now should still be relatively common (I have different frequency indicators included in Yomichan and usually don’t add rare words), so it should hopefully be possible to make them stick through a combination of a bit of initial memorization via Anki + exposure through immersion after that.

But since it’s only been a couple of weeks since I switched to that method, I have no clue whether that will work out or not. We’ll see :smile:

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#30

To me, whatever benefit you’re getting from Anki is not worth spending 6h a day on it. Even one hour is excessive.

I like Kanji/Hanzi. I use Skritter to practice writing (when I feel like it, usually not everyday). I was going to take Chinese calligraphy classes in the nearest Confucius Institute, but 2020 happened.

Back when I started a lot of people on the internet said THE way to start learning Japanese was to do Heisig. I did the whole volume 1 in 3 months (had a lot of free time). If I were to start again I wouldn’t do it this way. You don’t really need to know thousands of kanji upfront.

Anyway, my intention is not to say how you should study but to give another perspective. You started the thread asking for help so you already feel your anki use is getting excessive. 6h of anki a day would be absolutely soul-crushing to me. I can’t even take 1h these days, because I know there are far more interesting and fun things to do with this time and yeah, maybe it will be less efficient than using anki for longer but I’m not on a race or contest, I don’t need to be 110% efficient. Fun >>>> efficiency.

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#31

Please don’t feel obligated to clarify that. It is forum. It is meant to have different opinion and discuss them. It would be silly of me to get offended.

If you think I did, then I clearly made some fatal error in expressing myself. :sweat_smile:

Edit:
Actually after thought I decided to change my plan a bit more. Maybe learning that much kanji was shield to avoid immersion? Learning kanji is easy and mentally not challenging. So I decided I will stop adding kanji I don’t meet in immersion just to try meet some stupid target.

Pointing my attention to this few times in row has proven to be useful. Thank you :hugs:

You said this at exactly right time since youtube reminded me about this video:

xD Fortune maybe is looking after me :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Later I will consider next step. It will not reformer the whole system at once.

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#32

If it’s of any help, here’s my experience: when I first discovered Anki about a decade ago, I made a huge kanji deck: Heisig keywords and readings for all the kyoiku kanji and almost all the joyo kanji. I also made a Japanese words deck that was about a tenth as big. I overestimated my ability to recognize kanji by visual memory so they never stuck. I burnt myself out and went years without using Anki, then I tried that same deck about a year ago and I couldn’t get a single card right.

Once I started using WaniKani earlier this year, I deleted all my existing Anki decks. It was hard to say goodbye to all that work, but I’ve had much bigger gains in the past year than that deck ever gave me. In addition to WaniKani (and Bunpro, of course), I have new kanji and Japanese words decks. Now I’m much more purposeful about making sure that each new note is only a little bit more than I already know.

The example I always think of is Ludwig Zamenhof having to create Esperanto twice, but the second time was much better. Redoing things from the ground up is annoying, but the second time is always so much better that it’s worth the effort.

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#33

My man!

If you speak Esperanto then I am sorry: I spoke it for about 3 month only and I don’t speak it anymore. I forgot all of it ;/ Maybe one day I will relearn it.

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#34

I’d agree with that.

There’s a book that I’ve been reading that I’d recommend to any language learner, let alone any Bunpro user: Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C Brown, Mark A. McDaniel, and Henry L. Roediger III. It explores the neuroscience behind which study techniques actually work and which make us think they work. One of the book’s theses—at least as I interpreted it—is that learning is supposed to hurt. Spaced repetition can be boring and frustrating, but because it forces recall more than more passive study techniques (like rereading & highlighting), the long-term gains are much higher.

So I have to remind myself that the fact that Anki irritates me is exactly why I need to keep using it!

That was about what I did too! I did the Esperanto course on Duolingo before I realized that I would just never use that language in my life! That story always stuck with me, though, especially after I lose hours of grinding in an RPG!

#35

Esperanto on duolingo is best prove duolingo is good for nothing. They made simple language into hard one.

I actually am still “using” Esperanto. It was mostly a tool to teach my brain how to learn foreign language. It made learning English possible for my: i am not talented at languages at all.

Here is list of research on that subject.

If Japanese if first foreign languages for anybody I would advise to take 3-6 weeks and learn esperanto first.

#36

Though you don’t necessarily “learn” a language. According to some researchers on language acquisition (the well-known example is Stephen Krashen), language acquisition is different from language learning. Acquisition works unconsciously, learning/studying is done consciously but it’s not acquisition.

This video is an explanation about these points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_EQDtpYSNM

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#37

I totally agree on that one. I am strong on immersion side. :hugs:

I don’t understand people trying to turn learning Japanese into academic endeavor.

#38

I remember an interview with Dr. Krashen where he was talking about the Affective Filter hypothesis and he says that he believes that a bit of suffering might be necessary to learn other subjects like mathematics, but that language is different.

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#39

I am not sure about that. I suffered learning my native language. Speech problem made it very hard for me to learn how to read. I was often mistaken by other kids for being German up to about age of 10.

So I would tend to disagree with that hypothesis.

And lets not forgot Japanese people “suffer” learning Kanji as well.

I would guess it was just rhetorical device.

#40

Yeah, Duolingo’s model is deceptively Eurocentric. I wish there existed something similar that incorporated context and was less, “How would I say this in that language” and more, “How would a native speaker communicate that idea”.

That’s an interesting video that I wish I’d seen sooner. It sounds like what he’s saying is the best tactic for aural comprehension, which is usually the hardest thing about language acquisition. My own goals mostly involve translating written Japanese, so I’ll probably take his advice but continue to practice with Bunpro and WaniKani and Anki.

What I’ve been doing for listening practice personally is watching a video every day that’s trending in Japan. I’ve also been listening to NHK News, and I think I’ve learned more from YouTube. So I think he’s onto something.

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