While there’s a lot to be said about the practical usefulness of the JLPT, in this particular instance it’s unrelated because I don’t think that 眼科 is JLPT N5 anywhere but on Bunpro. It’s just because, apparently, it’s a word used in Genki I so they decided to cram it in there. Jisho has 眼科 at N1 and 改札 at N2.
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During my reviews I just stumbled upon an other funny example: the N5 deck contains 抗生物質 (antibiotic) but 物質 (substance) alone is… in the N3 vocab deck.
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may I ask you some questions about Anki?
What SRS setting do you use? It seems every site and youtuber recommends highly different settings and I’m still not happy with the ones I tried. I would like it to have closer to the WaniKani or Bunpro levels if possible.
And how can I start reviews if I could still do more lessons? It always shows me how many reviews I have, but I can’t start them without doing the daily lessons.
And last is there no way to just flip trough the cards without actually studying?
I wanted to flip casually through a kana only deck in the evening to improve my kana reading spead (especially katakana) but it seems there is no way just to go through the cards without doing lessons. So what do you do if you got a lot of new stuff that you want to learn before beeing quized about?
I’m not the best person to ask about the settings, like what intervals to use. I messed around with that for a while and finally settled on one. Still trying it out. It does take weeks to get a feel for what settings you like, are you giving them enough time? Because it doesnt affect reviews already in queue, just the new ones. I did add multiple learning steps though to make sure I knew it before passing it to “know” so it wont get stuck in that lowease hell.
Go to your deck options and choose reviews before new. This setting wont let you learn new cards until the review queue is empty
There is! on both desktop and mobile. I can show you desktop right now, but the mobile way would be the same path to get there. Browse>top right Preview
if you want to view them as front and back make sure you have “back only” unchecked. In the sceenshot I have it checked because I was previewing stylisticts. Previewing them wont affect your reviews.
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I will admit that Bunpro does have some specific and difficult vocabulary. My custom Anki decks are at more than a thousand words taken from just Bunrpo and I have already gone through a core 6000 deck in the past.
Still, even if it’s a hard word it’s better to know it than not to know it. And it’s better to be exposed to it even if you aren’t planning on learning it anytime soon. The whole N5-N1 system is so flawed and only works for JLPT and those who are so structured they can’t function any other way. That whole system falls apart when you actually try to use Japanese and immerse in it. I’ve never once had a conversation with a Japanese person and was like, “I don’t know that word, it’s not at my level yet” Instead I ask and they explain no matter how hard the word is. You can’t ask TV shows, videogames and people to speak at N5 level for you. That only exists in learning book and apps.
Language isn’t like math, it’s a mess of ever changing words, dialects, and rules that get broken all the time. I forget words in English and Spanish rules and grammar all the time, although age might have to do something with that. Exposure to difficult words creates connections that make it easier to identify them later on. Just my take from years of doing this.
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Thank you so much!! 
Preview is exactly what I was looking for. I did not know you could go from card to card there. I think that will work perfectly on a tablet or smartphone to read casually.
And the review before lessons setting solves that problem as well.
At the moment the vocab decks at Bunpro work pretty well for me but it is great to be able to use Anki for mining vocabs and kana.
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眼eye ball, 科 science. The meaning is straightfoward. And I already know 科 is か from 科学 and 教科書。just need to learn 眼 is かん and read the ‘nuance’ hint instead of the one for one translation.
I 100% agree JLPT deck should include JLPT vocab. If it’s a word from Genki put it in Genki.
I use Jalup Anki (the iOS app is now named “Nihongo Lessons”) for vocab.
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I just didn’t add those words. The possibility of those words showing up on the test is near 0. Also even if they do it’ll barely affect your grade because they’ll only account for a few marks. It’s better to learn 10 common useful words than spend the same amount of time and energy on a rare word that you will barely use.
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That makes me feel sick! It’s really ruined my mood!
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Saw this today in Shin Misato, made me think of this thread, lol. Quick, shield your eyes if you’re only at N5.
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Not anymore, since the update a few months back. You can just enable FSRS and leave the rest at pretty much default settings. It’s awesome.
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I concur, FSRS is really a game changer for Anki IMO. No more tinkering with more-or-less obscure SRS parameters and meta-gaming the ease factor to get decent review intervals.
It’s still a bit of a pain to setup though, for instance the official Android app in the store doesn’t support FSRS (you have to side-load the alpha version from github) and you still need to muck about with the deck settings to get it all working correctly since it still defaults to SM2 and you have to manually tell it to train on the review data.
But once it’s set, it’s really good.
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Wait, what ?!
I haven’t heard about FSRS. Just switched to Ankidroid alpha to try it out. Thanks !
Out of curiosity, how are you learning and relearning steps set ?
They’re all by default I think.
My relearning steps are 30m 1d 6d. My learning are 10m 100m 1d 6d I read about ease on refold so I set my ease to:
to meta-game the ease factor.
I believe that “ease” only matters for SM2, FSRS uses different parameters (not entirely sure though).
Yeah @Noxsora must be using the old algo. Ease doesn’t matter with FSRS. Also the devs say learning and relearning have to be under a day to make it work as expected.
I admit I’m a bit anxious about the new steps, some reviews have been pushed back in like 5 years, and some intervals seem to be a bit too long. Anyway, I’m expected to have such feeling, it’s literally written on the GitHub, so I’ll give it a month to adapt to my learner profile and see how it goes.
Yeah, I’m on 2.1.48 It’s a miracle I was able to download it at all with the fire wall, and I can’t install updates or addon’s
crazy how it’s still in there…
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