I think 5 seconds / card is fine, and that’s what I do in anki. 20-30 secs / card is crazy long, since nobody thinks for that long trying to come up with a word while interacting with the language naturally. 5 secs/card also has the advantage of greatly increasing the number of cards you can do, which will help prevent burnout and increase your progress. I really don’t see much of an advantage for long cards since if you don’t remember it in 5 secs, maybe only 15% of the time you would remember it if you had 20 secs. Pausing to hear the audio for a sentence I also think is unnecessary, since in real life you’re going to need to be able to see and recognize a word even without much context in order to achieve true fluency.
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I honestly have no idea how people can memorize and remember cards after interacting with them for 5 seconds once a week/month, assuming you’re not constantly encountering them elsewhere. 5 seconds would never work for me.
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Anki’s FSRS system is quite powerful, so if you’re forgetting them constantly, you’re going to be seeing them a lot more than once a week. Generally, you’re going to see it everyday for a couple days until you start to remember it, and then it slowly increases the increment, but if you ever forget, it drops the increment back down to just a day or two so that you can remember it again.
Each card only takes 5 secs, but since my true retention rate is 80%, that means for 20% of the cards, I’m going to see them a 2nd/3rd/4th/etc. time, meaning my total time with the card is more like 15-30 secs, and then I’m going to see them again tomorrow. So it’s far from 5 secs/ week, more like 5-30 secs each day.
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the beauty of anki is that it forces you to pretty much memorize cards no matter what. When you first learn a card, you will probably see it on anki 7+ times just in your first week. if its a card that youre really bad at (so you get it wrong and the interval resets), you could see it 20+ times in a single week. if you know what it means, it could be years between when you see the vocab word on anki
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Question for all native English speakers out there who read quite a bit of this thread: what do you think about my English writing skills?
I never practiced my English after reaching low b1 level (except learning conditionals for a few days), so my main practice was writing on Reddit and trying to identify common mistakes with Grammarly as a little bonus.
Do I make a lot of grammar mistakes? Is it even possible to read my texts without pain?)
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Outstanding - very easy to understand. You make enough mistakes that I know you’re not a native.
Keep in mind, internet / international English is very different from formal / workplace English, so you’d potentially get some looks from less accepting old people in the USA assuming you talked / wrote emails that way.
To give you a fair comparison, around 25% of the people I work with daily are ESL. Their emails are only slightly better than your posts here, and they’re meant to be formal!
Have confidence 
!
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Thanks for your response!
I guess I’ll give some time to my writing after finishing my Japanese speedrun.
I would say my writing is kind of the same in my native language - it has no style and clear structure, so I can not write any nice posts.
So I think about finding some YouTube writing courses (for natives in English) so I can learn basics and establish my daily-conversation style, and only then fix my grammar mistakes 
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A bit late but I’m here with new update:
Grammar
Added 89 points since the last update, so it’s about 3.9 points/day
It takes about 2.5-3h to do every day
Kanji
I have consistently 400 reviews piled up and can not move forward(
Spending about 15m/day
Words
I learned about 250 and then almost totally gave up, no methods worked, words were not sticking, and reviews were piling up. Right now I’m not doing any words learning.
Anyway, I spent 25 hours starting from the time of the last update.
Input
I was reading ± 90 minutes/day and my reading speed and comprehension became better. Right now I can read videos from BiteSizeJapanese easily (compared to light novels) with speed about 20 words/m or 45 characters/m. Also after I read though it I can watch with subs and understand most of it.
Also right now I’m doing mostly “language learning” input, which means almost I’m reading is language learning content. Also I have planed reading something more advanced as また、同じ夢を見ていた or a translation of HPMOR (harry potter and methods of rationality) https://fanficfanfic.tumblr.com/post/169144902211/hpmor1. First one was hard at the start (started about the time of the last update but switched to another content quite quickly), can not say how it is right now because haven’t read enough yet.
Taking harder content because I need to see new grammar point’s in context, but there are not much of them in those videos for beginners.
Organization
Messed up my schedule due to traveling and do everything up until 4am, I hope I’ll recover soon, but probably only after 15 when I get home, not burning out until that time is crucial, but I do not plan to lower my goals!
As you can see my time was down last week, but I hope to fix it as fast as I have a schedule.
Plans
- Bunrpo: I think about doing 3 hours/day (because I like it more than other stuff right now and what I have most success as well as I see the results of it on reading)
- Kanji: I want to take my time to 60 minutes/day, close all reviews and learn the last 700 kanji I need, it should take about 40 days.
- Words: I just gave up, so I won’t be doing any for now, they just make me depressed
- Reading: 80 minutes for language learning content + 40 minutes of books/novels
- Listening: I can not do passive listening as long as it is not Mashl (in which I understood like 100% of plot even though I barely coughed only a few whole little phrases), otherwise content like Shun or BiteSizeJapanese is not there yet (maybe shun, but I need to stay more concentrated to catch the main line). As for active listening I rewatch videos I’ve read though with subs on but without stops (it’s not a rule, I can stop sometimes, but I don’t actually need, and it’s about making my brain work fast and understand sounds well).
One more thing
One bonus thing is the strategy I came up with:
I called it “Listening fluency entry pomyint creation”, wich means I listen, watch, learn words related to one topic, which I’m very familiar with until I don’t have to do any effort to listen this topic, and then I can scale it to other topics. Therefore I’m not practicing with podcasts and other stuff not related to Language Learning which I took as my main topic. I did this thing with Engish and a few months ago with Italian, and it worked out grate, hope to have the same result (maybe in 0.2x speed) for Japanese, lets’s see how I’ll be able to watch content like that!
Thanks for reading and have a learning experience!
About vocab study, can you explain to me what you’ve tried so far?
I’ve tried doing 5 seconds/card but it wasn’t enjoyable, review piled up to fast retention was 55% for young cards. After some time I was able to add only 10 new cards/h and it wasn’t the end I guess, reviews were still rising at that time.
I’ve tried doing sentences n+1 for about a week but creating then is hard while I read content from youtube ("。" are messed up on youtube subtitles) and it wasn’t fast enough, as well as retention wasn’t high.
I’ve tried spending as much time on card as I want to find meaning of each kanji in my head, understand the word’s meaning and find reading in my head, but it was to slow, about 40 sec/card, not sure about retention because I gave up pretty quiqly.
Right now I’m thinking about learning just word’s meanings, and then attaching reading while reading, this way I’ll reinforce kanji, and learning meanings are like 10 times easier
Well, I have some suggestions for you
- Japanese course based on Tae Kim’s grammar guide & anime - AnkiWeb: Even though it’s anime, it’s the only n+1 deck that I know (and it’s a really good one)
- Use the vocab lessons on Bunpro (some words doesn’t have example sentences, but all N5 has). I’ve been testing and they’re good as reading practice (I’ve encountered some words that I thought I knew, but I didn’t quite understand in that context)
- Different from how you’ve been studying grammar, you could also add the words to your reviews as you come across them in the wild
Flashcards:
- Don’t try to rush cards, it’ll backfire at some point (like it happened to you)
- Don’t add too much new cards all at once, it’ll also backfire too (because it can be too information for our brains and your reviews will pile up too fast)
- If your retention is lower than 85~, stop adding new cards for some time
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Have you got a sentence mining workflow set up? There’s a way to create Anki cards directly from what you read or watch in a few seconds. I find it much easier to remember a word with picture and voice context taken directly from the media source. It’s sort of like having a memory palace technique built in to the Anki card.
Unfortunately, the setup is very technical and there are a lot of configuration steps that have to be just right across many applications.
If you’re interested, I can post instructions for my setup.
Here’s an overview of one possible workflow:
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Heh, I just tried to set a goal according to my understanding of how many words I can learn a day, and I never was so wrong, because I took stats from my experience with Italian words… and then Japanese just won’t stick like Italian which are basically like English and I can do so much associations for them. So my plan was just unrealistic in terms of words.
I’ve seen this before but didn’t pay attention, now it looks decent, I may try it
Bunpro can work, but I afraid to put to much time into it so platform won’t get to familiar to the extend where I don’t want to learn here anymore.
In summary I’ll try everything little by little, but I don’t really see a point in learning words if I can do only as much as 10/hour (unless I quite everything else), I’d better train on my listening and speaking to get more familiar with language and then 17-20/hour will be good enough, if I can get to that point
I just used yomitan to add cards from what I’m reading
Adding images and audio might work, but I don’t think it’ll give me boost that is significant enough to make me start learning cards again right away + it’s mostly YouTube videos about learning languages, so I don’t know if this will help
In case you might be interested or want to come back to this later, the last part of this video demonstrates a setup that allows you to mine sentences directly from YouTube. You can also configure it to use the highlighted definition rather than automatically including all of the definitions for a word.
There are other setups that let you mine from games or from manga.
I also came across this article for optimizing Anki for learning languages.
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I learned about 250 and then almost totally gave up, no methods worked, words were not sticking, and reviews were piling up. Right now I’m not doing any words learning.
Anyway, I spent 25 hours starting from the time of the last update.
This happened to me the first time I tried going the same pace I’m going now. It was a pretty bad feeling.
So as to don’t get too discouraged, also keep in mind that there’s to a certain extent a limited amount of energy and capability for retention you have each day and you’re already putting a ton of work towards kanji and grammar which can reduce the amount of vocab you’re able to pick up without hitting the breaking point of more words = less words due to getting overwhelmed and kind of dropping the entire stack you’re carrying on the floor as a consequence. I doubt you’re actually bad at learning words since you’re putting in the work with kanji and grammar, you’re just biting off more than you can chew (yet).
What I ended up doing was setting a very leisure pace and then gradually increasing the amount of words per day until I hit my breaking point, and then I stayed there until I started getting the hang of it and increased it little by little all over again. Over time I just sort of got the hang of it and was able to learn more.
Rather than sit at zero, you can probably do something like a few words a day (literally just 3-5 would be better than 0 just to reinforce some readings that will help with other words later on), and when that starts to feel easy consider increasing it a tiny bit. To make it easier on yourself though, it’s a good idea if those few words use mostly the same kanjis. The less readings you need to remember in one day the better.
The good thing about readings is that the more words you learn the easier it gets, it makes sense that you find it hard in the beginning. It gets easier, don’t worry.
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Maybe you could do what @adorable suggested: learn just 3 words a day, it doesn’t seem much, but at a steady pace is way better than nothing. Also, you could use srs for reinforcing what you already know.
For example, you encountered 寂しい a couple of times and you kind of got the feeling of how it’s used, then you could add it on bunpro and example sentences will appear in your reviews.
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Thanks for suggestion.
I just finished establishing learning plan with my mentor and we added 30 minutes of Anki vocab to my routine, where I recall meaning of each kanji with no hurry.
Nice thing, I guess I’ll do that
I think about taking 1 month off from bunpro after completing n4 grammar to make myself another, immersion challenge. I think it’s the best thing I can do now.
I don’t know how can I make challenge from it besides just setting myself time limit of 3-4 hours/day minimum (I’ll have Bunpro review for a few days) + kanji 0.75h + words 0.50h + writing 0.25h
Do you guys have any ideas or suggestions?
Instead of doing 0 reviews, just don’t do new lessons, I think it’s the best course of action if you want a break (so you don’t forget the grammar you already know). What have you been thinking to use in that challenge?
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