I add every single new word I see to an anki deck and review them everyday.
1 Like
I use bunpo-check and journaly.com. If you write too much, you may not get all the corrections you need, but it’s something! 
4 Likes
I did my first transcript of a dialog (a podcast episode) in Japanese last week and I want to keep doing it. It was really challenging and time-consuming but worth doing. I then shared it on Journaly and got some corrections and could compete the bits I didn’t understand.
4 Likes
Sorry for the reply to an old post, but thank you SO much for this. I’ve been improving so much in the past week just by adding this to my routine.
5 Likes
No problem! Playing around with Anki is half the fun to see what helps. Recently I’ve changed my new card steps to be 40 90 1440 so I see the card one more time the next day before it officially becomes a “learned” card. Plenty of ways to experiment - add another day, increase/decrease graduation number (mine is currently set at 2), utilize the WONDERFUL ease auto-reset feature so you’re not stuck in ease hell, etc.
I do this sometimes, so I can study both English and Japanese at the same time. 
That’s why I’ve added some English channels aimed at Japanese in this post.
1 Like
Every time i take a shower, I memorize a list of around 7 words or grammar points i find difficult and repeat them. I take however many items that fit working memory, and try to create a little story/“sentence” to make it easier to remember. It’s not a grammatically complete sentence (probably unnecessary), but sometimes i put a verb in て-form or insert a の somewhere.
This has really helped me recently, and i’m running out of items i’m struggling with, because i usually remember these well after this.
I collect these “difficult items” in a list or spreadsheet, ideally regularly, but often just before the shower. (actually i could tag them in Anki)
You could probably apply this to other activities like running or cooking, any chores.
3 Likes
This is somewhat similar to what your are doing, I use the NINJAL databases to see how words/verbs are used and the frequency of different constructions, Databases | NINJAL
2 Likes
Ooh I hate writing in Japanese but that sounds like a really good idea, I could probably benefit from doing that
1 Like
I have reviewed item X in Anki and thought “Isn’t this Y?” more times than I can count.
Of course, I would then study the difference between X and Y to make it easier for me to distinguish between the next time that I ran across X or Y. After a while, I started recorded these mistakes in the Anki card for item X. That’s when the fun started …
After I started recording this in Anki, I realized I often make the same mistake 6-12 months later, and I had completely forgotten about the note to self not to confuse X and Y(!)
Recently, I decided to use SRS to train my brain to distinguish between the kanji / vocab items that I was mixing up. I did this by creating cards where the front side is a “mix-up pair” and it asks me to recognize both of them. Here are a few examples of how I mixed things up. Your list will be different.
投 役
更 便
停電 充電
そっくり そっと
超える 越える
This added remarkably little to my Anki decks:
- One “mix-up kanji pair” card for every four kanjis
- One “mix-up vocab pair” for every 25 vocab items.
I find these new cards be my most challenging cards because they contain >>my<< mix-up pairs. This is just another tool, but I sure wish I had done this earlier.
3 Likes
I’ve tweaked my Anki settings a bit recently and so far it’s resulted in some positive results so I figured I’d share it with you all and see if it’s something you’d maybe try yourself!
- Adjust new card steps to add in one more day of review. My current steps are 5 30 180 1440. When I see a new card I’ll add my mnemonics or notes, hit good so I see it in 30, then 180, and then the next day it will be mixed in with that day’s review. My graduating interval is 3 days so if I press good on the card on 2nd day I’ll see it in 3 days time after that.
- My Lapses steps are set to 40 160 1440. Initially I debated adding 1440 but it’s been much more useful. New interval has always stayed at 70%
- Migaku Dictionary add-on to help import things to my cards instantly (pictures, audio, japanese dictionaries, multiple dictionaries w/ freq count, etc.)
The main thing that holds this deck together would be my Reset Ease Automatically add-on which adjusts the ease of my cards every single time I close Anki from my computer. If you’ve been in ease hell, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I’ve set the minimum to 200 which means no card’s ease will ever drop below that. This allows me to hit “hard” on cards I slightly struggled with and I see it in 2x whatever the current card’s day was (4 days → 8.) You can adjust this as you see fit obviously!
Let’s say I get a card wrong, I will see it twice that day and then once again tomorrow. Because I have the Ease Adjuster, if I still forgot the card the next day I can hit hard again which makes me see it again tomorrow before adding it back to the review pile. If I didn’t have this adjuster my cards would have an ease of 130% (I believe is the lowest it goes?) and I’d be miserable. I very rarely hit hard the second day during review but life happens yaknow? All in all adding an extra day to my review and new cards has seriously helped me out. Yeah, you’re gonna be adding more cards to your review per day but to be honest these review cards are going to take no time at all to answer since they should be fresh in your head. It’s an extra 2-5 minutes (depending on how massive your decks are) that I really think is going to help you out. At the very least, Ease Adjuster should be on everyone’s radar because it’s seriously going to reduce the amount of time repping which can then be used to either immerse or be lazy and browse youtube 
oh! and if anyone is interested, I have a very generic card outline that can be used in conjunction with Migaku dictionary so everything looks nice and clean. i know people have used yomichan to make anki cards but i’ve switched to migaku for now, just a ton easier and cleaner imo.
3 Likes
review steps of 30, 180 and 1440 seem soooo long! is that basically the default? seems like you don’t see a card again for ages after just a few reviews. I might prefer the Wanikani/Bunpro model there. (even though i also use and like Anki)
But in general it sounds like you’ve set it up well for yourself!
I use Migaku as well, but still use Yomichan for creating Anki cards automatically. Can Migaku automatically add audio for a word? What about frequency?
Review steps seem long in terms of how often you’ll see the cards? Hm honestly I would disagree, I think you see it a ton. I would see it two times in the first day after learning it, then once more the next day and then after that it becomes learned and I see it in 3 days. I believe the next time you would see it your ‘hard’ would display 5 or 6, one of the two. That’s pretty often imo because you gotta put some trust in the SRS that it’ll lead you to where you need to go. You could also very much so drop the graduation interval to 2 so you’d see it after 2 days instead of 3, but that’s a little too much for me. I think if you wanted to create the Bunpro experience you’d drop it to 2
Yeah Migaku does all that too! Yomichan is fine for a quick look up while browsing, but I don’t like card creation. There’s a couple really good videos out there that show how quick and easy it is to install everything. Basically you just have one giant window inside anki (Migaku) and you enter the word and it’ll show you everything you need, and you can also dictate what things it’ll show in the first place. All the dictionaries are the same ones Yomichan would use and if I remember correctly you put the freq lists inside the add on. There’s usually 4 audio sources to choose from for the words, so the variety is good. When I get home I’ll link a video showing the setup if you want
1 Like
ah, i thought review steps of 5, 30, 180 means that if you always press “good”, you’ll see it after 1, 5, 30, 180 days. that seemed a bit long.
Yes, if you could link the Migaku Anki video, that would be great, thanks!
1 Like
HAHA oh my god nononononono those steps are in minutes 
Here’s a link to a brief overview of just creating cards. I personally don’t use sentences on my cards (for the most part) so my process is a little faster than his. Basically, you just hit “Add Card” and then inside the dictionary press the arrow and you’re done in 5 seconds. Hopefully the below video jumps to the 9:20 section and skips the set-up so you can see what it’s like.
3 Likes
Haha, alright, that explains it 
My Anki still has full day intervals (1 and 3 days for first reviews), i should probably also set it more towards WK/BP style with minutes/hours. For now it’s still fine for me as i’m still doing a lot of BP/WK lessons, so i have enough reviews already.
1 Like
Instead of putting aside N hours per day, I keep WK and bun pro in tabs open all the time and visit them for a quick session(10 items or so) when I have downtime. Helps to prevent getting rusty even if you have busy schedule through out the day.
17 Likes
I do this, too! It’s why I can never quite pin down how long I actually spend studying in a day, because I do it in little chunks whenever I fancy and have a spare moment. For me, it’s also been the best way of avoiding huge review pileups, which are the bane of my existence.
8 Likes
As a beginner, I see new kanjis everyday. I tried rtk, but failed (felt like I was not learning anything from it, but now they don’t looks like random lines).
For each of the one I encounter, instead of putting them all into my SRS and having thousands of reviews per day, I just take a quick look at them in the dictionary, and for each of them, I look at the meaning, example words (thank you apple build-in dictionary for making everything so easy !) … I’m probably going to forget them in the next 5-10 minutes, but it helped me a lot. After searching for the same kanji a few times in the dictionary, I often remember them easier each time, or remember at least one of the vocabulary words.
4 Likes
Writing sentences online is one thing, but actually writing on paper is considered useless because Asian societies are tending to have everything written on the phones nowadays. Lots of Japanese and Chinese people I know say they don’t know how to write kanji because it’s not that useful other than rare occasions like signing their name.