What’s the best batch size for vocab? I’m planning to do 25 words per day for n5. I’m trying to sync it so that when I finish the n5 grammar I’ll finish the n5 vocab.
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25 sounds like a lot. You will be overwhealmed soon. Especially if you are also doing grammar. 10-15 should be fine. It is better to go slower, than to face a wall of 500 reviews per day and stop completely.
You can calculate the estimated number of reviews you will have in about a month by multiplying number of lessons by about 10. Long term, it will be closer to 15 or even 20, depending on your failure rate.
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It’s possible that 25 a day, if you’re just starting out and can devote a fair bit of time to reviews, will be sustainable for the short term. But it’s likely you’ll need to dial it back before too long.
It really depends on you and how much time you have. 25 is a lot for most people. I do about 10-15 a day and even that is steady and time-consuming. Just starting out you have more to worry about than just vocab. I’d definitely recommend doing 5-10 and then committing more time to grammar/basic sentence structures and listening.
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Give it a shot, you can always scale back or do review only days if it gets to be too much.
if you think you can be consistent with it and always do your reviews no matter what then go on, you can always reduce them and do less, or even do 0 new cards to catch up with reviews.
But if you’re a beginner then 25 or even 30 should be fine as long as you do some immersion alongside where you try to read some japanese, you’ll see the first words a lot so as long as you keep immersing you won’t forget the words just learned as easily
This may sound like a cop-out answer, but the “correct” amount is whatever amount you can handle.
I am slow at remembering so I need to have days where I do not do any new lesson and only do reviews.
However, some people have photographic memories and can instantly remember anything on first sight.
So, the most important thing to remember is that reviews will stack up over time with all the new words you are doing daily. So doing 25 words a day will mean you are doing 175 new words a week. So by the third week you could be having reviews ranging anywhere from 200 to 500 daily. And if we assume it takes 30 seconds, on average, per review and 500 reviews, that is 250 minutes or about 4hrs and 12 minutes you will need to spend on reviews for vocab only, daily.
So, if you think you can handle that much work and have the time to dedicate to doing that work, then go ahead and do that.
My understanding of this question is that you’re asking about the batch size rather than the total target per day i.e. how many new words you do before you have your first quiz on them. Definitely dial that way down, I’m doing 20 words per day with a batch size of 5 and that’s at the size where I’m mostly getting all the words on the first retry.
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Oh I hadn’t even realized that! Good catch Galateomatic!
Personally just increased my daily goal to twenty with a batch size of five.
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10 works for me and is sustainable. And it gives you the time to practice. Like to do some sentences of your own or smth. And with grammar you will encounter grammars that require way more than 1 day to master (て form for example), so you can go with 1 grammar in 2 days + 10-15 vocab. Add wanikani to the equation and you are good to go ;3
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From what I read at some point, the average person can learn 15 to 20 words a day.
I think this was something measured for romance languages where the word to word family ratio tends to hover around 1,6.
I don’t know what that ratio’s number is for Japanese, but what I’d suggest you do is to get started at 15, and then get up to 20 if you’re comfortable with 15, and just add or remove new words per day based on how your accuracy evolves over time.
That’s for total number of new words a day. Now when it comes to batch size, I’ve found that with a batch number of 10 I’d not be able to comfortably process all the new entries at once. With 3, it’s too easy to memorize, and once the review actually comes I realize I didn’t actually commit it to memory.
Through trial and error, I found that a batch of 5 or 7 works for me. Mostly dependent on what my number of new words per day for a deck is a multiple of. Again, you should figure this out through trial and error, but I’d say a batch of 5 new words with a total of 20 new ones per day is a good starting point.
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Additionally, don’t worry about people saying that the number of reviews can get overwhelming.
I’ve personally managed to sustain an average of a little under 300 reviews a day for the past couple months. You just need to be strategic about it.
Say you want to learn 20 new words a day and you got a batch of 5. It is known for example that the intervals for reviews is 4 hours and then 8 hours first. Then it starts going for numbers of days.
This means that say, you start doing your reviews at 9AM. You do a batch of new words at 5, then 5 more the following hour, until after after hour you’re done with your new entries at 12PM.
12PM to 3PM is also when you’ll get 5 reviews per hour for the new entries you did earlier in the day. You will then also get these reviews again at 5 reviews per hour from 8PM to 11PM.
Sometimes, I don’t feel like learning all of my new terms in the morning for a lack of energy. So what I do is that I know that I sleep for roughly 8 hours. This means that if N is the time I got to sleep, I’ll learn a new term perhaps N-4 or N-5 hours, then do the first review at N-1 or N, and then do a review for the same exact term when I wake up at N+8 or N+9 if I’m a bit sleepy still.
People are right when they say that if you do X new words a day then that means you’ll eventually have X times 10 reviews to do a day. However, if you do things like me that just means that you at worst get batches of 50 reviews to do per hour on different hours of the day.
I personally find this to be very manageable.
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