LLearn Japanese

Am I doing too much? I feel like I am getting bit overwhelmed.

  • August 22, 2022

So past 1.5-1 year I had started Japanese grinding. With Time I got into Anki and WaniKani. In Anki I am grinding 3 decks – RRTK Kanji deck, Core 2K/6K deck and free WaniKani deck.

**RRTK** I get a meagre 35 – 40 review cards while taking 5 new cards each day. RRTK’s Mnemonics are not that great . But **manageable**. No problem here.

**Core 2k/6k deck** looks all over the place. It has an optimized order but still It feels hard to memorize the words’ meanings and readings. Even taking 5 new cards feels hard. I have to go through 135 review cards which **feels hard** to go through. Many cards are becoming leeches (tags) . Overall doesn’t feels right. It feels not like i+1 level. I have around 1000 words seen. Words are usable as they are everyday words but feels a bit hard to memorize.

**WaniKani** has been a going quite well mnemonics help a lot. I get around 150 words about half of them are reading and other meaning. It feels **more structured and more approachable**. In short this feels i+1 level. I study future meanings cards for whole level just for fun.

Now As I will be going college this fall, I don’t think I will get enough time and brainpower to grind all 3 decks at once, especially Core 2k/6k. My final goal is to understand a whole anime episode without subtitles (I know Cringe), which will take long long time and efforts I know. My s**hort term goal is to pass N5/N4**. I want to **go through the Immersion route** which needs a basic vocabulary to begin with.

So Should I drop Core 2k/6k deck at all? Is WaniKani deck enough? Or Should I replace Core deck with Tango deck or Refold JP1K deck? or Should I leave these deck and make my own Immersion deck using Yomichan? Or shrug these self doubts and press through it?

5 comments

  1. Tbh we can’t rearrange your own study plan and expect it to work for you. Instead I’d honestly suggest studying as much as you can Instead

  2. why are you using those 3 decks together? It makes no sense. The point of RTK/RRTK is to go through it FIRST so you have an easier time learning words later on. You COULD slowly start learning vocab on the side but its clearly not working for you. Also Wanikani is largely rendundant if youre doing RRTK. Sure it teaches readings but if youre doing RRTK you can and should learn those readings by learning actual words.

  3. IMO either do 1) WK or 2) Core + RRTK. I don’t see any reason why you would do both. It just doubles your work with zero additional payoff. Doing both WK and RRTK makes no sense at all. And if you should go with WK over RRTK you will learn plenty of vocab, so no need to also do Core now. You can always go through it later to fill in the blanks (e.g. kana-only words).

    Edit: Also, I swear “overwhelmed” is the most used word on this subreddit.

  4. Hey I also did something similar when starting and got super discouraged. I gotta be honest, learning words through the “general mass word deck” really sucks. If you don’t know kanji and you dont frequently encounter those words you basically have to memorize each little thing individually like it’s a hieroglyph or something. I got through the N5/N4/Half the N3 deck and still could not really understand any Japanese beyond people talking really slow and with simple vocab. What helped me a ton was Satori reader and reading/listening to the mostly comprehensible stories over and over and making my own decks from that vocab. I still forget random words from the tango decks I did but stuff I hear and encounter frequently gets burned into my head whereas stuff I only saw in anki I can barely use or remember at all. I think for the first like year and a half of my studying I completely misunderstood what it meant to “learn a word” and was way too focused on trying to remember flashcards and not just encountering words a million times until I understand them without puzzling them out.

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