Update – Yeah, seems so. I appreciate everyone's input. Time to start deleting decks and changing routines up.
**
TL:DR – I'm concerned that I'm hitting a point as an intermediate Japanese student where study techniques I've used for years are now working against me. I'm also terrified of letting go of an Anki routine because I don't want to forget kanji readings. Anybody else ever hit this point of needing to adapt things that felt fundamental?
**
So let me begin by saying I utterly love anki, and I recommend it to everybody who wants to learn Japanese (or needs to learn something where there is a prioritization on memorization). However, I think I've fallen into an Anki trap.
I've been studying Japanese for years now. I've passed N5 a few years back, I came within 2 points of passing N4 in December (Fucking zaza). I attend classes. I have a tutor. I practice every day. I enjoy reading the NHK and Gundam manga. I even try to do a little shodo. I am not short on motivation. What I have is a profound fear of changing study habits because "OH GOD WHAT IF I START TO FORGET THINGS"
To that end, I use Anki on a tablet with a stylus so I can make use of the whiteboard feature. I have a deck for individual kanji/readings and stroke order, a deck for grammar drills, a deck for clustered vocab cards (a thing where I put 3-4 vocab words on a single card from a common theme rather than doing individual cards for individual words – I draw on the Squirrel N4 and N3 vocab books for this) and then a kanji deck where I use the same clustered approach but with two sided cards so I can go from kana to written kanji and then reading back the kanji into kana: that deck has been killing me lately.
Whenever I find a new kanji in my NHK reading, I build a kanji card that has the word but I also add a few more words that share the same reading into that "cluster". But now I'm hitting a crunch where I have 70-80 reviews a day on that deck alone because I don't hit "good" on the card unless I can nail every word on the card.
Anki is starting to feel like the only Japanese I do because of that deck. And this very morning I asked myself if that deck isn't just my completionist brain trying to memorize the dictionary again. And maybe the best thing to do would be to put a hard limit on that deck to make time for more reading and shadowing (but then I hear the voice in my head telling me that limiting a deck defeats the purpose of an SRS).
Recently, I've also created a cloze deck from NHK articles I've read this year. In that deck I have the sentence from the NHK and I cloze out the interesting kanji. So I'm testing myself on the kanji reading and the overall grammar of the sentence. I think it's a good way to practice my kanji readings in context while keeping the mental process aligned to the what one would see on JLPT. As someone who wants to put N4 to bed this year and focus on N3, I feel like that kind of in-context learning is probably a better way forward in both the short and long-term. And yet, I worry that I will start losing kanji if I don't take this brute force effort. Welcome to being a learner while having a full-time job being old enough to remember the 90s.
Anybody else had this problem? Any thoughts or recommendations? Because I keep coming back to something that Cure Dolly said in one of her videos. "Anki should be your handmaiden." Right now Anki feels like my wife and my mistress (metaphorically speaking) and both are muttering 失敗しているんね in another room.
by Shaftoe001