Theory: it’s better to learn more vocab with okay recall than fewer words with great recall

こんにちは~

I’m about six weeks into studying Japanese and I think I’ve been making a mistake on vocab learning. I’ve been strict and marking things wrong on Anki if they weren’t reasonably easy to recall (like if took me a minute or a few listens to get it, I’d just mark the question wrong).

However, I’ve noticed I’ve retained other vocab I’ve picked up in sentence mining just as strongly without needing to do this level of scrutiny, simply due to encountering the word in multiple contexts.

I think I’m realizing that maybe it’s better to cover more vocab less intensely if it means you have more time to encounter those words in an immersion context?

I’m still a beginner though so I am curious people’s thoughts since I am new to language learning. Has anyone else thought about how to strike the right balance with this?

経験はどうですか？ 体験談を教えてください🙏🏼

Edit: Reddit was being weird and I accidentally posted this multiple times. Apologies for the spam!