I made this post in r/languagelearning already, but figured I'd repost here with additional context specifically around Japanese for anyone looking for advice 🙂
In April of last year I lost my 4 year long Anki streak for Japanese, and I felt literally nothing after realizing it.
I kept up with Anki religiously throughout the first 4 years I studied. My daily routine was about 30-40 minutes of Anki reviews, then 30 minutes of listening practice/sentence mining through movies and TV (Yomitan my GOAT), and about 20 to 30 minutes of reading before bed.
During the last year of the streak, as I racked up thousands upon thousands of vocab cards, it felt more and more like I was fighting with Anki rather than using it as a tool. There are so many words that mean practically the same thing, and I often found myself guessing the wrong synonyms repeatedly, leading to a huge pile of words that I technically knew but just barely got wrong every day. 利用 and 使用 for example, technically different but if you confused them in real life you'd effectively get the same sentence. My deck was full of these words and it felt like I was wasting so much time with them and with Anki instead of actually learning new words and getting more input. It was also taking longer and longer to finish my decks each day. What used to be a quick 20 minute warm up became 40 to 45 minutes, so if I was short on time, Anki was all I had time for. And if I didn't finish the whole deck in a day, I'd have to come back for an hour to clear it out the next day.
Additionally, as you enter the higher levels of any language, the vocab becomes a lot more specialized and infrequent. Meaning each additional word learned adds less and less to your overall ability to speak and understand, making Anki a less effective study method. I think it becomes even more effective at this point to study word roots or guess meanings through context as they show up instead of forcing yourself to memorize every single fringe financial term or type of metal you come across.
For years I had agonized about losing this streak and made a huge point about maintaining it no matter what. I expected a huge surge of guilt and failure but instead I just felt free. Anki has been an amazing tool for helping me with language learning, but something nobody prepared me for was how to know when it's time to move on from daily flashcards.
So after I graduated and got a full time Job in Japan, it felt pretty pointless to keep up the daily grind when I could be using all of that time for immersion, and for the past 10 months, that's what I've been doing. I've found that I haven't really had trouble remembering and using new words without making flashcards. I guess its the same way I remember new words for English. It honestly feels awesome to not wake up and have that big deck looming over me all day, and I'm spending so much more time just listening to and reading things I actually enjoy, where I get my review naturally. Anki is like training wheels for language learning, and I was long overdue to take them off.
TLDR: Don't be afraid to take a break from Anki if you're addicted to it like I was. You might not need it anymore. Good luck everyone 🙂
Additional Japanese study advice:
Basics: I started by self studying Genki 1 and 2 while watching very simple anime made for kids like クレヨンしんちゃん、ムーミン and reading manga like よつばと and しろくまカフェ. I think its okay to speed through these, skipping the workbook like I did because each lesson builds upon the last, so if you don't fully understand a grammar point the first time, you'll likely get it later once you have more practice. No need to agonize over understanding everything perfectly. I used Anki every day to remember vocab words.
Intermediate: As soon as I finished Genki, I started taking my immersion seriously. I slowly transitioned to more complex anime, while sentence mining for Anki flashcards with Yomitan. I read a couple simple light novels, but I was mostly watching Anime and Movies. I gave up on grammar study altogether, opting to go full immersion after doing research on language acquisition. Great lecture on the subject.
Advanced: I still used Anki for a while, but as you read above, I stopped about a year ago. I've been reading mystery books like 容疑者Xの献身、変な家, and my favorite, 阪急電車, because it takes place on the same train line I used to ride everyday. I hang out with my Japanese friends a lot and had to use a lot of formal Japanese at my job which improved my speaking quite a bit. I dated a Japanese girl for a little over a year after my study abroad and we spoke entirely in Japanese which bolstered my speaking ability and slang.
Additional study methods and my thoughts:
Dogen Japanese pronunciation course
- GOAT course, completely transformed my accent. Worth 100x what he charges for it, I feel like I ripped him off.
Study Abroad
- I already had a decent level of Japanese when I studied abroad, which enabled me to practice speaking. I tried to make as many Japanese friends as possible and break out of the foreigner bubble so I could get good speaking practice. At first it was difficult to start speaking even though I understood most of my conversations, but after a couple months I was able to stop thinking in English and my responses got a lot faster.
Language classes
- I was the TA for the advanced Japanese class at my college for a semester and I'm pretty disillusioned with that whole system. It moved at a snails pace, barely finishing Genki 2 after FIVE SEMESTERS, focused way too much on perfect grammar, punished students for mistakes, and had zero interesting input. Most students in their last semester of their JAPANESE MAJOR could not hold a conversation with me or the native speaker who also TA'd.
- During my study abroad I took one Japanese language class and it was completely different. The teacher didn't use a textbook, just taught us Japanese culture (Buddhism and Shinto stuff mostly) while speaking to us entirely in Japanese. He would act out a lot of stuff, use pictures, point to different things, encouraged us to talk, and most important, HE WAS FUNNY (typical Osaka ojisan energy). I learned so much and I wish I took more of his classes in hindsight.
- If you're set on taking language classes to learn, look for a teacher who creates an environment where people are having fun and are comfortable speaking. It makes all the difference in the world.
Job
- In 2025 I worked at the Osaka World Expo at the American pavilion. I gave tours, speeches, helped guests, and managed a ridiculously long line all in Japanese.
- This helped my keigo a lot and unexpectedly my ability to speak quickly since I didn't have a lot of time to help people always. I did interpretation for government officials, cultural performers, paramedics, etc. The pressure definitely helped me lock in haha.
TLDR 2: Getting input from movies and books was the most important thing for me while using Anki daily to boost my vocab retention before eventually transitioning into pure immersion. Being in Japan also helps a lot. Good luck all.
by TheStellarJay1