12 Anki Tips That Changed How I Learned Japanese

There are 12 things about Anki that many Japanese Learners aren't aware of, and if you don't know these things, it makes Anki feel like a jail and makes you want to quit.

So, I've got the key- Let's help you get yours too.

Stay tuned...

Point 1: This may sound obvious, but we're supposed to be using our Anki every single day.

Fundamentally, Anki's algorithm is designed to show you a card right before you forget it.

So if you don't review on the day you're predicted to forget a word, you'll probably forget that word.

Not to mention, the stuff that you don't review today builds on and stacks onto your reviews tomorrow.

Fortunately, it's not that hard to build consistency in Anki, as you’ll see with the following points.

The second thing you want to do is set your review count to infinite.

For that, we want to go into Anki and open up the deck options by clicking the cogwheel and going to "Options."

Right here, we want to set our max reviews per day to 99999.

Now, why do we want to do this?

If you have a 200 card limit, and Anki determines there are 201 words you're about to forget, there will always be this one card that keeps getting unreviewed.

By setting it to 99999, every single thing that Anki determines you will forget will be reviewed.

Now, some of you may be panicking, "Well what if I have to do 99999 reviews a day? That's a lot of reviews!"

Well, that will never happen once you hear the next point.

Control your new card count.

I really can't stand the people that complain about how Anki "takes too long" when they're the ones not doing anything to reduce their own workload.

If we look at the settings, we can control how many new cards we learn per day.

There's a common myth that you're supposed to do a specific amount of cards every day for the rest of your life.

Now, unless you live every day with the exact same schedule and motivation levels, things change, and this number should reflect that.

If you've got exams coming up, for example, there's nothing wrong with setting this number to 0 and just reviewing the cards that you already know.

Over a few days, this will gradually decrease your total reviews and cut down the amount of time you're spending on Anki.

General rule of thumb is: if you're getting a bit overwhelmed or your daily reviews are taking too long, drop the new card number.

4. Understanding the purpose of a core deck.

Core decks are starter decks that contain the top 2,000 to 6,000 most commonly used Japanese words.

I've included my curated core deck list in the description, where I recommend some great options for beginners.

I see a lot of people online talking about finishing a core deck before moving on to other things.

But the thing is, that shouldn't be your main goal at all.

The purpose of a core deck is to help build your base vocabulary while you get input from immersion on the side.

As you immerse, you'll begin noticing what words you *don't* know, and that's your cue to start mining those words instead.

Does this mean you should delete or stop using your core deck?

No!

You can turn the core deck into your backup library instead.

Here's how to do that.

In Anki, open up your browser by clicking over here.

Select your deck.

Then, up here, filter by the due date.

And all your cards should be in order of what's due first.

Select all of your undue cards by clicking on the first one, scrolling down to the bottom, then, while holding shift, clicking on the last one.

Remember, only select your new cards.

It should say "new card" with some number.

Once you have all your new cards selected, right-click, select "Change New Card Order," and set this to another number like 5,000.

By doing this, your mined cards can come before number 5,000, while the rest of Core stays as your backup library.

So this way, if you encounter a word that you already have a card for, you can just copy the word, go back to Anki and search for the word.

Set the new card number to something like 0.

Now this card will show up before anything else does.

One more thing is to make it so the new cards show up after your reviews.

We can do this by going into the deck options, scrolling down to display order, and changing when to display the new cards to "after reviews."

Next, let's talk about card types.

There are two types of cards: vocab cards and sentence cards.

The majority of the cards you'll be doing are vocab cards.

These cards have a single vocab word on the front.

And on the back, there's the audio, the pronunciation with the pitch, the definition, an example sentence, the example sentence audio, as well as an image.

This is great for training your active recall in isolation, then putting the word back into context by using the example sentence.

However, when it comes to grammar, sentence cards are what I recommend.

For these, the front will show a sentence, and the back will have the meaning and the grammar point explained as well.

Sentence cards are also useful if you already have cards for a certain word but want some extra cards to help you memorize it better.

Finally, sentence cards are great when a word has a stupid amount of meanings.

Instead of creating one vocab card with all these meanings, use sentence cards to show different meanings in context.

Next, let's talk about review types.

There are two types of reviews: single reviews and double reviews.

For single reviews, if you do 100 new cards, you are learning 100 new words.

And for each card, your job is to recall the reading and meaning of the word.

While for double reviews, if you do 100 new cards, you will only learn 50 new words.

This is because, on top of reading the word, there’s a second card type where you need to listen to the word and recall the meaning that way.

In other words, single reviews allow you to get more words done, while double reviews allow you to practice your listening as well.

The Jouzu Juls Core Deck is double reviews by default.

But if listening is not that important to you, here’s how to switch it back to single reviews: In Anki, go up to Tools → Note Type Manager.

Then, select the note type in question, choose "Card," and up here at the top, select the listening type.

Then, under Options, delete the card.

Next, and this is very important, let’s talk about how to grade cards.

By default, Anki has four buttons that allow you to grade how you did: Again, Easy, Good, and Hard.

However, we only need to use Again and Good, as well as one more button that I’ll get to later.

The reason you don’t want to use Easy and Hard is- not only because it makes reviewing easier, but also because it permanently messes with something called the "Ease Factor", which is how often you’re supposed to review a card.

If you have the Migaku add-on, you’ll notice that you already only have two buttons.

Furthermore, Migaku makes it so that pressing Again does not have any effect on the Ease Factor.

If you don’t have Migaku, you’ll have to get this add-on, which is free.

This one just stops the Again button from messing with your Ease Factor, but it doesn’t change the button layout.

So, grade your cards using the following criteria: If you can recall the reading and meaning correctly, press Space to mark the card as Good.

If you can’t, press 1 to mark the card as Again.

You don’t need to recall the exact meaning word for word.

As long as you understand the word, that’s good enough.

As you can see, it’s very black and white.

But what if it’s gray, you ask?

What if I kinda knew the word but just had a brain fart?

Or I say the word with the wrong pitch?

Or I accidentally press Space too quickly?

For those situations, you can press the Minus button to bury the card.

Burying the card sends it to tomorrow instead.

One more thing is the example sentence on the cards.

Should you spend time trying to understand them before you grade?

Ultimately, the choice is up to you, but in my opinion, yes.

Especially as a beginner, building up your fundamental understanding of Japanese sentence structure will allow you to understand grammar much more intuitively and quickly.

You should also be aware that the English translations of the sentences are 99% of the time flaming hot garbage, so don’t take them literally.

For a head start on grammar, I recommend watching my video on the most important concept of Japanese grammar: The Øが (Zero Ga), linked up here in the top right.

Next, let’s talk about graduating cards.

You’ll notice that a lot of the cards in my deck are yellow.

These yellow cards are suspended.

Suspending a card removes it from the active reviews, marking it as finished or "graduated."

I suspend cards once the review interval reaches one year.

So, if you look at the bottom of a card during your reviews, you’ll see an interval written on top of the Good button.

If this reaches one year or more, I hit the exclamation mark key to suspend the card.

Now, why do we suspend it after one year?

It’s simple. Within an entire year of immersion, you’re bound to encounter the word at least once.

If you don’t, then it’s probably not worth memorizing in the first place.

Graduating cards also prevents old reviews from piling up.

After four years of using Anki, I’d have around 10 to 12 extra reviews daily if I didn’t suspend cards.

That’s an extra 300 reviews per month for words that you probably already know.

By suspending them, I save time and get a clear sense of accomplishment by being able to complete the cards.

And next, on the topic of suspending cards: If you’re coming from another resource like Duolingo or textbooks, you probably already know a few basic words.

If this is you, you don’t need to waste time relearning these cards in Core.

Go into Anki, open up the browser, and choose the Core deck.

Then scroll through the cards and suspend the cards you already know by selecting them and pressing Control + J.

Now obviously, 2,000 words is a lot to go through just like this, so feel free to also suspend the cards as you go along with your reviews.

Number 10: You’ll notice that I have quite a few decks in my Anki.

So, how many decks should you be doing?

Well, the answer is very simple: one.

Especially if you’re a beginner, just stick to the Core deck.

Some people use additional decks like JLPT decks, grammar decks, or kanji decks, but I don’t think they’re useful for a few reasons.

First JLPT.

The JLPT has never released a vocab list, except in 2010 before the modern N-system was introduced. So, any decks claiming to be JLPT are completely baseless.

was introduced. So, any decks claiming to be JLPT are completely baseless.

Even if they were based on JLPT, JLPT does not rank words based on difficulty or frequency—it’s completely arbitrary.

So, when the alternative is the top 2,000 most commonly used words by real people, I’d say there’s no reason to choose JLPT.

Next, grammar decks.

Grammar decks are often linked to JLPT decks, and we already know the issues with the JLPT.

Furthermore, most grammar decks are completely bloated and don’t do a good job of explaining the core sentence structure of Japanese grammar.

Instead, I would recommend taking a closer look at the example sentences in Core and looking up things you don’t understand based on what you’ve encountered.

The best resource for grammar is my teacher, the late Cure Dolly-sensei— or myself, since I’ve remade some of her videos.

As for kanji decks: Learning 2,000 kanji does not mean you can read or understand 2,000 words.

This is because individual kanji aren’t necessarily words.

For example, this is a word read 泳ぐ This is a word read 水泳 But this, just by itself 泳… is not anything. It’s not a word.

So, trying to learn the readings and meanings of random individual kanji out of context is highly inefficient.

Instead, learn kanji via the vocab in Core, since those are real words that people actually use.

Finally, I’m not sure why some people use multiple Core decks because all Core decks basically contain the same vocab.

So, just stick to one.

Eventually, when you start mining, some people like to make another deck for mined cards.

But I like to mine straight into the Core deck because of the setup mentioned in section 4 of this video.

Next, we're going to talk about editing cards that need extra information.

Sometimes a card just won't stick, no matter how many times you review it.

So, instead of brute forcing it, let's try changing something on the card.

You can hit "E" to edit the cards while you're reviewing them, or find them in the browser.

First, for listening cards, if you have words that sound alike, like "早い" and "速い," you can add a note in the audio field to say, "not the other one."

Next, if the meaning doesn't make sense to you, just change it.

If you don't know what a "persimmon" is, just add a note like "fruit, like an orange."

Finally, for the image field, if the image is weird or you have a better idea in mind, just swap it.

Do not underestimate the power of images because you can realistically learn a lot of words without an English definition, just by using images.

Oh, one more thing.

You can take the example sentence and copy it into the audio field, then blank out the word with underscores.

This is basically a cheat because you get extra context.

So, I only do this once I've tried everything else first.

Next, if all else fails and you keep failing a card, it'll eventually become a leech.

To find your leeches, go to the browser and click on "Leech" on the left.

When a card becomes a leech, it basically means they're suspended.

Now, you might say, "Oh, but if they're suspended, then I'll never remember them!"

But to be honest, if you're a beginner using a core deck, I don't recommend reviving dead leeches.

Core vocabulary is so common that you'll naturally encounter them through immersion anyway, and you'll just remember them through exposure.

In my four years of learning Japanese, I've never resurrected a leech.

Yet, we can take a look at my leech list, and I can indeed read and understand all of them now.

So, while preventing leeches is ideal, having them isn't a big deal.

The next step from here is going to be creating your own cards via the process of mining.

So, click this video next to find out whether you're ready to start supercharging your Japanese using anime, manga, books, games, and more.

Cheers!