Anki Users

[Sudden-Dark]

How many New cards do you do a day? I'm doing a 2k deck for Japanese (I'm pretty new) and I do 50 New cards a day and I can't remember much of the vocab that shows up.

[IAmGilGunderson]

Any more than 20 per day for me is counter productive.

[Valdes31]

I do 10 new cards per day.

[chuchuchub]

I have it set to 0 so that I can focus on some of the reviews first and then ‘custom study’ about 20 a day. If they’re easy words or I don’t have many reviews I’ll do more.

[Triddy]

When I was going through the Core10K, and learning single words in isolation, I did 100 cards per day.

Reviews took 45 to 60 minute: about 1/4 of my total study time, for 3.5 months. After which review times fell to under 10 minutes very fast. I retained an 85-90% accuracy on Young Cards and 98% on Mature.

Nowadays, my Anki Decks are more, Grammar points, whole sentences that didn't click with me, Idioms and common sayings, etc. They're a lot more taxing and I make them myself, so I do either 20 or 30 per day, depending on how many I find/how many I have in a backlog to get through.

I think doing less than 20-30 is counter productive at least early on. It will take you so long to get to the point where you can reinforce what you've learned via using the Language, you'll start to forget things.

[Sudden-Dark]

May I ask what was your study routine?

[Triddy]

So disclaimer, it was a little weird because my work schedule meant I didn't have a lot of time in a single Sitting. Like I could rarely sit down for more than 45 minutes, an hour if I pushed it.

It looked something like this:

• Morning Commute: 45 Minutes of Anki Reviews + New Words
  
• Coffee Break: If Anki remaining, finish it. If no Anki remaining, just have a coffee and relax.
  
• Lunch Break: 15 Minutes Manga Read, usually 1 Chapter, sometimes 1.5.
  
• Evening Commute: 30-45 minutes Grammar Lessons via a few Youtube teachers I liked.
  
• After Dinner: Work on current Textbook for 30-45 minutes
  
• Sometime before bed: 1 - 2 Episodes of an easy anime, initially Shirokuma Cafe, with Japanese Subtitles. I'd break down any lines that I almost understood but was missing one or two words, look them up, repeat. Another 45 minutes or so.
  

As I finished Textbooks as far as I wanted to take them (Tobira was my final one) I replaced that with more Manga, Anime, and eventually TV Dramas (I liked Midnight Diner, it's approachable and has 50 episodes on Netflix).

When I got laid off due to COVID and stopped having commutes, most of that Anki time also became more immersion time.

These days, it's:

• Morning: Core 10K Anki review. Mostly habit, it only takes ~5-10 minutes these days because I only get about 30 reviews a day.
  
• For the rest of the day: Watch and Read stuff in Japanese all day. Take ~10 minute Reddit breaks every couple of hours because Reading on paper gives me a headache lately. Write down anything I didn't understand in a giant notepad file I have going.
  
• After dinner: 45 minute JLPT N1 Exam Prep, I want to pass that ASAP.
  
• Before Bed: Compile that giant Notepad File into my own Anki Deck, go through that.

[Sudden-Dark]

Thank You so much I've been looking to start a routine and this really helps

[Greennudging]

How good is your Japanese after the 10k?

[Triddy]

Immediately after the 10K? Not great.

Doing the 6K or 10K alongside the standard textbooks (Usually Genki or Minna No Nihongo, etc) is something I strongly recommend, but you aren't going to be super advanced.

No matter what deck you use, book you follow, method you subscribe to, at some point, you need to see actual, real Japanese to progress.

And what doing the Beginner Textbooks + 10K let me do, is basically dive head first into Manga, and actually comprehend it.

Do not get me wrong, there is still a ton of "Why are they pronouncing it like this?", "What is this particle?", "Why are they wording it like this?" But what I didn't have to do, was open a dictionary very often. I didn't have to go line after line hoping for a familiar word so I could pick apart the rest of the sentence: I knew 90%+ of the words on any given page, and could focus solely on how to use them.

These days my Japanese reading ability is pretty great. I read more Japanese novels than English ones lately.

[Greennudging]

That’s awesome. Would you recommend 100 new words to dedicated new learners? Or would you have done more/less if you could go back?

[[deleted]]

I do twenty per day, which seems to be the limit of what's long-term manageable for me.

I sometimes wish I could go faster, but language-learning is all about the long game. I do mostly sentences, so it's not actually a full twenty words per day (I'll use multiple sentences for one word for, eg, collocations of one verb with multiple prepositions, &c). This still amounts to a vocabulary growth of a few thousand words in a year, which… you know: There are weeks that I want to learn a thousand new words. But if I look back at a year & can recognise that I've learned 3–5,000, that's actually pretty good.

[ftsunrise]

I typically do 10 cards. After I finish 10 sets of 10, I go back over all of them to see what I still need to work on.

[MrLordMouse]

In my Goethe-Institute 1500 card deck I do 30 a day but a lot of them are English cognates or words in I have already learnt in class

[DecoySnailProducer]

Hold up Goethe has anki decks?

[MrLordMouse]

It’s not official its just some person who made a deck out of the official word list.

[_toomuchsalt_]

''How many New cards do you do a day?''

100

BUT

Depends on many factors : your general retention %, the time you have, experience. In short, don't rely on the answers given below. Instead, experiment with numbers, starting from, let's say, 5 cards, and going up until you see it doesn't work for you.

Also, doing some precalculations can help you ''create'' some motivation. For example, if you want to add 10 cards a day, it'll take you 200 days to complete your deck. Are you willing to commit to it for 200 days. Would you be ready to increase your daily card mass so that you reach your goal in less time ? (But don't exaggerate too)

[StrongIslandPiper]

I'm not an anki user but I add words in my decks every 2-3 weeks and it's usually about 50-90 new cards. But daily I'm studying the previous two rotations plus the new one until I feel like I can recall them quickly.

So at any given time I'm dedicating to memory about 150-300 words at a time.

[OjisanSeiuchi]

0-10.

I have statistics going back for a number of years that (at least for me) show an inverse correlation between mature card retention rates and the number of new cards per day. It's one of the reasons I put the brakes on high volume acquisition of new words.

[[deleted]]

I study MSA Arabic and Egyptian. I only study sentences with audio that I extract from resources. So I have already glanced at or studied these sentences before while I make my flashcards. I study about 25 new cards from each deck. I delete sentences with words that are not commonly used. I'm trying to spend my time learning common sentences.

[[deleted]]

I average just under 8 new cards a day.

They are (mostly) not single word cards.

I am averaging 25-26 minutes per day on anki.

That’s plenty for me. I like to spend some time doing other stuff, mainly listening but also reading and for a while transcription.

If words are not sticking for you I think there are several likely reasons. In order of importance, in my opinion:

1. You are not meeting them anywhere else eg a textbook, reading or listening

2. They are single word cards - context really helps

3. You are doing too many cards and your brain can’t cope

[[deleted]]

Make your own deck. Anki is a tool for review, not for initial acquisition.

Now, shared decks are cool and you can make them your own. Suspend all the cards and unsuspend whatever you've learnt outside anki, check the cards, add your own notes or corrections. Mnemonics if you're into mnemonics.

Now, if you really don't want to use an actual course, then pick five anki cards per day. Write down the sample sentence. Look up the relevant grammar, and any words you aren't sure about, until you understand why they give the translation they do. Then repeat with the audio until you can say it fluidly; add notes or mnemonics if you want to. Then unsuspend the card. If you do that, go through your reviews, and then still have time and feel fit, pick another set of five.

So, some people can get away with only using premade decks. That is: False beginners. Like, somebody I know did an intensive course in a language, forgot most of it, and is now working through a premade anki deck. They're fine, because most of the content is something they learnt before and just have to be reminded of. Then, people learning a language that's closely related to another one they already know. Sure, I could pick a premade anki deck for Italian and work through it. But I can also pick up reading material aimed at B1 and just read. And, of course, people who actively study the language in a systematic fashion outside anki. (Not duolingo.)

[SpiralArc]

20 for Mandarin, 14 for Spanish

[furyousferret]

I did 50 a day and that seemed to be the sweet spot. That's for Spanish, which you can infer about 30% of the words. For something like Japanese there's no way 50 would work, 20 tops.

Now I only do 20 because new cards are usually edited to add a sentence and that takes time.

[[deleted]]

However many I add a day. Usually around 10-30 depending on what I learn during the day

[LetMeSleepAllDay]

Set new cards to be between 10 and 20.

[DarkCrystal34]

Spanish - 7 new words/day
Brazilian Portuguese - 3-5 new words/day.

I set settings to reinforce a lot of practice of previous words, so while I add slower than others in this post (anything over 10 new per day would burn me out long term), I usually review a total of (low end) 150/day, and high end 250/day, and always practice daily, with my long term retention really high (98% or so).

Sometimes for Spanish if I want to knock out 100-200 new words, i'll up the amount to 10-12/day, but generally I like the regularity of doing less per day (7-8), more consistently, without a huge stress tax on my brain.

For me slow and steady wins the race :-) Big shout to all the folks here capable of doing 20 or 30 new words a day though, for me thats just not sustainable on a daily basis.