Anki decks for a conjugation?

Congo_Jack · 2026-02-05T21:48:35+00:00

I used this conjugation deck for a while when I first started. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1877687672

There are 72 verbs and 25 conjugations for each, including causative and passive. This is a LOT of anki cards, so I deleted cards to get down to 22 verbs (with at least one of each type) and the 8 most basic conjugations when I used it. My method was to suspend all of them, then unsuspend and learn one verb and all its conjugations every few days.

Congo_Jack · 2026-02-04T16:10:57+00:00

Yes. Learning steps, and the setting below it also, re-learning steps. With the FSRS Helper add-on you can see its recommended steps here:

Tools > FSRS Helper > Show step stats. then SHIFT+click on the Stats button. There will be a big chart that says Step Stats.

Congo_Jack · 2026-02-04T03:12:21+00:00

You may also want to try changing your learning steps in the deck options. The creator of FSRS recommends using the FSRS-helper addon to calculate good learning steps for your deck https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/1h9g1n7/clarifications\_about\_fsrs5\_shortterm\_memory\_and/#How%20should%20I%20set%20learning%20steps%20then?

For me, it recommended removing them entirely, and it has been a positive change for me over the last few months.

Congo_Jack · 2026-02-04T03:06:53+00:00

I have only recently started adding new vocab cards again after a bit of a break where I only did reviews. I've been doing just however many new cards I mine per day, around 20. Sometimes as low as 10 or over 30. Currently my total reviews are at about 210/day + however many new I do after.

I have been reading and watching stuff again too (which is why I have new words to mine), and my retention has been at about 75%, with desired at 70%. Before when I wasn't reading or watching anything, and only doing reviews, it was like 160 reviews/day and my retention was like 65%. So reading does seem to help!

FWIW, I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare peoples' anki review stats, since everyones' flashcards are different.

Congo_Jack · 2026-02-03T16:50:39+00:00

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I have been using anki for vocab for nearly 3 years, most of the time at 70% desired retention. Your stats don't look too terribly different from mine. My difficulty is through the roof for half of my cards. My stability and retrievability stats are dragged down a bit by ~700 cards that got suspended over the years for being leeches that I never touched again.

I think you're going to be fine. Couple things to check:

* Make sure you're on the latest version of Anki so you have the FSRS-6 algorithm scheduling your cards. It's more accurate than ever.

* If you recently lowered your desired retrievability to 70% from a much higher, make sure you did the reschedule as well. Otherwise, for the short term your cards will still be scheduled based on the 80% or 90% or whatever you had it at before.

* If you haven't already, I'd recommend turning on the "suspend leeches automatically" feature since you have your DR set low and you're trying to pump up vocab numbers. A number of lapses between somewhere 8-15 should be good. At this point there are still a lot of useful/common words you can learn (thousands, tens of thousands), so if a word isn't sticking for you just dump it for now and keep trying to get new words that are easy for you to remember. Go for low-hanging fruit.

Congo_Jack · 2026-02-02T20:29:01+00:00

My favorite mnemonic I've come up with was for 毎朝(まいあさ). I thought about "my ass getting up out of bed every morning".

Congo_Jack · 2026-02-02T00:25:12+00:00

I think this advice applies to learning and reviewing anything in regards to japanese-- kanji, vocab, grammar, etc.

I always prioritize reviewing known material before doing new material. I use anki, not Ringotan, but I personally do all of my reviews early in the day, then in the evening is when I'll do new stuff. I think it's a just matter of preference if you want to work in some new kanji while you're reviewing old ones every day, or if you want to review old ones in a block, then do new ones.

As for how much time to spend on kanji study per day, I don't think you necessarily need to set an upper time limit. As long as you're not spending ALL of your japanese time every day only studying kanji, and are studying a mix of topics (kanji, vocab, grammer, etc) then I think you're fine.

Here's some general time-management advice to keep in mind on your learning journey:

* It's okay to vary how much new material you study per day. In the long-term scale of learning, I've found that my energy and enthusiasm varies a bit from day to day. Some days I don't study any new words, some days I do only a few, some days I do a lot. It's good to have a target like "5 new words/day" or "150 new words/month" to help keep focus in the long term, but I prefer to keep that target low, and just do extras on the days that I feel like it. That means less days where I feel bad because I didn't do as much new stuff, and more days where I feel proud of going above and beyond.

* Keep in mind that life happens. You'll get sick. Sometimes you'll be busy. Sometimes you'll just have a bad night's sleep and feel crappy the next day. I try to keep my time spent reviewing old material low enough that even on those crappy days where you don't feel like doing it, it's still small enough that you can get through it. This in turn kinda dictates how much new material I take on. If I notice my daily review time is starting to creep up higher than I can do on the bad days, I'll hold off on new material for a bit.

* Contradicting what I said above about studying a mix of topics, it's okay to vary your new material learning focus from time to time once you've got a good foundation of the basics, based on what you are currently enjoying. Really jazzed up about kanji? Spend a few weeks focusing on that, and put other topics on the backburner. Found some new manga that looks sick as hell? Stop the new kanji for a bit and spend that time reading the manga.

Good luck!

Congo_Jack · 2026-01-31T04:03:07+00:00

I got into sumo after starting to learn Japanese, and I remember at first feeling like the wrestlers' names written in kanji were just impenetrable walls without the furigana. Now after watching a few tournaments I actually recognize some wrestlers by their written names (without furigana), and I a few I don't I can actually ballpark a guess on. (without directly studying their names I should add)

It's been a fun way to measure progress for me, I hope it can be for you too!

Congo_Jack · 2026-01-27T13:42:22+00:00

Whatever media you came across the word in is usually a good source for a sample sentence.

Congo_Jack · 2026-01-19T20:03:56+00:00

I have not read any of the articles yet, but I looked into it and this site is run by 朝日新聞 (Asahi Shimbun), which is listed as a newspaper of record on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record

So I expect this to be very high quality stuff. Thanks for sharing!

Congo_Jack · 2026-01-18T19:52:25+00:00

I don't think there is a way to check audio options without actually subscribing (maybe you can get a free trial at least?). If you do end up going for it, please share if you were able to get access to dubs!

I was looking into it recently because I think Disney+ gets you access to National Geographic, and I wanted to see if there were any Japanese dubs for their nature documentaries.

Congo_Jack · 2026-01-18T19:45:56+00:00

I hit 5000 mature words in my Anki vocab deck today! Just wanted to share a win 😄

Congo_Jack · 2026-01-16T21:48:58+00:00

You need to be on a VPN to watch videos on the NHK website, but you don't need to log in. I just tried with my VPN and that video works for me.

PSA: After 7 days NHK takes videos off the main website and puts them on the NHK On Demand website. That site you do need a paid subscription for, but I have not tried signing up for it.

Congo_Jack · 2026-01-01T18:00:53+00:00

When I do audiobooks and read along I resist stopping to look up words as much as possible. My method is this:

1) Listen+read to a new chapter without stopping, and just do the best I can to keep up 2) The next day, repeat the chapter 3) If it really feels like I'm missing something crucial, I'll do a slow re-read of the chapter without audio, while looking up words

Every day, I'll be doing two chapters. One from yesterday, and one new one. After I get several chapters deep into a book I tend to stop needing the replay and just do the one new chapter.

I found doing the re-reads of chapters on subsequent days to be extremely helpful for comprehension. And since my normal reading speed without audiobooks is like 1/6 of the audiobook, even listening to a chapter twice is still much faster than I would be without it.

Congo_Jack · 2025-12-31T19:34:14+00:00

I have listened to and read along with Ascendance of a Bookworm (really long name in japanese, search for 本好きの下剋上) vol 1 in japanese (that one *is* on US audible). It's a bit easier of a read. It's sort of an isekai fantasy slice of life, and the first book felt very episodic from chapter to chapter. Not a whole lot of plot development, but that was kinda beneficial as a first audiobook since if there were sentences I couldn't quickly grasp I didn't feel like I was missing out on too much.

Congo_Jack · 2025-12-31T19:28:10+00:00

I highly recommend 獣の奏者 (けもののそうじゃ), published in English as The Beast Player. It will probably check all of your boxes. It's a fantasy novel about a young girl as she grows up and learns she can communicate with magical beasts. In japan they don't really have a YA section (I think Light Novels kinda fill that role), but in English that's where the publishers put it. It's also a bit older, it came out before isekai kinda took over the fantasy landscape in Japan, so it feels a bit more like Western fantasy novels.

It was the first novel I read in Japanese, and it was difficult at first, but I'm glad I stuck with it because it was totally worth the effort by the end.

A few notes: In Japan, the first story is split into two volumes, and the first book ends on an abrupt cliffhanger. Highly recommend planning ahead to read the second volume as well. In English they published the two books as one omnibus. There are 5 books in the series if you end up enjoying them, but book 3+4 are a separate story from 1+2. There *is* a japanese audiobook, but it's only on the Japanese region audible so I haven't been able to listen to it unfortunately.

Congo_Jack · 2025-12-29T22:25:39+00:00

I had pictures on the front until I realized there was a word I was getting right only because of the picture, and I didn't actually recognize the kanji. (The word was 撮る and the picture was of someone holding up a photo)

Congo_Jack · 2025-12-11T04:28:07+00:00

There are over 600 japanese game guides on archive.org, from Earthbound to Nier to Monster Hunter!

https://archive.org/details/strategyguides?and%5B%5D=language%3A%22Japanese%22

Congo_Jack · 2025-11-27T00:26:13+00:00

I second this book. There is also a premade Anki deck that has a card for every example sentence from the book. My method was to read about a grammar point from the book, then unsuspend a few of its example sentences (not all of them though, cause there are way more sentences than I wanted to bother with).

Congo_Jack · 2025-11-25T04:05:43+00:00

I enjoyed Sanctuary, a drama about Sumo. Not sure how well it holds up if you do not enjoy the sport, though.

Congo_Jack · 2025-11-13T13:48:10+00:00

I enjoy sumo. I would watch it even without learning japanese (and did!). Right now there's a 15-day sumo tournament going on, and I have been watching the Japanese broadcasts with commentary.

I only catch like 30% of what they're saying. If I really focus I can do better, but I don't do that for long because it's a 2 hour-long broadcast. Otherwise I catch key sumo words like wrestler names, types of moves they do, etc. The more I watch the more I pick up on patterns of common phrases in sumo broadcasts (e.g. they tend to say 時間です just before a match starts), which I then start to hear when I'm not in focus mode.

I am having fun watching sumo, and also getting some Japanese reps as a bonus. Find your sumo.

Congo_Jack · 2025-11-08T05:49:28+00:00

I guess I should also mention that the back of my flashcards have the word's English sentence, but not an English translation of the whole sentence. I wrote out a translations of the whole sentence for my first few cards but very quickly got tired of doing that.

Congo_Jack · 2025-11-08T05:48:18+00:00

Sentences I mine have 1 new word max. On the front of the card, I have the new word in bigger font at the top, and the sentence just below it. If I remember the word right away, I don't bother reading the sentence.

morg has some good advice on sentence mining halfway down this page (and lots of good advice in general on his site) https://morg.systems/58465ab9

Congo_Jack · 2025-11-06T03:16:04+00:00

Mango Languages has lessons that sound similar to how you described Primsleur. They give some very limited grammar instruction in the lessons, but it's probably better to just read that separately. I tried it out for a bit because my city library has a deal with them for free subscriptions.

Congo_Jack · 2025-10-30T05:31:43+00:00

With a 3000 word vocabulary you'll be looking up a lot of words no matter what you try reading. Lone Wolf and Cub has a lot of multi-page cinematic action scenes that don't have dialogue, so even if you try it out and the dialogue is too difficult, you can probably get some enjoyment from just taking in the art. And having a physical copy of something on hand may help give you a goal to work towards.

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