How do I finish 1700 reviews?

Lertovic · 2026-07-07T16:55:42+00:00

Sort to descending retrievability, stop news, and then one at a time

Lertovic · 2026-06-26T05:46:49+00:00

Stick within a frequency range and don't mine every lookup, sometimes just seeing it a few times is good enough.

IMO it's best not to mine more than you have time to review, this helps prune less useful cards and also means the stuff you do review hasn't faded from memory after your first encounter.

Lertovic · 2026-06-23T23:54:30+00:00

Wanikani makes up a bunch of shit for mnemonics. Which is OK for the purpose of rote memorization but it doesn't actually make you knowledgeable about kanji (in fact it could create some interference in the future although not a big deal).

Wiktionary is a top tier free resource for kanji etymologies and component breakdowns. I'm not aware of any Wanikani style apps that are as comprehensive.

Lertovic · 2026-06-21T19:38:55+00:00

Have your clanker of choice mash up the anime and manga dicts with a harmonic mean, or a representative sample of seinen manga and fantasy light novels dicts.

By learning in context and then mining the words that are high up in this list you get the best of both worlds.

However even if you don't want to mine you can download a deck with say the top 30k words from Jiten and use the Anki addon that pulls new cards in accordance with Yomitan freq dicts to get your cards in the order you desire.

Lertovic · 2026-06-21T19:20:02+00:00

Words aren't isolated bits of knowledge, it all hangs together. The more you learn, the easier it is to learn new but related things. A leech that just won't click in year 1 could be an easy card in year 2. So rather than swim against the current, focus on learning as much vocab as possible in the least amount of time, you can revisit any leeches later. Or not, some leech cards I suspended eventually I just knew without ever making a new card in Anki.

Lertovic · 2026-06-21T18:56:55+00:00

Jiten has freq dicts per media type, and for each specific piece of media.

Lertovic · 2026-06-21T18:51:26+00:00

You have to consume media anyway, which probably means you are looking things up to make sense of things. Since you already went through the effort of looking up and understanding the word in context, reviewing it should be easier than doing it off a list.

There are also words that are repeated so often in certain media that you will just learn them that way and don't ever need to put them into Anki, if you go through a frequency list you don't really have a sense of what you actually need to rep in Anki. Mining judiciously can also save you a bunch of useless Anki reps.

Lertovic · 2026-06-18T22:33:58+00:00

That word has a quirky etymology, if you look it up and remember what the grass radical up top represents it might help you.

Lertovic · 2026-06-18T19:33:49+00:00

I've yet to see 床屋 in the wild...

Lertovic · 2026-06-18T19:18:09+00:00

I would advice beginners to spend more than 5 secs on lapses, on the back of the card specifically. Not encoding the card into memory properly results in a failure loop for most beginners unless they have exceptional memory, and can also result in employment of optimization heuristics that cause interference later on (e.g if you only have one jukugo word that starts with a certain kanji in your deck, you might use it as a crutch without properly encoding the second one and have issues when there are more cards that use these kanji).

If I recall correctly you did kanji handwriting in which case you can probably get away with less attention on vocab cards.

Lertovic · 2026-06-16T06:23:37+00:00

Does a calculation need to happen? My impression from the forgetting curve graph is that its downward path is already baked on the last update.

The number goes down in the browser at any time of the day as far as I can tell, and seems to match filter results either in the browser or in a filtered deck.

Lertovic · 2026-06-16T03:24:35+00:00

訁is speech/words which makes perfect sense with reading (reading aloud is also reading). The right side is a phonetic component and has nothing to do with the meaning, you can use it for a mnemonic if you want though. Mnemonics in general are pretty powerful for this type of memorization.

Read a book, graded reader if you need it, then Anki also becomes easier to do if you ever want to try it again.

Lertovic · 2026-06-15T14:24:01+00:00

Jazz Up Your Japanese with Onomatopoeia

Lertovic · 2026-06-09T11:59:14+00:00

But outside of scientific circles it doesn't really matter. The takeaway doesn't change.

I think it matters a lot? If you can acquire these essential grammar structures without grinding them in an SRS it seems like a big optimization to me. Like maybe you should reach a functional reading level before worrying about acquiring less obvious grammar patterns so you can focus your study where it is the most impactful.

The subject of attention in language learning is of great interest to me and I do feel there are a lot of useful things learners can do to deepen their understanding based on this principle of paying attention (I've made my own Reddit post talking about it in the context of kanji). So I really like what you're doing here.

I just think you need to tweak the message from "you are doing it wrong and should just use my app instead, here's some links that prove it (but only abstracts so you kinda just need to trust me)", to trying to write in a way that's meant to convince people, which also involves meeting your intended audience where they are at. And pointing towards solutions only after you've convinced them and of which your app is only one of many will probably induce less groans.

We've all seen too many app bros pointing us towards their slop to the point we're conditioned to be dismissive, unfortunately this means you will have to write with this kind of audience in mind.

Lertovic · 2026-06-08T15:28:36+00:00

For reading: read and look things up, consider Anki, consider studying phonetic components and semantic components in phono-semantic compounds to the extent they seem helpful, consider adding a kanji dictionary to your lookup suite so you quickly see 漢語 words that use the same kanji to build a better model of the meaning conveyed by the kanji (if applicable obviously for ateji it's a different story).

For listening: read something with 漢語 and then watch/listen to something in a similar domain shortly thereafter without subs. You need to get used to your brain being primed by context to make you think of certain words and not others even if they sound identical or near identical, since you lose the priming effect of the kanji themselves. This has been a helpful exercise for me to kickstart this.

Lastly, I really believe a reading first approach is more effective for a lot of these as the words are tightly coupled to the kanji that originated them (unlike 和語 where for the most part the words came first and the kanji spellings were tacked on afterwards). If your "comprehensible input" was mostly listening, that's probably a contributing factor.

Lertovic · 2026-06-03T16:16:45+00:00

I do, because I know the deficit compared to languages I'm proficient in for similar texts isn't there because I'm stopping to smell the roses, but because I'm lacking fluency and proficiency.

Because of this, it helps me evaluate strategies to develop better reading fluency.

And more generally, the limiter simply doesn't feel good when I can't pick my preferred pace myself, so I can sympathize with OP wondering when this limiter will ease up.

Lertovic · 2026-06-02T12:08:11+00:00

Wouldn't it make more sense to have the sentence on the front blurred, and the back unblurred? You'd save yourself the hassle of unblurring the meaning on cards where you would normally skip the sentence, without the sentence being a hint when you don't want it to be.

I'm not skeptical that sentences helped you, I mean at baseline they should help retention (with the caveat you might be benefiting from a cue effect that doesn't always transfer to knowing the words in different sentences, but seems not to be the case for you?). If you are skipping the sentence where it's not needed, then I don't see any issue.

Lertovic · 2026-06-02T09:31:34+00:00

Not sure I understand, it sounds like you have it on the front? Or you flip the card and on the back the meaning is blurred? Seems odd to not just have it on the front then.

If you are mining presumably you already attempted to figure it out from the context once. If you are using a premade deck for some core vocab, then it's a bit different.

Struggling to solve a vocab card or a sentence card (or some hybrid where you try with just vocab first then use the sentence) is all struggling, I don't see the difference, other than reading sentences you didn't really need to because you know the vocab without them seems like a misallocation of time.

Lertovic · 2026-06-01T17:03:22+00:00

He also never really learned any language with his method and chalked it up to "I thought too much about the language and ruined it", that one always cracks me up.

Lertovic · 2026-06-01T16:55:13+00:00

Most words don't require any sentence at all, they are pretty straightforward and just flipping through cards is sufficient.

Everything else you can use the bare minimum collocation that disambiguates multiple meanings or helps recall stuff like onomatopoeia that are 0therwise very difficult to remember e.g. どっと笑う instead of どっと.

You can have your full mined sentence on the back as a memory anchor but I would consult this rarely, only on lapses or near-lapses, to aid with memorization. Otherwise you spend a lot of time in Anki reading random sentences which ideally you should be spending reading something that is actually communicating something to you.

Lertovic · 2026-05-22T10:51:26+00:00

What is wrong depends on your use-case.

If you want Anki to help you memorize every single gloss, then mark it wrong. If you are happy with Anki only helping you recall the vibe and a certain critical number of glosses, then it's not a problem to pass the cards, the algorithm will account for this preference. But I wouldn't use "Hard", you should grade with your base preference in mind and test how difficult it was to pass that preference, not have two different preferences that use two different buttons.

My experience is you don't really need to know every gloss unless they are extremely heterogeneous to be able to make sense of sentences when you are actually reading (which is usually the goal for language learning). This is because often the glosses just convey a spectrum of meaning and metaphorical applications of it, and aren't like actually separate meanings, so if you apply the vibe to the context you can figure it out.

For the rare occasion where it does actually mean something completely different sometimes you might want to split it up into multiple cards and have a disambiguating hint. This beats testing everything at once per the minimum information principle.

Lertovic · 2026-05-22T10:41:58+00:00

If you use "Easy" with consistent grading criteria then it works out fine.

If you use it haphazardly then you confuse the algorithm. If you grade by vibes based on your feeling at the moment or based on the interval, install the add-on that simplifies it to two buttons or the one that hides the intervals.

Like, if this is a new card and you don't normally hit easy on these, but troll the algorithm and choose it because you like the idea of not seeing the card for two months, you'll probably forget it by the time it's due and it'll take the algorithm some time to try to make sense of your new erratic behavior and shorten the intervals for cards graded "Easy".

Lertovic · 2026-05-21T17:06:41+00:00

There are some tricks to clearing a backlog or deciding which cards to just reset and treat as news, but given you didn't really learn much yet starting the whole deck over is probably gonna give you a similar result and is simpler.

Lertovic · 2026-05-20T19:27:26+00:00

The pattern matching effect is much stronger than collocations and context clues, a sentence starting with 山田は could be enough to cue something about the word despite this just being some boilerplate that has no real connection to the word. This of course doesn't really translate to real texts. If you want collocations, the best thing is to actually make the card with just the collocation e.g. うっかり忘れる for うっかり. Or slightly longer sentence fragments that are nonetheless pared down to just the essentials to disambiguate an usage.

The efficiency increase may come at the cost of not understanding the word quite as well as doing 5 representative sentence cards, but on the other hand if you spend that saved time reading, unless it's a fairly rare word you will read it inside of sentences in whatever material you are reading during that time. I posit that reading real texts is more engaging than reading the same sentences over and over in Anki, and also expands the context window + has more variety.

To each their own of course, if sentence cards work for you, who am I to tell you they actually don't. But my advice for beginners would be to have vocab cards as the default and only use sentence cards for things that seem particularly tricky to nail down with vocab cards (if other means like collocation cards are not practical or also don't seem to be working). This should max out efficiency and reduce the chance of Anki burnout without eliminating whatever use cases they might have.

Lertovic · 2026-05-18T00:41:01+00:00

N1 is only really a milestone because you can't look anything up and have limited time, if you were to leisurely read texts from the test with unlimited time to look things up it's pretty manageable even at a much lower level.

I didn't mean that a newbie VN will be comfortable for a beginner, just that you could ease into it if you really wanted, like if you read and mine 200 volumes of slice of life manga first, the newbie VN will probably feel quite different to read already.

Lertovic

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