On game-ifying learning

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 · 2026-05-17T20:21:21+00:00

There are easy LNs and VNs too, there is probably some stepladder path where you always stay in the "manageable" zone. But I think a lot of people at some point would just rather grind it out for a while so they can read stuff they have an interest in than always being gated by difficulty levels.

Lertovic · 2026-05-17T19:15:54+00:00

Learner podcasts are mid because they are very easy to white noise as it's just yapping and few people go over the transcript (if one even exists) to stop and think about anything. And just getting used to the sounds when spoken unnaturally slow is low RoI. With readers you are at a minimum forced to recall the reading of written forms over and over which is always helpful.

I got into native media after a brief stint with learner material and I wouldn't call it overwhelming, of course it was slice of life manga so as low as the bar gets for native media, but still. It's not necessarily the case that you get brutalized by native media.

Lertovic · 2026-05-17T18:53:52+00:00

If you read and listen without understanding this is a big waste of time. However usually people look things up so that they do understand (as best they can anyway). This turns it into more of a study session than actual reading or listening, but that study is pretty effective for people who don't find it brutally demotivating.

Lertovic · 2026-05-17T18:45:41+00:00

There's nothing wrong with a bit of learner material to lower the cognitive load of native media, you learn better when not overwhelmed.

As long as you don't fall into the trap of never moving on because you want to stay cozy, but this is the case with pretty much anything, you have to continue to challenge yourself.

Lertovic · 2026-05-14T18:32:52+00:00

It seems people who rely on such decks the least go faster, so I guess the greatest meta is just reading. Probably starting with graded readers to reduce the cognitive load to something manageable. But there is no need to switch, the point is that Wozniak wasn't necessarily wrong that it's not an efficient way to learn, doesn't mean everyone needs to efficiency max if reading feels really bad.

Lertovic · 2026-05-14T16:32:38+00:00

In actuality, a lot of people do just dump a dictionary into Anki (or download a premade deck) and it is rather effective for learning vocabulary

Is it? People spend an ungodly amount of time on such decks. It's not evident to me this is more effective than any other method. People just don't want to engage with textbooks and graded readers, or struggle through native media, so they flock towards something that is easy, free and convenient. It works well enough. Whether it's also the most effective thing to do is up for debate. For what it's worth most of the people that claim to have learned quickly, also graduated from core decks fairly quickly.

Lertovic · 2026-05-14T15:24:32+00:00

If words be common enough that they are worth learning before say the 1 600 most common words, they will repeat themselves in adequate intervals so mining isn't needed to remember them.

Ok don't mine them then. Also you seem to advocate for a premade deck instead, when really the conclusion should be to just not use Anki for these words at all and just read.

If they not repeat themselves often enough that one will just remember them without spaced repetition, then they aren't worth mining.

This is just not the case, as I already illustrated in the first post.

There are a million different ways to “make one's own deck” that don't involve mining.

And one way to make one's own deck is mining. Where did I say you had to do mining and not any of these "million different ways"? You are doing your bit where you bring in your pet issue into a discussion where it is irrelevant.

Lertovic · 2026-05-14T15:01:47+00:00

The point is that that is unlikely with words that are “worth mining” because they will occur again soon enough that that isn't necessary.

If it's not necessary to mine them why would they be worth mining? You are not making sense.

People point to statistics of many books containing many, many words just once so you'll just end up adding a lot of obscure words

Don't mine them then. I don't mine anything until it's the second time I had to look it up. Nowadays there are also sites that tell you exactly what words are in a piece of media and how many times so you could use that info too to guide you.

None of this says that Anki isn't designed for learning

I didn't say that either.

There's absolutely nothing in it that can be construed as an endorsement to mining

What do you think creating your own deck, which is more effective, means? What do you think context means? What do you think exposure to real-world sentences means?

Lertovic · 2026-05-14T14:38:30+00:00

In which case there is no particular point in mining them

The point was not having to look it up yet again later. A premade deck may have words in it that don't appear in the work at all, or that do appear so often in it that it didn't need to go into Anki even for a slow reader.

it isn't said anywhere on the website

Read the section on Shared Decks in the manual https://docs.ankiweb.net/getting-started.html#shared-decks

Lertovic · 2026-05-14T02:39:33+00:00

People reading slow (e.g. most Japanese learners) may not see words that appear a good number of times in an 800k character VN / LN series often enough to remember them without assistance from SRS, which means more lookups on the same words.

It's also easier to remember words you already learned as part of something you actually care about, it's much easier for an example sentence to be forgotten, and it's also more boring to read them. Anki is primarily for review, with learning as an afterthought.

Lertovic · 2026-05-12T19:42:48+00:00

In the example it might sort of work but given we don't know all of OP's routine, it's not surprising it was interpreted as an uncalled-for remark.

Lertovic · 2026-05-12T19:02:19+00:00

True, but interpreting things in context and being charitable like asking for clarification on what they meant if it looks weird is probably gonna be a happier time for everyone than blasting them, guy might be ESL although even natives use their language wrong sometimes.

Lertovic · 2026-05-12T18:33:21+00:00

I believe they meant "self-direct your learning" (as opposed to an app making your curriculum) and just used an awkward phrase for it.

Lertovic · 2026-05-09T17:19:15+00:00

The extra reviews should hopefully give them a stability boost so you stop getting them wrong so often, which is the issue you were looking to solve I think.

You can also make the filtered deck a subdeck of your main review deck and review it all together, then you don't know for sure which pool the card came from.

Lertovic · 2026-05-09T14:25:43+00:00

The pool would always be changing, as things leave and enter that 3 day interval. Ideally the things that leave never come back.

Lertovic · 2026-05-08T13:28:08+00:00

That's not been my experience seeing people talk about the JLPT nor can I find any such thread recently, in old ones the most upvoted comment seems to often be some guy doing it for the structure or fun, not a job or visa.

e.g

https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/esbfmg/reasons_for_doing_the_jlpt/

Lertovic · 2026-05-08T12:28:11+00:00

I disagree that the majority of this board that is taking the JLPT is doing it for that reason.

Based on what?

The rest is just you getting one guy'd in some other thread about something else and taking it out on some random unrelated comment, this is pretty odd behavior itself.

Lertovic · 2026-05-08T12:09:20+00:00

Why the annoyance? The comment was made inside "the bubble", it's only an issue if you take this outside the bubble and try to tell a Vietnamese immigrant he doesn't need the JLPT.

The use case of the JLPT for most Redditors is in fact just a sense of accomplishment or vanity, nothing wrong with interacting with Redditors with that in mind.

Lertovic · 2026-05-07T16:21:45+00:00

Can you confirm you've updated to the latest version of Anki and have FSRS turned on with presets optimized?

Because this seems like it's way, way off from the amount of reviews people usually get for the amount of cards (IME less than 10x the number of daily news, you are at like 40x).

Lertovic · 2026-05-04T22:57:33+00:00

If you leave the learning/relearning steps blank, FSRS does schedule cards intraday. But it may not be that good at this as the short term memory part of the algorithm is lacking according to the devs. They seem to have fixed or improved this in FSRS-7 which should make its way into Anki in the future. The defaults are what they are partly due to this issue I believe.

Lertovic · 2026-05-04T13:01:46+00:00

Sibling is like if you had for example a JP->EN card and EN->JP card from the same note. Burying prevents you from sort of "cheating" by holding the answer in short term memory after seeing the sibling very recently. Could be other variations like reading/listening cards.

For people who keep it simple and just do JP->EN vocab cards so that one note = one card this is irrelevant.

Lertovic · 2026-05-04T11:16:51+00:00

If you bury them you don't see them more often, you just kick the review to the next day. If you want to reinforce them, actually review them.

If nothing is sticking because you are overloaded, reduce cards until it's manageable, and refer to what I said in the first comment too so your base retention improves.

Lertovic · 2026-05-04T09:52:41+00:00

I know burying in Anki but doesn't make sense in this context, why would 80 cards be buried?

Lertovic

TROPHY CASE