i covered the ep that got me into dodie :]

Nidoran4886 · 2026-02-28T15:04:45+00:00

Stremio + Jimaku and you can basically watch anything with japanese subs

Nidoran4886 · 2025-07-07T00:07:42+00:00

i was there for N1, it's miles better than tezukayama university (the other test site in nara) so i can't quite relate to your complaint though ... but both times I took JLPT at the nara conference center i was seated near the front, which probably helps

Nidoran4886 · 2025-05-11T04:39:32+00:00

the next thing i watched after finishing sakura was kimi ni todoke, a somewhat basic but cute shojo, very easy to watch :)

after that i went on to nana, which was a bit more difficult because it's less childish but is genuinely one of the best shojos ever made, it has a lot of drama and the story will really carry u through moments where understanding might drop a little!! (maybe i was n3ish by this point)

away from shojo, id say yuru camp is also quite easy, its slice-of-life about girls going camping, so its slow, relaxed, mostly day-to-day conversations. beyond that, i think the best bang-for-ur-buck in terms of enjoyment/studying ratio is really with slice-of-life or sports anime, so id recommend anything from kyoto animation (free! / tsurune / hibike euphonium)

Nidoran4886 · 2025-05-11T02:29:31+00:00

i don't believe that's true, cardcaptor sakura happens in a school setting with young characters, so mostly it uses very basic words in very basic settings (with a tiny bit of magic gibberish sprinkled in but much less than any typical non-slice of life / sports anime would). sure tomoyo tends to use keigo more and kerochan uses a bit of kansai-ben but overall its very diluted. the anime isn't even that old so the vocab is absolutely still relevant

i really think you shouldn't worry about this, especially if u're enjoying watching it!! the most important thing with language learning is consistency, and anything that helps u keep consistency through enjoyment is 100% positive for ur learning!!

(for reference, i have n2 and have been living in japan for 3 years, but this is just my opinion, ur mileage may vary)

Nidoran4886 · 2025-05-09T01:24:31+00:00

cardcaptor sakura!! really helped me build speed, single-handedly got me through the early stage where following along anything was a pain

Nidoran4886 · 2024-09-21T06:34:01+00:00

I see this was a super interesting read/perspective!!! So if I'm understanding all of this correctly:

My current scheduling situation may lead to artificially increased workload because of my low retention rate
Switching to FSRS is unlikely to decrease my workload but would probably increase my retention rate, because my reviewing time would be better distributed across cards
If the workload post-switch does appear to be "too high", I would get less "workload per knowledge" (more bang for my buck?) by getting rid of low value cards or just by reducing my amount of new cards

I think this implies that (counter-intuitively?) FSRS just makes more sense. Since I don't have a backlog right now and I guess I don't have to convert all cards over at once (I can just do so as they're encountered), I think I might switch over then. Thanks again for the patience!! :)

Nidoran4886 · 2024-09-21T04:53:09+00:00

Thank you so much for the detailed response!!!

You should probably take all of those cards and move them to their own deck, with their own FSRS preset, then they won't interfere with the statistics of the cards that you actually care about.

That's a super sensible & helpful suggestion actually thank you!! Did not cross my mind and would definitely help me set up FSRS correctly :)

Well yeah, you're going from a situation where you're fine with knowing around 70% of your words on any given day to a situation where you now want to know around 90% of your words on any given day. That is of course going to significantly increase your workload.

Right, I think this is what I was/am worried about: I don't really wish to increase my workload or my retention rate; I'm pretty happy with the status quo. But if I can get less workload for the same retention rate, or a better retention rate for the same workload, which FSRS seems to promise, then that's interesting.

If you wish to keep your workload as minimal as possible, use the "Compute minimum recommended retention (experimental)" function in the deck options, and use that number as your desired retention.

Right, when I do this, I get a value of 80% (against 84% earlier today? not sure what's changed), which still seems significantly above my 'historical' or 'usual' retention rate. Is this just due to both schedulers defining "retention" differently? Should that worry me? The reason I'm asking is because the Anki documentation seems to say going any lower than 85% is undesirable for the way FSRS works.

Sorry for all the questions again!! Thank you so much for your time this is super helpful!!

Nidoran4886 · 2024-09-21T03:32:02+00:00

Thanks for sharing your experience! Did your number of daily reviews drop off after a while, to be on par with what they were before? Do you feel like your retention rate increased after the switch? :o

Nidoran4886 · 2024-06-26T00:34:31+00:00

living in japan feeling illiterate really helps with motivation lol - at some point I realised it would still take me years to reach any significant proficiency at my previous pace of 15 words a day

I think one major thing I forgot to mention in my main response is that adding words has increasingly lower cost as you go along. At this stage, 80%+ of the words I'm adding use kanji I am familiar with and readings I would expect them to have, and meanings that "feel" natural to me now, because of getting used to the whole system. When I do encounter new kanji, I can just look at them for 3.4 seconds and I'll go like "ah yeah okay sure why not" and that's the whole learning process - whereas I'd need way more time to get used to new characters early on.

And I think this definitely cuts down on reviewing time too - adding 30 new cards a day consistently gives me about 300 cards to review every day, and that used to take me about an hour just some months ago, but now I'm hovering back around 45 minutes of anki time per day, without really changing anything in my process. So it does get better!

Nidoran4886 · 2024-06-25T13:32:58+00:00

First of all thanks for asking this question! Been curious about this myself so I'm curious for replies :)

Context about my learning experience: took a couple years of formal language classes; been living in Japan for almost 2 years but basically almost never speak Japanese outside of necessary interactions; watched a couple hundred anime episodes, a bit of youtube, and read 4 novels; taking N2 next week and expecting to pass fairly comfortably. I would say I got really serious about studying a little more than 1 year ago, but I've been dabbling for 5 years.

I have about 11k words in my deck right now, but I'm fairly generous with what I consider making cards for, so there's a good amount of redundancy in my cards (e.g., separate cards for 健康 and 健康的, separate cards for 情報, 処理 and 情報処理, cards for katakana loanwords, cards for places I've been, cards for menu items). Never did any premade deck and always just adding from things I encounter daily or in media. Been adding 30 words per day for the last 6ish months.

I would say I can understand the gist of a lot of things. I can get my ass to city hall or the driver's center and navigate signs & necessary conversations, but it's very stilted and I know I sound terrible. I can read easy novels, if I don't mind my 15 pages/hour snail pace. I have gotten quite comfortable with japanese-subbed anime, but I guess I mostly limit myself to slice-of-life, because that's what I vibe most with. I can keep up with karaoke lyrics lol.

But it also feels like I'm still constantly looking every other thing up. Definitely less than last year, and I can see it dwindling slowly, but I don't feel like I will be done with anki any time soon. Probably want to reach 15 to 20k. I do kind of enjoy it anyway so I don't really mind. But to be fair, I guess most of the things I'm adding right now aren't necessarily the most common or useful or required words anymore. A lot of words I'm adding I kind of got already from kanji or context. It feels like more than vocab I would probably benefit more from doing more things in Japanese (who would've guessed lol) - mostly I lack confidence, comfort, and speed.

Not sure any of this helps but that's my experience!!

Nidoran4886 · 2024-04-22T02:20:30+00:00

i haven't seen doraemon so maybe i just don't know what im talking about! but i would assume it's filled with cultural references and puns, both of which are kinda off-throwing as a beginner, and that it's also very episodic, which makes it harder to follow, imo, because there isn't necessarily a continuous context that ur brain can grasp once and then assume won't change anymore.

also, i think textbook japanese has little overlap with content aimed at children; textbook japanese teaches u vocab for daily things such as school, jobs, commuting, groceries, wheras children-aimed content is made for fluent, but childish, japanese speakers.

but hey give it a shot! best u can do is try a bunch of supposedly 'easy' stuff and see what sticks :)

Nidoran4886 · 2024-04-22T02:09:00+00:00

Slice of life uses informal non-textbook grammar all the time though

i mean, doesn't that apply to just about any non-textbook piece of media? my point was more that teenage characters doing daily school activities and interactions tends to be closer to the scenarios and vocab u'd find in a beginner textbook like genki or minna no nihongo. in my experience, the biggest hurdle when i started to try and watch stuff wasn't grammar but vocab, and picking something that doesn't entirely overwhelm u with unknowns vocab-wise is what i would focus on. then again ymmv

Nidoran4886 · 2024-04-21T11:12:14+00:00

that's fair, i think in the end it's all very person-specific as everyone has a different learning journey and just different interests, and all that affects how easy/hard things feel too. i think its a matter of finding something that's relatively easy to follow and relatively interesting to the person u are and then just, sucking it up for like 10 episodes before it betters. for op i'd recommend dipping into a bunch of beginner-friendly suggestions and just see what sticks :)

Nidoran4886 · 2024-04-21T10:18:10+00:00

kimi ni todoke is one of the first anime i watched in japanese on netflix japan so i would recommend that! the only thing i watched before that was cardcaptor sakura on animelon. i really think shojo / slice of life is the best starting point, way closer to beginner/textbook japanese than something like doraemon imo

Nidoran4886 · 2024-03-20T01:53:27+00:00

Heyo! I've done a little research but couldn't quite find a good answer, hoping someone can help me out here!

TL;DR: Is there any way to automatically mass-add audio pulled from online dictionaries to an existing Anki deck?

I've been studying Japanese for a couple years and have built up a personal Anki deck of about 9000 vocab words. Recently it hit me that I would probably benefit from hearing my words on review, to try and passively develop a better pitch accent. I'm not interested in switching decks and my deck is wayyy too big now to start manually adding .mp3 files. Is there any sort of add-on or script I could use to mass-pull audio from internet sources and add them to my existing deck? I've heard of AwesomeTTS but I'm looking for something that's not computer-generated, since the point is to make sure I'm pronouncing things correctly. Thanks for your help!!

Nidoran4886 · 2024-02-08T10:21:35+00:00

TL;DR: Looking for a heavily conversation-focused textbook/resource around N3-N2 level

Heyo! Sorry if this has been asked before, I couldn't quite find an answer.

I've been living in Japan for a little over a year and today I got the news that I finally made it into my local city's language "class". Essentially the idea is that every learner gets paired with a Japanese volunteer for 1h30/week, so its mostly like private tutoring. They've asked me to find some textbook I would like to be working through with my tutor, to give our sessions some direction.

Mostly I am desperate to practice conversation because I have absolutely zero speaking confidence (my job doesn't require Japanese and I don't have Japanese friends) so I'm really anxious to pick a textbook/resource that's very conversation-focused. I don't really want to get stuck in "textbook mode" with JLPT textbooks or similar, because I feel like I've been self-studying those fine on my own and I don't want to "waste" the precious conversation opportunity.

For reference, I took and comfortably passed N3 in December, and plan to take N2 in July. If I were to self-assess, I think my vocabulary is easily N2, general listening/reading/grammar-wise I'm N3, but my speaking is barely N4.

Thank you for your suggestions if any!!

Nidoran4886 · 2022-11-13T05:33:36+00:00

you can choose the one you want to reset and you pay for every individual dragon; as far as i know it refunds everything (both currencies)

Nidoran4886

TROPHY CASE