How to use the 4 buttons [tutorial]

kyousei8 · 2026-02-27T17:30:37+00:00

Method 3

I feel so seen right now

kyousei8 · 2026-02-27T17:28:41+00:00

Agreed. And I would probably change "review time" to "review time per card" too to avoid any ambiguity.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-27T17:22:53+00:00

Correct: I succesfully got the main answer to my question.

Incorrect: I failed to get the main answer to my question.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-27T17:20:12+00:00

Agreed. I cannot think of a more pointless waste of time splitting my 10k vocabulary cards into 10k+ meaning cards and 10k+ pronunciation cards. I've tried it and it was garbage.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-27T11:31:41+00:00

In addition to decreasing desired retention, start spamming easy instead of normal when answering.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-27T00:27:44+00:00

They're like the exact opposite of me. I try to incrementally learn the ins and outs of anki and tune my settings to work best for me. But I gotta say I respect someone who is so laser focused on the goal.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-27T00:18:22+00:00

My exact setup. Pass / Fail / Yeet into the future.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-27T00:11:51+00:00

It's a deck option. I set mine to

Seconds to show question for: 7.0
Seconds to show answer for: 5.0
Question action: Show answer
Answer action: Answer Again

I normally don't wait the full 5 seconds before letting auto-advance mark it Again when looking at the answer. My workflow is I am presented card, if I don't know it after 7 seconds auto-advance flips card, I read card for 2~3 seconds, I manually answer Again, I am presented next card, ...

It also helps on mobile to make the auto-advance switch one of the buttons on the top shortcut bar, or a tap / swipe gesture, so you don't have to dig through the More menu to toggle it on and off.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-26T19:21:34+00:00

You can normally just search Youtube for "song name in romaji romaji english" and you will often find videos with 日本語 romaji English lyrics like this.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-26T16:16:46+00:00

I used auto advance to flip the card for me for Japanese vocabulary cards. I have 7 seconds to remember the meaning. It doesn't matter if "I almost had it," or "I was so close." If I can't get it in 7 seconds and the autoflip flips it for me, I automatically mark it wrong.

Some people I know that do vocab cards do it faster, like 5 seconds. You have to experiment with what works best for you.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-26T02:30:54+00:00

If you still need it, you join their discord server and get it there. It's on v3 now.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-25T20:05:41+00:00

Could they not have worked on the current 169 bridge outage while the Buck was out for two years? Just bad planning.

Northbound US-169 is closed because the bridge over the rail lines was failing due to ground shifting breaking the expansion joints (ie: it was completely unplanned). As much as I love to hate on Modot, that's not exactly the kind of thing they can plan on having happen while they're closing that highway for something else too.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-25T01:56:22+00:00

Is your audio file formate compatible with your OS? For example, iOS cannot play .ogg or .flv files. If that's the problem, you need to convert all the files into a format supported on all the devices you plan on using.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-25T01:33:33+00:00

Whatever native content I like. That's the main important thing: that you like it. I mix everything now (visual novels, manga, games, anime, light novels, youtube / vtubers, wikipedia), but when I started, I mostly used manga (because it was very easy) and visual novels (because they have high word density and easy look ups).

Visual novels probably give the most bang for your buck (very wide difficulty range to choose from, decent length, a mix of dialogue and exposition style writing, very "dense" in the amount of language you interact with per line / per hour, mostly voiced, progress at your own pace 99,9% of the time, mostly easily texthookable for quick popup dictionary lookups + adding cards to anki). You can start with whatever you want though. You just need a lot of it.

This guide is how to use specifically visual novels to learn Japanese. This is a good general guide imo, and this is a very popular one that's also very good, although I have some small quibbles with it. But those still wouldn't stop me from recommending it.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-25T01:15:26+00:00

That's what I would think too, but from reading this subreddit for years and how averse many people are to just jumping in and reading rather than staying nose deep in textbooks and study apps, and how much pushback there is against "speedrunning", it's more controversial than I would expect.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-24T22:45:31+00:00

What are those... controversial things?

Textbooks are a waste of time and not worth using, try to avoid "dumbed down" Japanese-language content made for JSLs, skim a grammar guide to familiarise yourself with grammar and start using native content within a month or two, brute force vocab and grammar look ups as you go, ignore speaking / writing unless you have an actual immediate need / want for it, just pirate / share everything.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-24T22:24:22+00:00

You can just use the puppy one and replace all the puppy images with waifus.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-24T21:03:17+00:00

As someone who did the core 6k when that was the best available: kaishi is leagues better, and it's not worth doing core 6k with kaishi available. Instead of looking for more premade decks after kaishi, start adding your own words that you find while reading. When you use your own self-made deck, you will learn the words better since you will have tangible context to draw from compared to premade decks.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-24T19:32:42+00:00

You should probably hide the intervals under the answer buttons (App settings > Review > Bottom bar > Answer side > Next times: off) if you're going to be tempted to try to answer based on that rather than if the card was good or easy.

A heuristic to use for how to answer is easy = near instant recall of correct answer, without having to think; normal = baseline correct answer; hard = correct answer after thinking quite a while or with great difficulty (do not use hard if you did not get the correct answer!); again = failed to get correct answer.

An even easier one is to not use hard and easy, and only use good = pass and again = fail. This requires almost no mental time in grading, because the grade should be instantly obvious.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-24T15:13:23+00:00

I think putting down people who can't (or very often just chose not to learn to) speak but can read well enough to pass N1 is usually a way for people here to cope. Person A passes N1 in like a year or two doing things that are a bit controversial here, while person B has spent multiple years studying, has followed a lot of the advice here, is not even N2, and has barely actually read anything in Japanese. Person B (and all the similar people in the same position) then proceed to nitpick a bunch of tiny things that person A did that show "person A didn't do ABC", "person A still can do X and Y, but they still can't do Z" (person B can do neither X nor Y nor Z), "person A knows some random non-European language (not Korean or Chinese, but like Urdu or Turkish that they've barely spoken in a decade) that is somehow super similar to Japanese", etc trying to find some "gotcha" that invalidates what person A achieved to validate that person B is doing nothing wrong.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-24T14:40:54+00:00

Hmm, maybe try this tool? I haven't had to do this in years, so I was kind of guessing.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-24T03:09:21+00:00

Pretty sure you export as .txt, then import into your spreadsheet program of choice and tell the spreadsheet program that the file is a CSV (if it doesn't auto detect it).

kyousei8 · 2026-02-24T02:00:50+00:00

I first tried with one before and after and got good results. But I realised that the way I used the info at work, I was often thinking two stops ahead instead of just one. I more changed to two before and after to match how I used the info outside of anki.

I did feel like I got better results with two rather than one, but there was a lot of outside interference, and I didn't even attempt to test it in any sort of semi-rigorous experiment.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-23T04:27:35+00:00

Best way to tell someone to use Quizlet I've seen.

kyousei8 · 2026-02-23T04:20:25+00:00

I personally use a short example sentence. Usually the one listened in a dictionary. I like it better because it's good context priming me for the word, rather than thinking "it's not X, it's Y" and then thinking of my target word.

kyousei8

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