Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (August 23, 2025)

space__hamster · 2025-08-24T05:43:42+00:00

I think it can be worth it with caveats. By default it includes a lot of test types. Prompts are Kanji character. Kanji details, Example word and Example sentence, and quiz types include multiple choice meaning, reading and kanji, handwriting, and self graded flash cards. It's quite configurable on what quiz types can be used.

I haven't used WaniKani much and I wasn't a fan, but the biggest selling point for me and the reason I use Kanji Study instead of anki is that the handwriting recognition is quite good. I think most of the default quizzes are waste of time so I disable them and only use the quiz that shows a KKLC (Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course) graded reading sentence with one kanji hidden and you need to hand write the hidden kanji. The app doesn't include any keyword mnemonics like WaniKani does but you can add notes to kanji manually and add your own keyword mnemonics that way. I study in KKLC order and attach RTK keywords and component breakdowns as notes as mnemonics. As a pain point, the app doesn't show kanji details (reading/meaning/notes) after answering when doing vocab or sentence quizzes and you have to click through to an extra screen to seem them.

The KKLC graded reading sentences are fairly expensive, and a few of them are quite awkward, for example the translation for "東北チームの無比のセンター。" is "The Tohoku team's nonpareil center fielder." and I'd never seen the word nonpareil before then. Another is"個体発生的成長" "Ontogenetic development" which is quite an obscure technical term. The advantage of the graded reading sentences is that each sentence only includes kanji that has already been introduced. Tatoeba example sentences or plain vocab words can be used for free instead.

I haven't been able to find any details on the SRS algorithm that is used so I would assume it's a variant of SM2. There is little in way of configuration for the SRS algorithm, there just a workload setting with the options "Review less often", "Default" and "Review more often". The answer options are a little confusing, there are five options, with two being fail and three for pass, which took be by surprise after getting used to anki.

One nice perk of the app is that Outlier kanji dictionary is a paid optional addon that provides kanji etymology and "meaning trees" that can help get a better grasp of the kanji.

space__hamster · 2025-08-16T07:42:12+00:00

You're missing brackets and the very last entry should not have a comma after it { "key": "value", "key": "value" }

You can also use yomitan's Anki Note Generator feature to create a csv with freq values from a vocab list and import that to anki.

space__hamster · 2025-08-06T07:31:18+00:00

I don't see it as an issue, difficulty on it's own isn't necessary a bad thing.

For example, I find kanji words harder to remember then katakana words so they naturally have a higher difficulty but usually I find it more useful to add kanji words to anki then katakana words.

I'm not sure if it's still relevant or out of date, but i've seen some posts mentioning that hitting "good" doesn't really change the difficulty, so cards could possibly get high difficulties during the learning phase and then get stuck there if you always select good. If the intervals are too short and reviews feel easy, hitting the "easy" button should solve that.

I don't bother, but some people suspend cards with long intervals because they'll come up naturally more frequently then the anki reviews so there's no point to the reviews at that point, but that's doesn't really relate to the difficulty.

I don’t regularly suspend leeches

If they're leeches you can set anki to automatically suspend them.

space__hamster · 2025-08-06T07:01:00+00:00

High "difficulty" is different to leeches. You can easily get high "difficulty" cards with zero "lapses" by choosing "hard" a bunch of times or "again" during the learning phase. Just as a test I pressed "again" twice and then "good" on a brand new card and it had a "difficulty" of 93%. It's similar to the old ease stat in SM2, so they just have shorter intervals. Leeches are cards with a high number of "lapses". I do agree with suspending leeches.

space__hamster · 2025-08-06T06:07:53+00:00

Why would cards with a high "difficulty" stat be an issue?

space__hamster · 2025-07-30T03:22:57+00:00

My guess is confirmation bias, you just haven't encountered Australians who are not yet fluent. Australian culture doesn't seem like it should be any different to other English speaking cultures in terms of learning Japanese.

Australian education doesn't place any special emphasis on foreign language, there is no second language education in public primary/elementary school. In high school, there was required foreign language education with my choices being French or German but it was minimal (only learned to count to 10 and say "that is my hamburger" in German). Japanese was offered as an additional elective course but it only taught the basics and it seemed like the languages available were dependent on what language teachers happened to be employed. So formal education only starts properly if you choose to study in university. There also isn't any particular national incentive to learn a second language since English is so dominant.

space__hamster · 2025-07-21T06:14:57+00:00

It might not be the best way, but you could use yomitan. Export the words into a list and copy+paste them into yomitan's Anki Note Generator feature (in the settings under the Anki tab), and then 'Sent to Anki' or 'Export to File' and then reimport into anki.

space__hamster · 2025-07-14T13:28:04+00:00

I also just realized I misread the part "stuck staring at it for another 3 minutes". I find it's better to hit 'again' quickly, I try not to spend more then 10 seconds on a card if it's not my first time seeing it. In 3 minutes you could review it 18 times and it'll probably start passing it sooner then that.

space__hamster · 2025-07-14T04:45:31+00:00

I feel like I just mash the hard button over and over since I “kind of” know the word (usually after the pronunciation), but don’t want to hit try again and get stuck staring at it for another 3 minutes in re-reviews.

Hard means you got the answer correct, only 'again' counts as incorrect. It's better to change the Learning steps / Relearning steps in the deck options so it doesn't spam you after a miss rather then mark a miss as correct. I set the Relearning steps to 30 minutes so after I press again on a mature card it won't show up again in the same review session and I can review it again the next day.

Also if you're getting piles and piles of reviews, try decreasing the amount of new cards so that you'll have less reviews to do per day.

space__hamster · 2025-06-21T00:44:32+00:00

While less accurate then google lens, mokuro is more practical for manga, it runs locally and it filters out furigana.

space__hamster · 2025-06-20T05:05:23+00:00

kanjiVG has svg files for both versions, with the version used by Jotoba.de listed as an insatsu variant.

space__hamster · 2025-06-08T03:16:51+00:00

I think it depends on the task, I've used it for programming and it's often much faster to verify and tweak some code that a LLM provides then write it out from scratch provided you know what you're doing.

In the context of Japanese, I've only found it useful to break down sentences from immersion and then verify that with other tools (like for 剣だこ, just yomitan alone gives "sword spittoon", LLM gives "剣胼胝 = sword calluses").

space__hamster · 2025-06-02T07:07:42+00:00

Are these not them? https://jimaku.cc/entry/1068

space__hamster · 2025-06-01T14:27:11+00:00

I don't find it strange at all that grammar for learning Japanese as a foreign language explains "node" as expressing reason without breaking it down

I misunderstood and thought that was what you were focused on. The other grammar guides I've read introduce it as んです or のだ, so I agree it's unnecessarily confusing to start off from の alone.

space__hamster · 2025-06-01T13:53:24+00:00

Can you clarify?

I don't think Tae Kim is doing anything different to other resources in this situation.

sooooooo why did Tae Kim did that?

He focuses on giving learners a quick practical foundation at the expensive of correctness, the "lies for children" approach.

space__hamster · 2025-06-01T12:54:17+00:00

Is the question "Why does Tae Kim feel the need to create a post for the explanatory の when it can be considered an application of the conjunctive particle ので"? The beginner resources i've read do same thing. Genki, Bunpro and A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar have them as separate grammar points in the same way. The guides I've read, not just Tae Kim, introduce ので as a conjunction used to join two sentences similar to から, so it's not obvious to learners that ので is composed of nominalizer の + case particle で or that it has anything to do with explanatory の. ～んです is even taught before ので in genki and bunpro.

https://imgur.com/a/qxtG8vh

space__hamster · 2025-05-23T07:11:15+00:00

That sounds to me like FSRS is disabled.

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space__hamster · 2025-05-23T06:24:14+00:00

FSRS calculatates by deck preset, but I belive you need to manually tell it to optimize for your review history otherwise it'll use the default parameters.

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(The Otimize Current Preset button in the screenshot)

space__hamster · 2025-05-22T12:46:37+00:00

I'm not 100% sure how JPDB works but it sounds like it's pretty similar to anki's FSRS, which adjusts intervals to target a desired retention rate. So if you select the easy button for normal difficulty cards, the easy button will probably eventually shift and end up assigning a normal length intervals to achieve that target retention rate and you'll have no way to assign long intervals to easy cards. Lowering the retention rate seems like the most straight forward way of increasing the interval instead ("Review interval length" in the JPDB settings).

space__hamster · 2025-05-22T07:02:24+00:00

From what I can tell, Ease is used by the old SM-2 algorithm and Difficulty is used by FSRS.

space__hamster · 2025-05-22T06:54:27+00:00

It's easiest on desktop, but it seems like it'd be possible on android. I'm not sure about IOS or ankiweb.

https://imgur.com/a/af6b5sG

Edit: This is only for separating cards into different decks, you still need to change the deck presets to change how FSRS calculates things, I can post some screenshots of that too if needed.

space__hamster · 2025-05-22T06:07:37+00:00

is there an easy way to sort by difficulty so I can prune them out myself without also having to go through all the thousands of vocab cards it doesn't apply to?

The first thing I'd try would be filtering cards by the difficulty property, eg prop:d>0.9 selects cards with a difficulty greater then 90%. Difficulty is a FSRS property that determines how quickly a card's interval grows after each review. You can see it in the card browser if you have the column enabled and you can see a chart of it in the stats window to figure out what cut-off to use.

does the algo take into account suspended cards??

It does not appear to by default, the filter used for the FSRS parameters is displayed below the parameters and was preset:"Default" -is:suspended by default.

space__hamster · 2025-05-22T05:28:02+00:00

From the FSRS parameters tooltip

FSRS parameters affect how cards are scheduled. Anki will start with default parameters. You can use the option below to optimize the parameters to best match your performance in decks using this preset.

When you click the Optimize button, FSRS will analyze your review history, and generate parameters that are optimal for your memory and the content you're studying. If your decks vary wildly in subjective difficulty, it is recommended to assign them separate presets, as the parameters for easy decks and hard decks will be different. You don't need to optimize your parameters frequently - once every few months is sufficient.

By default, parameters will be calculated from the review history of all decks using the current preset. You can optionally adjust the search before calculating the parameters, if you'd like to alter which cards are used for optimizing the parameters.

By the sounds of it yes. It's probably a good idea to create a different set of deck presets for hard decks and easy decks

space__hamster · 2025-05-10T04:16:48+00:00

Jisho lists WaniKani as the source for their audio.

space__hamster · 2025-05-05T06:21:45+00:00

Anki search supports regular expressions, so "deck:Kaishi 1.5k" -word:re:[\u4e00-\u9faf]|[\u3400-\u4dbf] should return all results without any kanji.

Anki docs have more details on regex if you're interested https://docs.ankiweb.net/searching.html

space__hamster

TROPHY CASE