SRS without becoming an Anki drone

The night before my JLPT N2, I may or may not have crammed 300 words. Did it help the next day? Yes. Did I remember any of them a week later? Not one. I used to think the more words I shoved in per day, the faster I’d get good, and man, was I wrong. You don’t need to memorize harder. You need a system that remembers for you. That’s what an SRS is.

How many new cards a day?

The trap is that every new card you add today turns into reviews for months. You can play with that here:

When I first started with Anki, I did five new cards a day and thought, “this is way too easy.” So I bumped it to fifty. A few weeks later I was waking up to hundreds of reviews, dreading the app, and then I burned out and didn’t touch Japanese for three months. Going fast cost me way more time than going slow ever would have.

So start at five a day for a week, maybe a month, and only go up a few at a time when your reviews feel comfortable. Most people land somewhere between ten and twenty. Right now I do ten new words and five new grammar cards a day while I prep for the N1. Try to get 80 to 90% of your reviews right. Below about 75%? You’re adding too much. Slow down for a week. And if you’re up past your bedtime grinding reviews you’re not enjoying… put the phone down and go to sleep.

Which words are worth a card?

The best sentences to mine are what people call i+1, where you know every word except one. Here’s what I mean. Say you’re learning English and you hear “this book is interesting,” and the only word you don’t know is “book.” The rest of the sentence tells you what it means, and if your favorite YouTuber said it in a scene you remember, it’ll stick even better. A sentence with five unknown words is going to be a slog of a card. Skip it. There are a million more.

Also check how common the word is. Starting out, stick to roughly the top 10,000 on the frequency number in your popup. At the intermediate stage, most of what I mined sat between 10,000 and 20,000, still super useful day to day. These are rules of thumb. If a word feels like it’ll stick, add it.

Don’t become an Anki drone

Confession: I used to be an Anki drone. I’d see a card, think “oh, I know this one,” and hit Good without reading the sentence. Hundreds of reviews done. Not much learned. And there’s a sneakier problem. If you only ever see a word in the one sentence you mined it from, you start recognizing it in the wild without understanding it, because real Japanese keeps using it in ways that don’t match the one picture in your head.

Some words click the first time. Others take a bunch of different sentences before you get the vibe. Take 抱く. Read daku, it means to hold something. Read idaku, it means to harbor a feeling. If you only had a card for the first one, a line about a girl harboring a grudge reads like she’s hugging it. Or 食べる: you see it in a sentence about sushi and think “yep, to eat.” Then one day some guy is apparently eating money, you look it up, and it turns out it can mean making a living. Your picture of the word just got a little sharper. That doesn’t happen inside a flashcard.

Why immersion does most of the work

A video by the linguist Dr. Jeff McQuillan changed how I think about this. His point: vocabulary is picked up incidentally and incrementally. Incidentally means you learn words while you’re busy following the story, and opening your vocab deck to “learn vocab now” is about as far from that as you can get. Incrementally means you get a little more of a word each time you meet it. Studies by a researcher named William Nagy put it at around 10 to 15% more per encounter. One day you just know the word and couldn’t tell anyone when you learned it. And since the words you need show up more often, reading kind of works like its own SRS. Anki shows you a rare word as often as a common one. Real content keeps bringing back the common ones.

So I keep easing off the flashcards. These days they’re less than 10% of my Japanese time. As a beginner you’ll spend a lot more, since you’re building the base that makes immersion possible, but the further you get, the more of your day should be the real stuff. Oh, and your card count undersells you. If you’ve got 8,000 cards, you probably know more than 8,000 words. I got into Japanese because I thought it was beautiful. Swiping cards like a zombie was never the plan.

Backlogs, and mining everything

At one point I was mining every unknown word I saw, and I ended up with a 4,600-card backlog. Every word in there was useful. They were my babies. I had separation anxiety. I deleted the whole thing anyway, and it felt so good. If a word’s rare or obscure, skip it or mark it known so it stops bugging you. If it matters, it’ll come back. (Then again, my friend Wyatt, Furretar on YouTube, mined every single unknown word he ever saw, and he’s just cracked. So maybe it’s just me. I don’t think it’s for most people, though.)

Two card tricks before you go. Nouns often have long, fuzzy definitions, so slap a picture on the card. And the cards that stick best are the ones with a memory attached. I’ll never forget おなら (fart) because of the anime scene I mined it from. Weird example, I know. Bear with me. That’s context doing its job. If you’re setting up today: five new cards, sentence on the front, and read the whole thing every time.