Comments

Super Simple Guide To Using Anki Immediately — 21 Comments

  1. ehh…. These are the basics of the basics of the basics, of the basics. Good info nonetheless. Thanks AdShap.

    • Agreed. Anki is definitely a deep program. But even at its very basics it still holds great power.

  2. Awesome stuff. I think after all the time we’ve spent with Anki it’s easy to forget just how daunting and confusing the program can be. I remember first downloading it years before I found this website. I poked around with it for a little bit, downloaded some decks, got very confused and frustrated and ultimately ended up deleting it until JALUP convinced me to give it another shot.

    I’ve grown to love it, but it can certainly be unfriendly to new users. So, you know, cheers.

    • As Anki has grown in functionality, so has it’s complexity. It used to be a bit simpler. Unfortunately it is not the type of program where you install, press start, and know what to do.

      The most important thing that people need to know about navigating Anki is that it just takes a little time to get used to.

  3. Great article! After a few months using Anki just for a downloaded RTK deck, now I’m starting using it more widely.

    Since I’m in the very first days of creating my own sentences + vocab deck, a lot of questions are arising… Like inserting audio, choosing the right type of card and which fields should be in it, avoiding the reverse cards that don’t really add anything since they already show the answers.. There sure is a lot more on Anki than we can think of when we start using it.

    I wonder if JALUP plans on publishing more intermediate tips for using Anki. I’m sure a lot of people would be thankful and really benefit from that.

    PS: sorry if my english is not very good. I probably made some poor choices of words..

  4. Is there a way to see what the new cards for today will be?

    i.e. I have my RTK deck set to do 30 new cards each day. Is there a way to preview exactly which 30 will be introduced? Is it solely numerical order?

    • I don’t know if this also works if you have reordered a deck, but it will definitely apply to standard decks like the Jalup decks.

      If you view your deck on a desktop PC in Browser mode, the cards are shown in the order that they will also be added as new cards. So if you have set it to 30 new cards per day, the first 30 cards that have not already been shown will be added in the next cycle.

      The “Due” field can tell you which cards have already been added. Cards that display a due date have already been shown and are up for review next time on that date. Future cards will show a sequence number in the Due field instead. In other words the first 30 cards after the cards with due dates are the ones that will be displayed next.

      • Yup. I got it all figured out during my study session at lunch today. It worked exactly as I expected.

        I have the 6th edition of RTK, so before using Anki, I made pencil marks around each of the kanji I needed to study today, and then I studied them, and then I used Anki to help reinforce the study.

        Worked pretty well. I’m not sure if I can keep up with 30 new Kanji a day – may need to crank it down a bit. Not sure…

        Definitely going to work well for me, though!

        • You should have no trouble to start with, but reviews will start to pile up. Keep an eye on it and react early if you want to reduce the numbers, because it can take a while for reviews to die out after you reduce your intake.

          I used 30 for my own RTK, which is actually pretty fast and it worked out okay, but I’ll have to be honest and say that it was very tough at times. Don’t be tempted to let reviews spill into the next day as that will just make things worse.

          • So far, 3 days in (90 kanji), I’m still doing ok. I expect if there’s going to be a problem it’ll be in a few more days.

            As long as I remember the story for each character, I do pretty well.

            • You probably won’t see any issues anytime soon, but just keep it in mind, because it creeps up on you slowly.

            • Good luck! I used 30/day when I did RTK as well. Like was mentioned already, it does creep up on you – but as long as you don’t skip reviews, you’ll be fine. I think my peak number of reviews was 400-450 a day. It took a while, but it was doable.

              Something I did a couple of times was if reviews became too intimidating, spend a day or two doing only reviews and no new cards, then bump the number of new cards from 30 to 35 for a week to compensate. I found I liked it better if it was broken up into “waves” of reviews like that.

  5. For those of you who’ve learned ~ 2000 kanji, do you still go through your RTK deck every day?

    • Yes, but the review count slowly decreases over time, so nowadays it takes less than 5 minutes. Maybe 10 if I decide to add a new kanji that’s not in the deck.

    • I completed all of RTK1, but I now have mine on sort of standby after I started doing the Jalup decks seriously. I go through the reviews daily, but I don’t fail them, so effectively I don’t keep them memorized. This might have been a mistake, but at my current stage of learning I am not a big fan of returning to English keywords, so I have a bit of an ambivalent relationship with it. Even if I never return to it, the effort was worth it for the natural relationship it gave me to the kanji. I expect to do some kanji studies again at some point, but I have not decided what form it will take.

      • I actually don’t think that’s a bad thing. I only fail a kanji if I know a word that uses it. Otherwise I use Hard to push it off a bit ’til it becomes relevant.

  6. Hi everyone!
    I recently joined JALUP a month ago and I’m lovin it! Quick question: does JALUP have its own shared deck on anki? I’ve tried searching for it but couldn’t find it. If not, which decks would you recommend for beginners (not too beginnerish more of elementary Japanese as I already know the kana system and am familiar with some kanji and basic grammatical sentence structure). Would really appreciate your help JALUP family!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>