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Are you Setting a Dangerous Daily Flash Card Goal? — 13 Comments

  1. Great article Adam. Burnout is dangerous. It seems to me that most people believe that Anki is how you learn Japanese. I know for a fact that many people have learned a language simply by watching things in their target language, never even touching Anki. Anki just primes our mind so we can learn more quickly. My personal feeling is that Anki is simply a supplement to increase the speed of our language acquisition. For example, I was playing a game lately and making my own cards for it but it really wasn’t the cards that cemented anything, it was the constant repetition in the immersion. The cards helped set a foundation.

    I hear many people talking about massive reviews and how stressful it is. I highly encourage you to listen to Adam (unless you can handle power leveling) and take it slow and steady and fill all of that extra time with what truly brings fluency; huge amounts of immersion :D

    I was in danger of failing until I changed everything and filled my time with what I found enjoyable, which is Japanese media.

    You can do it everyone! Thanks for the awesome article Adam.

    • Well said Andrew.

      You pretty much need some kind of base before going into immersion. Whether that’s Anki, Jalup, physical textbooks, lessons, one of the million apps out there, you need something that will create your early foundation that allows you to get to immersion. Once you get there, that’s what becomes important, as your base (and the need to expand on it) fades away.

      I’m really happy to hear that you were able to get to this point where you can enjoy what is going to help your Japanese the most now.

      • Thanks a lot! Yah, I absolutely love having large sections in shows that are completely understandable, reading large sections that are as well, and understanding J-J definitions. It’s all thanks to starting Jalup 2.5 years ago; beginning with your Anki decks, becoming far to obsessed with Anki, and then putting it in its place and getting mass amounts of immersion as you suggest. I actually think the motivation articles and a couple of user comments were the biggest help though. My favorite article is the Japanese payoff point and the comments in it. Hugely motivatiing. I actually think I’m getting that for listening immersion to some degree now. I just need to increase my vocab more. Reading I slacked on because of anki obsession, but now I’m doing tons more (along with an audiobook reading to reduce building an accent in my head).

        Anyways, enough rambling.

        Thanks a ton Adam and said users.

  2. Agreed this article is right on point and something I have spent a lot of time thinking about this year, especially recently. Doing Jalup Advanced the last couple months I did something I had yet to do all year, take my time. I did 10 cards a day, every day. No more no less. I spent any extra time on immersion, usually at least 30 minutes sometimes up to 2 hours on top of reviews.

    It made me realize how amazing it is to add cards at the same pace. Every day I get 50-65 cards due from advanced. It is so even. Never a big surprise 200+ review day on the worst day possible.

    Earlier in my studies I did a lot more cramming. In particular doing Intermediate I set a hardcore pace of 25 a day. It was brutal. I enjoyed (many days) it but I could never sustain it. I would have 200-300 review days. Looking back that was the worst time to try that as well, moving to J-J. Luckily it didn’t burn me out, I did fine. But I WAY prefer the pace I have now.

    • That’s such an excellent point. Creating that steady routine makes life so much easier and allows you to know what to expect daily. It only takes one day of seeing 300 reviews to create a dangerous crash.

      A constant 10/day that you can enjoy and isn’t stressing you out is perfect.

        • I belive AnkiDroid has a predictive due review feature. This is in contrast to Desktop and iOS where it just looks at the amount of cards that are due on any given day without factoring in your likely pass/fail rate. I don’t think there’s any reason you couldn’t have the AnkiDroid feature on these devices but nobody’s got round to programming it.

          See https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/issues/3619 for more details. I believe you access predictive reviews by going to ‘advanced statistics’ on the settings. I don’t own Ankidroid so I can’t say for sure.

  3. For the most part I agree with what you wrote here, Adam.

    But I just can’t recommend going slow with Kanji. There is not only the burn-out due to being too fast and having too much, but also the slow burnout by the feeling to face an neverending amount of Kanji cards… I chose the 65/day route for RTK, after failing a few times at slower paces. Spending a whole year staring at Kanji cards everyday would have driven me crazy, without feeling any progress.

    Important note: That time with 65 Kanji/day was hell. Worth it. But hell.

    • Ooo good point. When I was doing rtk I also went as high as 50 a day. Speed is a little more doable with kanji only. I think I cleared them all in about two months. If you are doing jalup beginner at the same time though that would be way too much. If you do just kanji though that speed could work for some people.

  4. Hi,

    i recently bought the maximum package (nearly finished the begginer because i bought it before).

    At intermediate package, as the deck are divided on part, i think to learn 250 card each month with 10 new cards per day (25 days) and a small cooldown with no new card to finish the month (depending one month but take 5 to 6 days except february)and jump to the next part.

    4 month for 1 deck (20 month for finish all jalup)

    @Adam, what did you think about it ?

    Thanks

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