Why I’m Quitting Anki after 12 Years
The Day: December 27, 2007
One freezing morning during the winter holiday season, I started using Anki. New software merely a year old, I added my first Japanese sentence (which was awkwardly broken from a larger sentence), with multiple definitions, and a dream.
Front
５万人増は州再建に光明だが、
Back
増・ぞう・増えること「昨年に比べ五万円の増」
州・しゅう・中国の地方行政区画の一
再建・さいけん・失われていた建造物をもう一度建てること。
光明・こうみょう・くらやみを照らし出す明るい光。
I was almost 3 years into studying Japanese with moderate levels of success, and I made a gamble on a tool I hoped would propel me to success.
- 13,391 self created J-J cards for personal use
- 9,532 cards created for Jalup users
- 1,800 cards created to learn Chinese
- 3,000 cards created to study Law
- 5,000 cards created to learn various programming languages
I’ve done a lot of Anki. My longest interval is 21.3 years (using the default settings). If there is a record for Anki out there, I hope I’ve broken it.
However, we are now parting ways, inspired by my own recent post. Jalup has often been a therapeutic way for me to reflect on how I study myself, and my own goals, and writing this post made me realize what I actually need and want. Since Anki and SRS are the most talked about topics on this site, I thought I definitely needed to explain what happened.
*While this post discusses Anki, a specific app, it can be applied to any SRS (Spaced Repetition Software) out there (including the Jalup app).
Why I started using Anki
I started studying Japanese in 2005. Like any overwhelming subject, I was always doing a balancing act between learning new information and reviewing old. Before electronic SRS existed, most people have done some kind of manual version of it without even thinking about it. You learn something; then you review it later. You don’t sit there practicing the same thing daily for a week.
When I heard about Anki, I knew I had to try it. 3 years of compiling Japanese knowledge in no real order and I finally needed something to “manage the mountain.”
What Anki meant to me
Anki massively boosted my confidence in studying and moving forward. It let me avoid worrying about the process, and focus on the actual studying. This was big to me. Create new cards, review, and repeat. That’s it. No more crazy textbook addictions, or wondering what I should be doing next.
I always felt I was in a state of progress. Progress that I could see, and progress that was giving me power. Watching intervals grow was magical.
What Anki did for me
Made me fluent. Made me beyond fluent.
Why I continued using Anki for so long
The time requirements of using Anki grow less and less the longer you use it. This is the appeal. There was always something new to learn in Japanese no matter how good I had gotten, and using the same tool made it easy to keep that continual growth.
Why I am quitting Anki
I’ve talked about “eternal Anki.” Keep doing it until the intervals grow so large you will be dead by the next time they come around. The logic was simple and effective:
Minimum time commitment (5-10 minutes a day) to keep strong something I’ve spent years building. I enjoyed it. It was the perfect time filler for those “lull moments” throughout the day. I didn’t see a reason to stop.
Until I did.
Anki became a habit out of duty. Out of fear. And I wasn’t actually enjoying it anymore despite convincing myself otherwise.
Cards never disappeared forever
The great promise of Anki: forget forgetting. It does a great job in keeping its promise, for the most part. But not completely.
I still fail cards, and probably more than you would expect. While pushing cards into eternity feels great. Failing cards that come back years later? Not so great. Why does this happen?
Memory is imperfect. You forget stuff that you use. You forget stuff that you don’t use. Immersion is an assistant that reinforces everything you’ve learned in Anki. But there is no guarantee that you will encounter everything you’ve done in Anki out in the wild. And even if there was, that doesn’t guarantee perfect recall.
The result is a daily mix of forgotten cards, cards that I didn’t see much in the real world (even if they weren’t technically uncommon words), and the annoyance of having to encounter them every day. Annoyance is the ultimate fun killer. It doesn’t matter if it is only a few minutes of annoyance. That’s a few minutes too much.
This daily annoyance could be handled easily if there was a good reason behind it. But for me, there wasn’t any longer.
Perfection and fear
Perfection. Grading yourself too harshly on your reviews. Expecting too much out of yourself. Being too strict with yourself. I warn people about this a lot on Jalup because I always did this. It’s one of those “never feel good enough no matter how good you get” issues. While this can motivate you to work harder and longer, when you do eventually get good enough, it’s hard to ever leave that mindset.
I used Anki to build myself up. If I let it go, what if things crumbled? As long as I kept reviewing Anki, I had reassurance that my Japanese would always stay good/get better.
But this is nonsense.
Anki is the perfect tool to help build your Japanese. But what makes you/keeps you amazing are the books you read, the movies you watch, the podcasts you listen to, and the people you talk to. Anki gets you to immersion, the natural SRS.
Daily, I would spend 5-10 minutes a day on Anki reviews, going through 20 sentences, all in order to keep up my Japanese.
Daily, I would also read 40 pages of a novel, watch an hour of a J-TV show, listen to a J-audio book for 30 minutes, listen to a J-podcast for 30 minutes, and have several Japanese conversations. Add this all together and you have thousands of sentences.
Which do you think is really maintaining/helping me grow my Japanese. Which do you think can be removed?
The answer became so obvious. So I let go. It’s been about a month now. Did anything bad happen? No. Do I regret it? No.
When I should have quit Anki
Oh the ease of looking back and pinpointing when you should have done or not done something. But if I’m time machining here, I’d probably finish up somewhere in 2012.
Am I really done with Anki for good?
With Japanese, yes. Absolutely.
With other future subjects I might want to learn (which there will be), I’m positive Anki will make a comeback. In a future post, I’ll talk about how I used Anki (and the Jalup methods) to learn programming, which led me to change careers and become an iOS engineer.
The takeaway
The point of this isn’t to say you should quit Anki or any SRS. Far from it. Anki is still awesome with great results and I would never change that recommendation. This is for all the people that get stressed about reviews forever, and holding on too long.
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
Wow-congrats. I gotta admit, it made me a bit sad, since I know how studying can almost become like an old companion after a while-especially for us perfectionists. But, Japanese is still a part of your daily life, and you’ve moved on to an interesting and rewarding career. You’re an amazing teacher and always an inspiration. Looking forward to the programming posts; that’s a career I’ve started pursuing as well.
Yeah, it felt a little weird at first to stop doing them. But now whenever I have a few free minutes, I have Kindle ready to go :)
But don’t worry, quitting Anki doesn’t mean I’m quitting writing about Japanese learning on Jalup.
I recently decided that this will be my last year of adding words to Anki. I finally broke the mystical 10,000 sentence card barrier, and I felt like I’m done. 10,000 doesn’t gets you to fluency, far from it, but by this point there is minimal gain from new cards. These words often don’t come up in immerison enough to really stick. I get much more exposure to the language during immerison. A lot of the words I don’t understand very well until I see them enough in immerison. Sometimes I think I’m looking up a new word only to see it in Anki with a 5.6 month interval.
Immerison is the best SRS, because it’s the only one that matters. If you only see a word in Anki then it’s useless. Why should the random fancy word an author used in their book haunt you years later?
Which is not to say Anki isn’t useful. It is incredibliy useful in the beginning. But over time each new word is less likely to be useful. Once you reach a high level, your efforts are best spent elsewhere. It’s like training wheels, essential to the novice, but annoying to the expert.
Yeah, 10,000 seems like a good cut off point, and hey, that’s around where the Jalup Cards are now.
Those random words from novels do haunt. In my memory I could pinpoint a sentence from an Anki card to a book I read 10 years ago. And then I would forget what that word meant and fail the card.
Speaking from a point where I could probably drop Anki and be “fine”, I’m looking at a hybrid approach.
I’m probably going to drop my JALUP sentence reviews, as they’re my oldest and easiest cards at this point (which is not to downplay the incredible value they had in getting this far). But I’m probably going to keep my self-made sentence review process going for the time being. A couple of reasons for this-
1: I have a historical/emotional connection to the moments represented in these cards, and that makes them comparatively fun to review.
2: I actually like picking up and trying to retain “fancy” words. I feel like I still get a meaningful return on this effort, in terms of making myself a better writer.
3: I don’t have anyone I can speak with regularly (時差って最悪～), but I’ve always been in the habit of reading my reviews aloud, which is a nice way to shake the rust off. (I should probably work to build a better Shadowing habit >_>)
When it comes to kanji (RTK in my case), I’m on the fence.
-On the one hand, I’m over 400 reviews in the hole on my kanji deck and have pretty consistently failed to bring that number down. I’m unsure what my strategy will be to deal with this, but simply dropping kanji production reviews is not off the table.
-On the other, I work in an industry that could easily see me spending time in Japan at some point, and I’d kind of like to try if the opportunity presents itself. This would mean a need for handwriting skills that I’d hate to give up on just to relearn later. I’ve also found that my ability to distinguish similar kanji has suffered as I’ve fallen behind on reviews.
I think for now my approach can be summed up as “review smarter, not harder”, but I can certainly see the logic in dropping reviews entirely if you’ve got enough reinforcement built into your daily life.
For kanji, if you really want to practice handwriting, you might want to start a journal or something that you get more real practice writing.
Because I can tell you from my RTK experience (which is also 12 years old), while I could write kanji in RTK (with more failures than I’d like), when I had to write an actual letter to someone, things didn’t go so well. This was due to having nearly 0 writing practice outside of RTK.
It’s kind of like trying to watch an anime for the first time without ever having watched an anime before, even though you studied all the words.
This is weird… I revisit this site for the first time in years with this exact topic in mind and find this blog at the top!
I haven’t used Anki for Japanese for 2 years now. Anki used to have the exact same meaning for me as described here. Then I failed the N1/started my MA a week later surrounded by students with degrees in Japanese to compare myself to (my degree was not Japanese). I lost the sense of purpose in doing Anki reviews. My Japanese study has been pretty rubbish ever since. Which is why I’m back here- I’m still not sure what life after Anki really looks like?
Last year I started using Anki again to learn Ainu. My Ainu deck feels like my Japanese deck used to feel. So I’m happy I haven’t completely fallen out with the program. But I don’t see myself using it for Japanese again.
Timing works out strange like that :)
An Ainu Anki deck. Now that has to be a first!
It’s obviously a ladder deck. You can’t learn Ainu without Japanese. It’s a sad situation.
Very interesting! It reminded me of the choice I made to quit Wanikani / driven SRS a few months ago to go into Anki / self-made SRS. Similar to what you are saying about “I would have quit Anki in 2012”, I quit Wanikani at lvl 35 but I feel like I should have left it at lvl 20.
What I would like to know because it doesn’t appear clear to me is, what was your level back in
JLPT equivalent? Fluent? In the intermediate plateau? I guess you would suggest to everyone in this 2012 equivalent to quit SRS once we have developed a good “Japanese culture bath” habit?
I was fluent back in 2012, JLPT1+ equivalent.
There’s no right or wrong time to quit Anki. This just for me felt like the time I would have done it, looking back in hindsight. Though if I tried to tell my 2012 self that, I’m sure he would object!
You should post your statistics from your Anki deck such as total number of minutes studied just for fun.
Unfortunately my deck info got corrupted somewhere over the years (once early on, and again during the switch from Anki 1 to 2). So the reviews and minutes are wrong…
Did you end up getting fluent in Chinese? I remember that you had an article a long time ago talking about your experience learning the language, but I can’t find it.
I had studied for a year (2009-2010) with decent progress, but I was learning it for the wrong reasons and just wasn’t passionate enough about it to continue.
I’m someone that’s admittedly starting Anki with my first self-taught language and it’s an odd one: Ainu. I’m going to use it in conjunction with the Drops app/website. Drops seems good at getting you to learn words with prompts, but it’s not good at getting you to truly remember them. Anki seems like a good tool for bridging that gap.
Why such an odd, obscure language? Because I have a special gift with mimicking sounds and I feel like I can help in preserving the language somehow….