Learning Japanese: Anki

One interesting fact I noticed from learning Japanese, is the evolution you go through during the process. At the beginning, mastering hiragana is a big step and I remember I clearly made the plan not to learn kanji but to do everything in hiragana. But after a while, I found I really need kanji, as many words have the same pronunciation. So without kanji you are clueless about the meaning.

Another thing I noticed is that it’s really impossible to memorise all the words that exist. You need some hooks so that you can guess (with big certainty) what the meaning is. And the kanji are a big help at that.

So when I was getting used to the idea that I do need to know kanji, and that there are indeed ways to master them, I looked around for the necessary tools. I found that flashcards are widely used: a collection of hundreds of small cards with on one side the kanji, and on the other side the meaning. The meaning could be in English, romaji, hiragana, and may have references to the index numbering of kanji books.

The flashcards from White Rabbit seem very popular, but also come with a cost. Since I had more time than money to spend on this, I opted for the free-of-charge cards from RTK [More info on this here ].
Around 2000 kanji are listed on PDF pages, with a matching page that has the meanings. So you simply print these pages on both sides, and cut all the cards on the dotted line. Very simple but also time consuming, since the kanji are not arranged in the same way as we learned them in class. This means I had to cut several pages up, to get the one card with the kanji that I needed to memorise. Anyway, basically I started printing, and cutting, and sorting, and memorizing.









One day, when I was reading on AJATT(more on this in a later article), I found out about SRS. This is an electronic version of the flashcard system with several advantages:
- it can run on your computer, but also on your Smartphone or Tablet and even online (on a website), and all these methods can be mixed and your status or progress can be kept in sync.
- As you go through the flashcards every day, the system remembers that cards that you know already. So there’s no need to look at all the cards every day: only the ones that you got wrong will be presented again the next day. The others come one week, one month or one year later again. This Spaced Repetition System makes sure the cards that you reviewed will stay inside your memory.
- Some systems are free-of-charge, so no initial investment.
- Flashcard libraries are available for several languages, and levels
- You control the contents of the cards, so you can build your own set, inline with what you’re learning.

In a lot of forums this topic is discussed and several systems are compared. I chose to use Anki , but there are others that will probably be just as good. (Click on the picture for a good explanation on Anki and SRS)



I must say that this discovery had a tremendous impact on my way of studying. Again, I had to spend a lot of time in converting all the words, nouns, verbs, adjectives into my own libraries, but I made big progress in memorizing (my weakest point).

Another thing that helped me a lot was the fact that I decided from the beginning to include the kanji. So every time I look at a flashcard of a word, I also see its kanji and I will gradually recognize it even if I didn’t study it.

Recently I started adding sentences besides the words. That’s more challenging, but it seems to give me better results to memorise sentence structures.

Final conclusion: eventhough I still have a long way to go, I am making progress in Japanese by remembering words, how they are written, their kanji, and so on, thanks to Anki.

My next challenge that I need to address is speaking in Japanese, because that still sucks big time...