Level up your language learning on italki and participate in their language challenge to earn various rewards: italki.app.link/LIvakivi Hopefully the video helps! If you have any questions, I'll try to answer as many as I can! EDIT: As a clarification, pressing the hard/easy buttons on Anki doesn't really matter that much, I'd personally just avoid the hard button and just press good instead, but I still use the Easy button to do reviews of really easy cards faster, which is fine. My personal opinion on the buttons is just that its simpler to have less choices than to mentally calculate which button you should press, which is what beginners often spend too much energy on.
Yo, Livakivi, I don't feel like I'm learning anything. Like, when I first started learning Japanese, on Duolingo, I was learning alot, and it was good. But eventually, I quit learning Japanese for a couple Months, due to lack of motivation. I quit around 10 times. Now, I'm 4-5 Weeks strong without missing a Day. But now. But, I already know the stufd I learned on Duolingo, and I was using the JLPT N5 Tango Deck on Anki before, but since your Video, I decided to try the Core2k/6k Deck, along with Duolingo. It's really difficult. I don't even feel like I'm learning anything I don't already know from Duolingo. I'm on the Katakana 1 btw. I know the Kanji for Sensei, Student, Eat, Amd you know, Genki. But as for the Core2k/6k Deck, it feels really hard. Because before, I was trying to memorize the Sentences, instead of the Word. And I still do, hecause in the end, I'm gonna need to know Sentences, but I just feel like that's not working for me. It's hard to remember the Sentences, and it's hard to remember the Kanji. I want to learn the Sentences, and Kanji, but I feel like nothing's working. At the moment, I don't really feel like I'm learning anything. What do I do?
@@seventytew Well, you can stop using Duolingo after Hiragana/Katakana, and use that time for reading actual Japanese instead, which will probably help more. As for the Core 2k/6k deck, or Tango N5 deck (both are fine I assume), you just have to keep using them. Idk exactly what you're doing, but as long as you keep learning new words from those decks, you will improve over time. Just stay patient, learning Japanese takes a really long time, and progress isn't always day-and-night clear after each day.
@@Livakivi I actually just wrote the same thing on the refold server and a lot of people pointed out that what I am doing is wrong and I am heavily relying on mnemonics for words which isn't correct. I will try and sentence mine from tomorrow without mnemonics and see how my retention will be affected in a few weeks...
@@Livakivi I started like 8 months ago but I’ve stopped for a bit (only did my anki reps without immersing or sentence mining). I’ve mines like 3600 sentences so far.
@@abdulmohsen0 same core 2k 6k deck livakivi used, i know about 1500 plus kanji rn, as long as you know hirigana and katakana then i would start the deck. I used anki basically, he has a video on it
10:36 "Finish your cards early or you'll sacrifice sleep" Me just finishing my cards at 3 AM (almost every single day) and having to take class at 7 am. Y E S.
@@Anife69 I just do immersion everyday and chat with my japanese bud whenever we can nowadays. I've played some VN's over the last months and while It'd be useful to Anki the vocab in it, it's still very good (and rough) reading practice, I'd recommend it if you're at a pre intermediate stage or better. Other than that I should get some plans. Also I'd like to point out that getting a Japanese friend can be of huge help, I've learned so much from just speaking with him as well as getting used to output.
One thing to mention is that I think the decks based on the "Tango" series of books are a bit better than Core 2k/6k, thanks to their consistency and the words their sentences use beside the target words. Also for new learners, don't make studying the Core or Tango decks the end goal, they're just a stepping stone to learn enough words (say the first 3000 words) so that you can dive into sentence mining.
I know that the video is targeted to the beginner learners of the language but I would like to share some additional tips that may be useful especially if you're in the upper beginner to lower intermediate level. 1. *Learn first before Anki* - Make sure to learn and understand the word or the card before using Anki. Anki is a tool that aids memory recall through spaced repetition. Take note that it aids *recall* not learning. The purpose of Anki is to make sure you don't forget *what you know*. That means if you don't learn the word by heart, then it will be difficult to recall that word, which in turn will make Anki program ineffective. 2. *Review only days* - Set a weekly schedule for Anki such that some days will be used for learning new cards plus review cards, and the rest of the days to review only. I set mine into 5/2: 5 days (weekdays) for learning and review, and 2 days (weekends) review only. The reason is that - as stated in the video - review piles up very fast and it gets overwhelming especially when you also need to learn new cards, so you need a day or days that will serve as breather to clear those piling review cards and prevent a burn out. 3. *Honestly answer your cards* - Always put an effort when answering the cards. Don't just press the _Good_ or _Easy_ button just to get over the review phase because it will mess up with the algorithm. Do not be afraid of pressing _Again_ if you completely forgot the card. I used to skip pressing _Again_ because I'm afraid of losing the _Interval_ of that card thinking I'm dumb and I have to learn it again. Remember, Anki is a tool that aids in recalling what you learned, and it should be a reflection of what you currently know (or do not know or forgot) in order to be effective. 4. *Review Cards first before New Cards* - There's a setting in Anki that shows you _Review Cards_ first before the New cards. By setting Anki this way, the review will serve as some sort of a "warm-up" before the main course i.e. the new cards. 5. *Remove English in your cards* - I recommend removing every trace of English or other languages in your cards and have it entirely written (or spoken) in your Japanese. English (or other languages) will get in the way when reading, writing, listening, and speaking in Japanese because you'll always have translate the word in your head before you imagine or realize the concept/context. 6. *Use images* - Instead of using other languages, it is recommended to use images because this is more directly tied to the concept than words in another languange. You can search the Japanese word in Google Images to find a suitable image for your card, and this is a good exercise because it's like you're playing 4 pics 1 word in Google Images to understand the concept behind that word. It may be helpful to set your Google search settings to the following: ・Region of Search Results: Japanese (日本語) ・Language of Search Results: Add Japanese (日本語) 7. *Fields* - Anki has _Notes_ which contains _Fields_ (this is where you put information) to create multiple cards. My Notes contain the following Fields ・Written word ・Image of the concept ・Sound of the word (mp3) ・Sample Sentence With these, you can create multiple cards that will test your knowledge in different ways. For example you can have a card that asks: ・ Given the written word → How do you imagine it (Image) ・ Written word → What does it sound like? (Sound) ・ Image → How is it written? ・ Image → How does it sound like? ・ Sound → What concept comes to your mind? (Image) ・ Sound → How do you write it? That's a total of 6 cards in one note. It can be reduced to 3 cards if you ask for both other info at the same time. The disadvantage of this is that it will take a very long time to learn vocabulary this way. There are many more tips I wish to share but this is getting long so I'll stop it here. If you have other suggestions or criticisms, please feel free to do it.
I highly discourage using images, when I did I felt like I was recalling the words based on the images and not the words above them. Images are bigger and you are likely to focus your attention on them even if you dont want to. With them also being vague what you do is associate words with the images instead of the words. Thats what happened to me at least. PS: What I am talking about refers to front page images, I dont think there is anything wrong with having them on the back end
Since I studied kanjis before starting, I don't really have an issue with recognizing words (or recalling their meaning), my main issue is with the pronunciations. Hence, I found a method to deal with duplicates while still keeping both cards and not giving myself a huge clue like an example sentence: I just list the meanings / readings the card DOESN'T have. So let's take 上下 as an example. This has two pronunciations, じょうげ and うえした. Therefore, I have two cards for it. Basically, the じょうげ card has a "this is not the うえした pronunciation" disclaimer on its frontside. When I reach the card, I might immediately go in my mind "oh this is うえした", but then I see the disclaimer and go "oh this word has two pronunciations and I'm currently tasked with recalling the other one. Hmmmm, it's probably じょうげ. Nice"
I'm not sure if I understood that. Might just be me and my lack of comprehensive reading. Do both cards have a disclaimer, so that you don't _just_ look at the disclaimer, but read the context as well? Or is the context unimportant, since you really only need to know that the other one of the two readings is required?
@@tomppeli. okay so the front of the うえした card reads 上下 (not じょうげ) And the front of the じょうげ card reads 上下 (not うえした) When I see the card [上下 (not じょうげ)] I know I'm looking for it's pronunciation and じょうげ isn't the answer. This way I can still have two separate cards for both pronunciation, but I never have a moment of "oops they wanted me to give the other pronunciation, I happened to give the wrong one". And unlike have a complete sentence in the front of the card this method doesn't give me a huge clue that makes the card way too easy (not that a sentence would really even work in this case since both pronunciations have the same meaning)
I am 2 years late and this may be unrelated but this example is meaningless. First うえした is just onyomi reading for both characters so there is no reason at all to make it into a card, second I never heard it used. 上と下 (up and down separately) is frequently used, but I think if my memory is not bad, I have never seen うえした reading anywhere. It is always じょうげ. I have only heard it as a character name once, or maybe I can guess that there may be some place with that name? I am not good at geography. I don't think you should learn it at all anyway. But anyway what I also wanted to say(if someone looks here) is that these double reading cards are 100% useless. First of all you shouldn't have a vocabulary card, because that's completely useless, but you should have a sentence card. Just a sentence with a target word, that has some context. Then you don't need to guess which reading it is. 99% of words with possible double reading either fully depend on context, or have a main reading that 95% of people use. I can probably count on fingers of my 2 hands words with genuine 2 readings that are both used interchangeably, they are that rare. Others all have the "main" reading and you can just ignore the other since you will probably never hear it, or drop anki altogether by that time.
@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5 first of all that's kunyomi, not onyomi. Secondly I have a card for it because it has a card in the 2k6k deck, I do not know if it's a rare word or what but apparently it's frequent enough to warrant a card. Thirdly while I don't have a ton of experience with japanese media, I disagree that different readings are always dependent on context, at least from my experience (possible I don't have enough experience to notice the subtle context). But to the main point, I disagree with a sentence vocabulary card being the end all be all, or even preferable to a vocabulary card at all. Firstly from a personal perspective, my memory is way too good for your method to work for me. I'd see the sentence, and immediately recall what the target word for the sentence is, instead of trying to parse it and understand the word. It'd only work if I had like 5 sentences for each word and somehow cycled between them. But secondly, while I agree that having a sentence is more realistic to the actual utilization of the words you learn, I think the idea of going for the more challenging option of recognizing the words alone also has merit, as e.g. if you encounter a really tough sentence and need to parse it slowly then being able to recall words standalone would be good as you can't rely on context. But just in general, the idea of "I'll try to make the hard task manageable and then the moderate task would feel easy" is not an outrageous one
@@tcoren1 yeah it is kunyomi I was wrong. However you are wrong that "a card means it is used". No, I am close to native level proficiency in Japanese (and maybe even above native if only talking input alone, since I read a lot and average person don't) and I am telling you that I have never heard that reading. About the third point you are again wrong. It is the deck and dictionaries itself that give you the illusion that words have double reading, when in reality there is a main reading that 95% of people use and the other one is the "very rare one" used in some 1970 movie or once in a blue moon by someone. It is a lot more black and white than you might think which reading to use. As I said, I can probably count on my fingers how many words have genuinely double reading that are both equally frequently used. I was reading native material like light novels and visual novels since 2nd year of learning, and now it is 8th year for me, for the context. About the word learning, it still doesn't make any sense. If you can recall a word separately, it doesn't mean that you can recall it in the context AND it doesn't mean that you can understand it in the context. What are you even remembering then? Reading and the translation? You can't vaguely remember the meaning, without using the translation. However when there is a sentence, you remember both the reading and the meaning, without the need for translation. EVEN if we assume that you remember every sentence for every word, the sentence learning benefits still FAR outweigh the separate word learning in reality. In fact, more context for remembering is ALWAYS better than no context. You say the "challenge" will help remember better, but in reality you contradicted yourself. If the sentence helps you remember the word, then the word is in your memory. If you hear the word in the wild then you might remember "oh I have heard it in this exact sentence", it is even better. If you only try to remember the word, it is harder to remember for the exact same, no, even less result. What I have learned over the years is that to remember something, a system, a skill, or a language, it is actually the MORE the context is the better, our memory is made this way essentially. When you learn words, it is more efficiently done in sentences, by reading a book, or generally in immersion and it will be remembered for far longer and far easier than dry word reading translation pair without any context. If I were to choose, I would say that I would rather not do anki at all, rather than learning separate words. It is that much inefficient. I would recommend to drop that as soon as possible. You "think" it wouldn't work, however it would definitely work as that was exactly my experience: "oh, I have heard this word, in this sentence" and that was much easier to remember, especially if you have good memory as you say. It is a win win, whether you remember the sentence or not.
Thanks! I really appreciate the effort in your channel. This has helped so me so much and gave me much motivation and knowledge in my Nihongo learning journey. Lastly as an American your English sounds excellent!
Anki really works. I ended up using Anki for about 4ish months, but then I ended up stopping for some reason or another. I am just now getting back in to it, with the deck reseted. I am already 100 cards in, and most of the cards I can still recognize can recall pretty easily with a few hiccups.
I've also been using sentence cards with highlighted words for a while now and they're amazing. They're giving me around 5~8% higher accuracy on mature cards than pure vocab cards while still being about twice as fast to review as pure sentence cards. I like them so much that I even started highlighting words in old pure sentence cards that come up while reviewing. Definitely recommend using that format for sentence mining.
Even though this video is best suited for Japanese learners (something I am not) I thought it was cool to see your process. I find your videos so interesting and motivating. If internet shiba can learn Japanese I can learn French. Great content as always! I’m excited to see parts 3 and 4 :)
Russian teachers in Estonia typically serve for 30-40 years before retirement, and each year they teach about 4-5 unique classes, and each class has about 15-20 students. that's 60 - 100 Students / year And 1,800 - 4,000 Students during 30-40 years of service. Odds are (just like your russian classes Livakivi), very few will actually learn Russian, and many will mistakenly hate it. On the other hand, you just setup 200,000 people on the path to learning Japanese, in a span of 2 years. And if we assumed that 2-3% (lowballing) of those watching ended up actually sticking to your guide, then that's 4,000-6,000 FULLY fluent speakers.
i really want to thank for motivating to not dropping studing japanese, you help me to escape from disilusion and misjudging japanese, and show me the way of learning japanese. Thank for all, and ありがとうございました
the trick to make the kanji deck more interesting is to always customize it, the most popular deck also provides for example a list of words that use the kanji, you can then mark the words you already know, provide example sentences with references to the source and you will slowly build up an interesting deck that truely becomes your personalized core
Love your videos. Just to share, I've been learning for about 8 months now and I started with a modified bersion of the 2k/6k deck which uses sentences with the specific learning phrases bolded. I usually try to learn every word within the sentences even if they are not the target phrases. It always felt like learning a bonus phrase and its rewarding to see them come up again in other sentences. It also greatly helps with getting used to the grammar early on. Good luck with learning to everyone out there!
I don't know how many more, "How to learn from Anki videos" your channel needs, but I'll acknowledge that you're re-iterating on your previous details finer and finer. You're getting succinct, my good man!
@@Livakivi Rote learning is often criticised for being an inorganic way of learning. Just *remembering* the material is the demand though. Need any way for it...
As someone who's digging kanji with RTK, I would say the Heisig method certainly works. I covered 1k kanji in 15 days with an average daily study of 3 hours. My kanji level was around N4 level, but if you follow Heisig, you will see most of the kanji you have never seen before anyway. How I did it, was that I see the English meaning, then write the kanji. Daily reviews around 300-400 reviews. I took a test to see my recognition level, and out of 1000, I missed 67, around 93.9% which is good considering the short time to reach it. Of course, the road is still long for me. Knowing the kanji won't get you a good Japanese after all, just like learning alphabet won't guarantee your English skill.
@@rapoluchandana8955 Heisig is a method to remember the kanji with its meaning. You can Google it. The idea is to link a simpler kanji with an English keyword, then make up a story of that kanji. More complex kanji will have another story from the simpler one. I'll give example, 匕 (spoon) and 日 (day, sun). 旨 (delicious), so the story is like "in the hot sunny day, a spoonful of SUNday ice-cream is very delicious" 月, moon but in a radical, it can also mean meat (it's a radical of 肉). So 脂 (fat) i make story "fat is the most delicious part of meat". As you can see, more complex kanji is formed from simpler one, and thus heisig method is just learning the kanji from simpler to complex. The order of JLPT kanji is geared towards the common kanji first, so you see the complex 議 (deliberation) before learning 我 (self), though you might have learned 言(say) and 羊 (sheep). So in heisig, my story is "if I put the lamb 羊 of God above myself 我, i will be righteous 義". So, all those debate 議 are sayings 言 to find the righteous 義 thing. Also, in ancient time, people make sacrifice 犠 of cow 牛 to be righteous 義. You get the idea. There are several sites to find the heisig order. Use the anki to practice everyday for space repetition method. Write the kanji to force your brain to give output for faster memorize. Finally, try to assign a vocabulary for each kunyomi and onyomi for the reading part. Heisig skip this part because it focus on you remember the kanji and meaning first. And thus after completing all kanji, you will have strange feeling of can understand kanji but can't read it. When I see 会議 (conference), what I saw was 会 (meeting) + 議 (deliberation) so a place to do debates? Later on I learn it read kaigi かいぎ. Fun facts, this is what's happening with Chinese students learning Japanese. That's how they excel at kanji but suck at speaking.
@@jonathanosnar7141 In the book Heisig specifically tells you not to think of an animal sacrifice for 犠 because he doesn't want you to confuse it for another later one. One I haven't gotten to yet because I'm only 800 in. I should definitely try to up my per day because you're the second person i've heard to do 1k in two weeks. I spend like multiple minutes thinking of each card's story
I use different deck now, one that contains a bit less than 1k words, but also contains some grammar tips and stuff like that. Love it so far. Will get into Core2k once I'm done with this
One thing I found when using Anki is that I didn't need to worry so much about always remembering every kanji reading perfectly in the beginning. After I saw words and kanji in context during immersion, I started to easily be able to recall kanji readings better than just failing the same card over and over again. I would try to remember readings, but as long as I got the translation correct I would pass the card. When trying to remember the readings as a beginner, it would take hours trying to remember both English and Japanese words for every kanji. It was just to much information to remember early on so I just focused mostly on understanding the meaning first and that helped a lot.
Thank you so much for making this video. I realized that I was using the wrong 2k/6k deck the whole time, where the words were in a really random order. I now started over with the deck you linked in the description and it is so much better!
I didn't expect the next video to come so soon xD And I don't know why I watch a video about the Core 2k/6k deck when I don't even learn Japanese xD But the videos are always so motivating and nice to watch :D
Personally I had a lot of trouble memorizing words from i+1 sentences at the beginning. I couldn't figure out how people were spending so little time memorizing so many cards per day as memorising the words was really hard for me. What I had to do (I had already gone through RRTK) was to create stories in order to help me memorize the word. For example if we take the word 完璧 in the tranlsation field I would also add a story like this: (perfect + sphere) The perfect かんping is somewhere in Japan to play FFX and try to complete the sphere grid of the characters eating ぺきng duck! Absolutely PERFECT scenario! I've seen other people explaining how they make Anki cards but I honestly don't now how they manage to memorize these words without making stories... By the way great video, I subscribed and can't wait to watch more and follow your progress!
I just finished a 600+ word n5 deck, I really enjoyed learning a new word and then hearing it in anime or other japanese media. Anyways moving to a 6k deck
the idea of sentences on the front of the 2k/6k is so good i’m not sure how i never thought of it! i retain vocab far better from my sentence mining deck so why not try it out for the vocab deck as well
I've been wanting to switch to Vocab cards for a while now for my mining deck and your idea of just having both on the front is definitely what I'm going to now. That's perfect for me
Thank you for your videos! I fell inspired every time you upload new language learning content! I also wold like to hear your opinion on reverse anki cards. Like cards with meaning on a front and reading/kanji on a back. They are extremly easy to set up and I have been using them for a while, but I havn't seen a lot of mentioning of this method in language learning community
They're output/production cards. They train your recall/output ability for those words, but if you don't focus on immediate output ability, then they don't provide much value in my experience. If you're need to/want to output early, and if they're common words, then they can be helpful.
When I started using anki, I decided that I wanted to focus on recognizing words through hiragana. Since I heavily read and write kanji, I realized that whenever I saw a word in hiragana (for college) it became really difficult. So I have a bunch of decks that are kanji on one side and the other side is the reading in hiragana along with the english translation next to it (for example: 水/みず - water) and vice versa, except I keep the translation on the back side (so for example: みず/水 - Water) but I never thought about having sentences with highlighted words- that’s definitely an idea I want to incorporate next!
I am learning Chinese but I am a complete beginner, even I know a variety of Kanjis. I used to study through Anki but I found it boring then I downloaded Quizlet and I found it way better, it has a friendly interface and you can vary that you will study the cards. I use now Duolingo to learn basic things and it's helping me a lot. Furthermore, I make my own cards of what I learn from Duolingo. I usually go over a lesson more than once in order to intake better the information.
I'm getting very inspired by these videos and want to start learning Japanese again soon, but at the moment I use anki to remember tables, terms and stuff for my exam in the summer, so learning Japanese on top of that would just kill me. Continue making videos! Hope you'll get big in the future. Maybe try laking not only about Anki but more about other stuff about learning language.
Thank the author of the channel for making this beautiful and useful video for us! Many people are embarrassed to speak a foreign language if they have no speaking skills. People are afraid to hear criticism from others in their address. It all comes from having a psychological complex - to make a mistake. But, after all, he who does nothing is not wrong! In Yuriy Ivantsiv's workshop "Polyglot Notes. Practical tips for learning foreign language" states that we need to talk as much as possible: with yourself, with the mirror, with inanimate objects, with children and with pets. Find an interlocutor in real life or online. Talk without shyness. People won't care how you speak. They understand that you are a foreigner, as long as they understand you. They may even acknowledge your progress in their language and compliment you. However, always be prepared for criticism of your speaking skills. If you have the will to speak, you will gain an interesting interlocutor to consolidate your knowledge. Everyone is strewn with mistakes - don't be afraid to learn from them. As the Latin wisdom says, "walk and thou shalt not go astray". In the book "Polyglot Notes" by YuriyIvantsiv an entire chapter is devoted to the development of spoken language. Here you will find many useful tips and each student can choose a technique that suits him or her best! I wish you all the best of luck in your language learning!
awesome video, once again :) super excited for the sentence mining/immersion video, as immersion's always been one of those "am i even doing this right" type of things. and don't even get me started on sentence mining
repeating the word of a sentence out loud just after heaeing it is known as shadowing and is actually a good way to train pronunciation (so you need at least the sentence audio or the word audio)
Shadowing requires you to listen to the recording of your own pronunciation generally, if you don't, you could be saying it subtly wrong without even realizing it.
It would be nice to have a vídeo that shows me how to actually use Anki, without the advanced parts, just the first lesson of the app, nothing too deep.
For the sentence, I try to read and understand it the first time I see the card, and also if it's been a long while since I last saw it (it does not influence whether I hit again good easy etc. though) Doing it more often would be pointless, as I get to a point where I don't have to actually try to understand the sentence because I just remember what it means. I also set the color of the english translation to like #1F1F1F so it's super faded otherwise my eyes get drawn to it before I finish understanding the japanese sentence
Also I really don't see the point of sentence cards, being able to read sentences is REALLY not something you should learn through SRS, just maybe like memorizing really common sentences. Instead of seeing the same sentence 10 times (over like a month) I'd rather see 10 different sentences one time, e.g. by watching a few minutes of anime and making an effort to read and understand every sentence. (I'm talking specifically about trying to understand the entire sentence rather than vocab cards that give you a sentence as a clue)
@@tcoren1 I also don't really use sentence cards for the sake of sentences, but just for the sake of learning words through my immersion, like I demonstrated in the video at 5:45 That being said, I can see some value in sentence cards for memorizing grammar points, as in my experience, when you take stuff like ～ないわけに（は）いかない; ～ずにはいられない; ～ないではいられない in the vocabulary card format, it just becomes hell.
About how you do the cards on Anki, the way I'm doing is reading as much of the card as possible. If it's a vocabulary card I always read the phrase that comes along with the word. Don't this helps to remember instead of just paying attention to the word in isolation? Also, doing this I get a bit of experience "reading". Only downside if that if you don't read extra outside Anki you may decorate the phrases and only remember the meanings on the context of those phrases... risky but a worth risk. Decks with sound I also try to play the sound at least two times. I read the word/phrase, play the sound, read it again, play the sound one last time. This is also risky, maybe this is the reason it made me almost give up in during me second semester studying. When I look at the complete statistics now on Anki I can see that during those times I started taking 3 longer weekly to do the reviews with an increase of only 10-20% more cards reviewed. This almost destroyed me, I got that feeling of doing too much and learning too little. Now that I'm full on back and look at the statistics again and I see that I'm studying the same amount or a bit more weekly but I'm doing 3 times more cards, because now know a few words and can read the phrases much faster. In the end you have to adjust to what works for you. How? I can only wish you luck, but stay around and less persevere. But now something I want to say... I also use the "hard" and "easy" buttons, because I simple can't understand and accept how some of you can "learn" so many cards so fast. I want to extract the most from each deck, so if I don't feel that I can instantly recognize a word, but don't have much trouble recognizing it and feel that the meaning is well understood than I mark it as "good", if not, if I feel that I still have trouble understanding it, that doesn't feel natural, that I need to think a bit too much I mark it was "hard". Only cards that feel natural to identify and understand I mark as "easy" to push their reviews further and give space to the other words I still need more time to learn. Seriously, I really don't believe people saying that they learned hundreds and thousands of words just because they finished a deck. Did they really learned all those words? Do they really remember those words? I doubt.
I personally don't use Anki. I prefer reading a book because the words are part of the story. You will also get natural spaced repetition because the words repeat themselves in the book.
Doing reading with dictionary lookups also works instead of Anki, in fact, its the main thing I'd suggest for someone who doesn't like Anki. Although, you definitely need to do TONS of reading for that, and some people don't like reading at a beginner level, or don't like reading at all.
The way I generally do my reviews is very similar to yours but a have a key difference: I don't try to remember the pronunciation of the card, only the meaning, the reason is that I gonna have tons and tons of input from audio and I don't see the advantage to try and keep the sound in my read when I will already hear that word a lot
Matt (from Matt vs Japan) who's has reached native-like fluency used/uses it a lot. I'm referring to him as you've mentioned his name quite a few times in your videos. Anyway. I think "cloze delition" is something worth looking into. That could be the topic of a future UA-cam video.....
@@johnmthembu Im at 4k anki cards known now, how did I memorize? Just do the core 2k/6k deck, also sorry for getting back so long i didnt see this. memorizing kanji isnt as hard as you think, just do 8 new words a day, your brain has pattern recogoniztion, you will be able to remember them trust
@@johnmthembu also, ive never missed a day of anki, and tbh, if you dont have adhd it should be kinda easy for you to knock it out, i got adhd and it takes me all day sometimes if i procrastinate, but recently i get up in the morning and do anki first thing and crank it out and that seems to help
Is there any way to get the sentence before clicking for the answer? It’s really frustrating learning a kanji that has multiple meanings, but I have no context to go off of. For instance, 上がる can mean to raise or improve, but it can also mean stage fright. How am I supposed to know which without seeing it in a sentence first? Edit: nvm found my answer at 6:18, this will be a life saver for me 😂
Great video as always, Livakivi. There were some very useful tips on Anki here that I wish I knew sooner. I am looking forward to the next two videos in the series! Sorry if you have already addressed this in one of your other videos, but do you think it is more beneficial to use and complete a larger deck such as core 6k (or even bigger like core 10k or 30k) before switching over to learning any/all new vocabulary from immersion/sentence mining so that the input is more comprehensible? Or do you think it might be better to start with a smaller deck, for example core 1k or 2k, and getting into immersion/sentence mining for new vocabulary sooner? I have seen people supporting both sides, but I am not really sure myself which is better. I have been using the core 2.3k deck by Anacreon (which is based on iKnow's core 6k deck) for a little over a month now, and have learnt around 40% of the cards so far. However, I am starting to wonder if ~2k words will really be enough before I switch over to making my own cards with sentence mining, or if I should be using a larger deck like you did.
Imo 10k to 30k is an overkill. I started sentence mining at 6k, and I easily could have started earlier, even at around 3k to 4k probably. Some people start at 2k, which is like the minimum I'd recommend. You can start after at 2.3k, the benefit is that you start immersion earlier, but you're going to mine thousands of words that you'd get from most frequency based premade vocab decks. It's really up to you, and what you can stay more consistent with. If you're hyped to sentence mine, go for it, but if you find it tedious for now, you can just keep on taking premade cards and immersing on the side to build your foundation a bit more.
3:49 Noo not that image 😭😭. I keep forgetting that card, and the when I turn the card, this dude is just looking at me like. 'Yeah you don't know this word do you?'
Hi! If I read just a word and don't know the meaning but when I read a whole sentence with the word and because of it I know the meaning, then should I hit the button "good" or "again"? Btw. thank you for great tutorial!
I'm guessing the only thing holding me back is myself... I know how terrible I am at getting myself to read source material and reading for tests. To put it short: I like the idea, but I don't like the premise of studying, lmao 😅
I'm tired of not remembering the reading of the words, I multiplied the card by 4, only one with vanila 2k/6k format, each card now has 4 variants, the word vanilla format, the audio and furigana only in the front format, the sentence format, and the sentence audio in front format
Hi, what's your take on Anki cloze deletion feature? Any luck you could release a video about it? Great video btw as always. I smashed the like button.
I started learning Japanese this month, and I need help knowing if I should start with these 2k/6k decks on Anki, or start with my own cards with words I learned.
You can start making your own cards from day one, but I honestly recommend using a premade deck such as the Core 2.3k from the description and then move on to making your own cards through sentence mining. It might be a bit too time consuming to make cards for all these extremely common words, or sentence mining might be a bit too hard at first, but its up to you, the important part is that you're constantly increasing your vocabulary.
I often wonder whether I do something wrong when reviewing my cards. I consistently took 10 new cards for almost a year and Anki still only takes me maximum 30min a day (i have to review about 80 cards a day). How did you pile up so many cards so early on and had to review for about an hour a day? Is it perhaps because you used to use the easy/hard buttons in the beginning and therefore change the ease factor?
So I read that the CORE decks use the most common words from newspapers back until the 80s. SInce reading newspaper is not really what I wanna do, should I still follow with it? I have now learned about 800 cards in the 2k/6k deck.
While using the deck I'm finding it easy to memorize the characters and the meaning but not the pronunciation. Does anybody have any tips on how to remember the actually pronunciation easier
heya! a lot of this has been really useful, just a question though about starting off with the 2k/6k deck. is it supposed to be really really tough to get the readings down for each vocab? the meaning i can get relatively consistently but i've spent 30 minutes or so today on just 15 words trying to get the reading, i feel like i'm kind of forcing things or that I'm doing something wrong. just at the point where i dont think i can complete a review fully
Those words are most likely new. It can be pretty hard at first, yes, it gets easier the more comfortable you get with the words as you'll be able to predict their readings over time. Reducing number of new cards per day can help when its getting too difficult, and immersion/reading practice can help too. Also, don't be TOO strict with the reviews too, sometimes getting 1 letter wrong in the word isn't the end of the world, especially if you felt like you'd get it right the next time. Don't get too relaxed to the point you're hitting "Good" even if you know you got it completely wrong, but if you're extremely strict, its not the best either.
I personally think recalling the reading is more important. I often don't recall the exact English word into my conscious, but I feel like I know the meaning just from intuition or just via the context if I made the card myself.
Hey again 🖐 I’ve been wondering if you can make a video on (Kanji learning) I just learn kanji from vocabulary but I don’t want it to be a bad habit when I need to understand that kanji by itself.Any suggestions? Thanks before hand 😊
Umm, yeah! I do have a question, which core 2k/6k deck should I use? The first one linked in this video's description or the 2md one? (The alternative one with pitch accents and stroke order) and so that I'm sure I have the right deck, maybe you could tell me what was your first card? Thank you!
It's up to you, those two should be equivalent but one just has pitch accent graphs for the words which can be useful. There's also the Core 2.3k deck which only has 2300 cards, which is shortened so you'd start sentence mining earlier, but at the end of the day, the cards are the same, but maybe in a slightly different order. Imo the order doesn't matter that much if you're in it for the long term, they're all more or less equal as they're all very common words anyway. You can't go wrong with any of them if you're going for fluency over the long term. I don't remember what the first word was, but it might have been 一つ or 一.
Level up your language learning on italki and participate in their language challenge to earn various rewards: italki.app.link/LIvakivi
Hopefully the video helps! If you have any questions, I'll try to answer as many as I can!
EDIT: As a clarification, pressing the hard/easy buttons on Anki doesn't really matter that much, I'd personally just avoid the hard button and just press good instead, but I still use the Easy button to do reviews of really easy cards faster, which is fine. My personal opinion on the buttons is just that its simpler to have less choices than to mentally calculate which button you should press, which is what beginners often spend too much energy on.
Yo, Livakivi, I don't feel like I'm learning anything. Like, when I first started learning Japanese, on Duolingo, I was learning alot, and it was good. But eventually, I quit learning Japanese for a couple Months, due to lack of motivation. I quit around 10 times. Now, I'm 4-5 Weeks strong without missing a Day. But now. But, I already know the stufd I learned on Duolingo, and I was using the JLPT N5 Tango Deck on Anki before, but since your Video, I decided to try the Core2k/6k Deck, along with Duolingo. It's really difficult. I don't even feel like I'm learning anything I don't already know from Duolingo. I'm on the Katakana 1 btw. I know the Kanji for Sensei, Student, Eat, Amd you know, Genki. But as for the Core2k/6k Deck, it feels really hard. Because before, I was trying to memorize the Sentences, instead of the Word. And I still do, hecause in the end, I'm gonna need to know Sentences, but I just feel like that's not working for me. It's hard to remember the Sentences, and it's hard to remember the Kanji. I want to learn the Sentences, and Kanji, but I feel like nothing's working. At the moment, I don't really feel like I'm learning anything. What do I do?
@@seventytew Well, you can stop using Duolingo after Hiragana/Katakana, and use that time for reading actual Japanese instead, which will probably help more.
As for the Core 2k/6k deck, or Tango N5 deck (both are fine I assume), you just have to keep using them. Idk exactly what you're doing, but as long as you keep learning new words from those decks, you will improve over time. Just stay patient, learning Japanese takes a really long time, and progress isn't always day-and-night clear after each day.
@@Livakivi I actually just wrote the same thing on the refold server and a lot of people pointed out that what I am doing is wrong and I am heavily relying on mnemonics for words which isn't correct. I will try and sentence mine from tomorrow without mnemonics and see how my retention will be affected in a few weeks...
@@solidsn2011 How far are you into learning Japanese? I used mnemonics as a beginner, but haven't used them for a long time anymore.
@@Livakivi I started like 8 months ago but I’ve stopped for a bit (only did my anki reps without immersing or sentence mining). I’ve mines like 3600 sentences so far.
In my experience, learning kanji separately helped me distinguish similarly looking words as well as being able to take more cards per day .
Definitely agree
yep, kanji made learning words super easy
How did you learn kanji?
@@abdulmohsen0 same core 2k 6k deck livakivi used, i know about 1500 plus kanji rn, as long as you know hirigana and katakana then i would start the deck. I used anki basically, he has a video on it
True i personally recomend kanji ds games they are pretty good and you can get them for free
10:36 "Finish your cards early or you'll sacrifice sleep"
Me just finishing my cards at 3 AM (almost every single day) and having to take class at 7 am. Y E S.
Same. My Hourly Breakdown of Anki reviews paints a picture:
0:00-7:00 nothing
8:00-21:00 rolling hills
22:00-23:00 the great wall of china
If you're getting that little sleep, I would not be prioritising anki, that's a huge mistake
@@konan3968 I just graduated and fixed my schedule a little, so I sleep fine now xD
@@theofficialpollo hi there is your past
Are you still using anki so much ? or you switched to something else
@@Anife69 I just do immersion everyday and chat with my japanese bud whenever we can nowadays. I've played some VN's over the last months and while It'd be useful to Anki the vocab in it, it's still very good (and rough) reading practice, I'd recommend it if you're at a pre intermediate stage or better. Other than that I should get some plans.
Also I'd like to point out that getting a Japanese friend can be of huge help, I've learned so much from just speaking with him as well as getting used to output.
One thing to mention is that I think the decks based on the "Tango" series of books are a bit better than Core 2k/6k, thanks to their consistency and the words their sentences use beside the target words. Also for new learners, don't make studying the Core or Tango decks the end goal, they're just a stepping stone to learn enough words (say the first 3000 words) so that you can dive into sentence mining.
Can you share the link, please?
@@私-r9p Links can't be shared on UA-cam, although you can just write in Anki JLPT Tango and it will find all five books on Anki.
What is sentence mining?
@@youngtidepod3507 Learning the meaning of whole sentences rather than individual words
I know that the video is targeted to the beginner learners of the language but I would like to share some additional tips that may be useful especially if you're in the upper beginner to lower intermediate level.
1. *Learn first before Anki* - Make sure to learn and understand the word or the card before using Anki. Anki is a tool that aids memory recall through spaced repetition. Take note that it aids *recall* not learning. The purpose of Anki is to make sure you don't forget *what you know*. That means if you don't learn the word by heart, then it will be difficult to recall that word, which in turn will make Anki program ineffective.
2. *Review only days* - Set a weekly schedule for Anki such that some days will be used for learning new cards plus review cards, and the rest of the days to review only. I set mine into 5/2: 5 days (weekdays) for learning and review, and 2 days (weekends) review only. The reason is that - as stated in the video - review piles up very fast and it gets overwhelming especially when you also need to learn new cards, so you need a day or days that will serve as breather to clear those piling review cards and prevent a burn out.
3. *Honestly answer your cards* - Always put an effort when answering the cards. Don't just press the _Good_ or _Easy_ button just to get over the review phase because it will mess up with the algorithm. Do not be afraid of pressing _Again_ if you completely forgot the card. I used to skip pressing _Again_ because I'm afraid of losing the _Interval_ of that card thinking I'm dumb and I have to learn it again. Remember, Anki is a tool that aids in recalling what you learned, and it should be a reflection of what you currently know (or do not know or forgot) in order to be effective.
4. *Review Cards first before New Cards* - There's a setting in Anki that shows you _Review Cards_ first before the New cards. By setting Anki this way, the review will serve as some sort of a "warm-up" before the main course i.e. the new cards.
5. *Remove English in your cards* - I recommend removing every trace of English or other languages in your cards and have it entirely written (or spoken) in your Japanese. English (or other languages) will get in the way when reading, writing, listening, and speaking in Japanese because you'll always have translate the word in your head before you imagine or realize the concept/context.
6. *Use images* - Instead of using other languages, it is recommended to use images because this is more directly tied to the concept than words in another languange. You can search the Japanese word in Google Images to find a suitable image for your card, and this is a good exercise because it's like you're playing 4 pics 1 word in Google Images to understand the concept behind that word. It may be helpful to set your Google search settings to the following:
・Region of Search Results: Japanese (日本語)
・Language of Search Results: Add Japanese (日本語)
7. *Fields* - Anki has _Notes_ which contains _Fields_ (this is where you put information) to create multiple cards. My Notes contain the following Fields
・Written word
・Image of the concept
・Sound of the word (mp3)
・Sample Sentence
With these, you can create multiple cards that will test your knowledge in different ways. For example you can have a card that asks:
・ Given the written word → How do you imagine it (Image)
・ Written word → What does it sound like? (Sound)
・ Image → How is it written?
・ Image → How does it sound like?
・ Sound → What concept comes to your mind? (Image)
・ Sound → How do you write it?
That's a total of 6 cards in one note. It can be reduced to 3 cards if you ask for both other info at the same time. The disadvantage of this is that it will take a very long time to learn vocabulary this way.
There are many more tips I wish to share but this is getting long so I'll stop it here. If you have other suggestions or criticisms, please feel free to do it.
You can use anki both for learning and memorisation
I highly discourage using images, when I did I felt like I was recalling the words based on the images and not the words above them. Images are bigger and you are likely to focus your attention on them even if you dont want to. With them also being vague what you do is associate words with the images instead of the words. Thats what happened to me at least.
PS: What I am talking about refers to front page images, I dont think there is anything wrong with having them on the back end
Since I studied kanjis before starting, I don't really have an issue with recognizing words (or recalling their meaning), my main issue is with the pronunciations.
Hence, I found a method to deal with duplicates while still keeping both cards and not giving myself a huge clue like an example sentence: I just list the meanings / readings the card DOESN'T have.
So let's take 上下 as an example. This has two pronunciations, じょうげ and うえした. Therefore, I have two cards for it. Basically, the じょうげ card has a "this is not the うえした pronunciation" disclaimer on its frontside. When I reach the card, I might immediately go in my mind "oh this is うえした", but then I see the disclaimer and go "oh this word has two pronunciations and I'm currently tasked with recalling the other one. Hmmmm, it's probably じょうげ. Nice"
I'm not sure if I understood that. Might just be me and my lack of comprehensive reading.
Do both cards have a disclaimer, so that you don't _just_ look at the disclaimer, but read the context as well?
Or is the context unimportant, since you really only need to know that the other one of the two readings is required?
@@tomppeli. okay so the front of the うえした card reads
上下 (not じょうげ)
And the front of the じょうげ card reads
上下 (not うえした)
When I see the card [上下 (not じょうげ)] I know I'm looking for it's pronunciation and じょうげ isn't the answer.
This way I can still have two separate cards for both pronunciation, but I never have a moment of "oops they wanted me to give the other pronunciation, I happened to give the wrong one".
And unlike have a complete sentence in the front of the card this method doesn't give me a huge clue that makes the card way too easy (not that a sentence would really even work in this case since both pronunciations have the same meaning)
I am 2 years late and this may be unrelated but this example is meaningless. First うえした is just onyomi reading for both characters so there is no reason at all to make it into a card, second I never heard it used. 上と下 (up and down separately) is frequently used, but I think if my memory is not bad, I have never seen うえした reading anywhere. It is always じょうげ. I have only heard it as a character name once, or maybe I can guess that there may be some place with that name? I am not good at geography. I don't think you should learn it at all anyway.
But anyway what I also wanted to say(if someone looks here) is that these double reading cards are 100% useless. First of all you shouldn't have a vocabulary card, because that's completely useless, but you should have a sentence card. Just a sentence with a target word, that has some context. Then you don't need to guess which reading it is. 99% of words with possible double reading either fully depend on context, or have a main reading that 95% of people use. I can probably count on fingers of my 2 hands words with genuine 2 readings that are both used interchangeably, they are that rare. Others all have the "main" reading and you can just ignore the other since you will probably never hear it, or drop anki altogether by that time.
@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5 first of all that's kunyomi, not onyomi. Secondly I have a card for it because it has a card in the 2k6k deck, I do not know if it's a rare word or what but apparently it's frequent enough to warrant a card. Thirdly while I don't have a ton of experience with japanese media, I disagree that different readings are always dependent on context, at least from my experience (possible I don't have enough experience to notice the subtle context).
But to the main point, I disagree with a sentence vocabulary card being the end all be all, or even preferable to a vocabulary card at all.
Firstly from a personal perspective, my memory is way too good for your method to work for me. I'd see the sentence, and immediately recall what the target word for the sentence is, instead of trying to parse it and understand the word. It'd only work if I had like 5 sentences for each word and somehow cycled between them. But secondly, while I agree that having a sentence is more realistic to the actual utilization of the words you learn, I think the idea of going for the more challenging option of recognizing the words alone also has merit, as e.g. if you encounter a really tough sentence and need to parse it slowly then being able to recall words standalone would be good as you can't rely on context. But just in general, the idea of "I'll try to make the hard task manageable and then the moderate task would feel easy" is not an outrageous one
@@tcoren1 yeah it is kunyomi I was wrong. However you are wrong that "a card means it is used". No, I am close to native level proficiency in Japanese (and maybe even above native if only talking input alone, since I read a lot and average person don't) and I am telling you that I have never heard that reading. About the third point you are again wrong. It is the deck and dictionaries itself that give you the illusion that words have double reading, when in reality there is a main reading that 95% of people use and the other one is the "very rare one" used in some 1970 movie or once in a blue moon by someone. It is a lot more black and white than you might think which reading to use. As I said, I can probably count on my fingers how many words have genuinely double reading that are both equally frequently used. I was reading native material like light novels and visual novels since 2nd year of learning, and now it is 8th year for me, for the context. About the word learning, it still doesn't make any sense. If you can recall a word separately, it doesn't mean that you can recall it in the context AND it doesn't mean that you can understand it in the context. What are you even remembering then? Reading and the translation? You can't vaguely remember the meaning, without using the translation. However when there is a sentence, you remember both the reading and the meaning, without the need for translation. EVEN if we assume that you remember every sentence for every word, the sentence learning benefits still FAR outweigh the separate word learning in reality. In fact, more context for remembering is ALWAYS better than no context. You say the "challenge" will help remember better, but in reality you contradicted yourself. If the sentence helps you remember the word, then the word is in your memory. If you hear the word in the wild then you might remember "oh I have heard it in this exact sentence", it is even better. If you only try to remember the word, it is harder to remember for the exact same, no, even less result. What I have learned over the years is that to remember something, a system, a skill, or a language, it is actually the MORE the context is the better, our memory is made this way essentially. When you learn words, it is more efficiently done in sentences, by reading a book, or generally in immersion and it will be remembered for far longer and far easier than dry word reading translation pair without any context. If I were to choose, I would say that I would rather not do anki at all, rather than learning separate words. It is that much inefficient. I would recommend to drop that as soon as possible. You "think" it wouldn't work, however it would definitely work as that was exactly my experience: "oh, I have heard this word, in this sentence" and that was much easier to remember, especially if you have good memory as you say. It is a win win, whether you remember the sentence or not.
I just wanted to tell you that im extremely thankful for your videos. You're hella inspirational! Wish you the best man!
Thanks! I really appreciate the effort in your channel. This has helped so me so much and gave me much motivation and knowledge in my Nihongo learning journey. Lastly as an American your English sounds excellent!
Thank you so much for the help! I'm glad you've enjoyed the videos too, I'll keep on making them!!
Anki really works. I ended up using Anki for about 4ish months, but then I ended up stopping for some reason or another. I am just now getting back in to it, with the deck reseted. I am already 100 cards in, and most of the cards I can still recognize can recall pretty easily with a few hiccups.
I've also been using sentence cards with highlighted words for a while now and they're amazing.
They're giving me around 5~8% higher accuracy on mature cards than pure vocab cards while still being about twice as fast to review as pure sentence cards. I like them so much that I even started highlighting words in old pure sentence cards that come up while reviewing.
Definitely recommend using that format for sentence mining.
Even though this video is best suited for Japanese learners (something I am not) I thought it was cool to see your process. I find your videos so interesting and motivating. If internet shiba can learn Japanese I can learn French.
Great content as always! I’m excited to see parts 3 and 4 :)
Bonne chance avec ton apprentissage de la langue française
Rejoignez-nous, vive la francophonie !
Russian teachers in Estonia typically serve for 30-40 years before retirement, and each year they teach about 4-5 unique classes, and each class has about 15-20 students.
that's 60 - 100 Students / year
And 1,800 - 4,000 Students during 30-40 years of service.
Odds are (just like your russian classes Livakivi), very few will actually learn Russian, and many will mistakenly hate it.
On the other hand, you just setup 200,000 people on the path to learning Japanese, in a span of 2 years.
And if we assumed that 2-3% (lowballing) of those watching ended up actually sticking to your guide, then that's 4,000-6,000 FULLY fluent speakers.
i really want to thank for motivating to not dropping studing japanese, you help me to escape from disilusion and misjudging japanese, and show me the way of learning japanese. Thank for all, and ありがとうございました
the trick to make the kanji deck more interesting is to always customize it, the most popular deck also provides for example a list of words that use the kanji, you can then mark the words you already know, provide example sentences with references to the source and you will slowly build up an interesting deck that truely becomes your personalized core
Love your videos. Just to share, I've been learning for about 8 months now and I started with a modified bersion of the 2k/6k deck which uses sentences with the specific learning phrases bolded. I usually try to learn every word within the sentences even if they are not the target phrases. It always felt like learning a bonus phrase and its rewarding to see them come up again in other sentences. It also greatly helps with getting used to the grammar early on.
Good luck with learning to everyone out there!
How has your learning been a year after your comment? Have you been able to converse in Japanese?
@@davidpicarazzi Passed N2 this year, I can talk shit in Valorant Tokyo server but a lot more practice needed
I don't know how many more, "How to learn from Anki videos" your channel needs, but I'll acknowledge that you're re-iterating on your previous details finer and finer.
You're getting succinct, my good man!
One day, the End of Anki will come to the channel, until then, it do be a big part of my learning.
@@Livakivi Rote learning is often criticised for being an inorganic way of learning. Just *remembering* the material is the demand though. Need any way for it...
part 2 already? i love your videos livakivi, i have been learning a lot form you
As someone who's digging kanji with RTK, I would say the Heisig method certainly works. I covered 1k kanji in 15 days with an average daily study of 3 hours. My kanji level was around N4 level, but if you follow Heisig, you will see most of the kanji you have never seen before anyway. How I did it, was that I see the English meaning, then write the kanji. Daily reviews around 300-400 reviews. I took a test to see my recognition level, and out of 1000, I missed 67, around 93.9% which is good considering the short time to reach it. Of course, the road is still long for me. Knowing the kanji won't get you a good Japanese after all, just like learning alphabet won't guarantee your English skill.
Could you please suggest me what is heising method and tell me the process... I am literally dying for kanji help me
@@rapoluchandana8955 Heisig is a method to remember the kanji with its meaning. You can Google it. The idea is to link a simpler kanji with an English keyword, then make up a story of that kanji. More complex kanji will have another story from the simpler one.
I'll give example, 匕 (spoon) and 日 (day, sun). 旨 (delicious), so the story is like "in the hot sunny day, a spoonful of SUNday ice-cream is very delicious"
月, moon but in a radical, it can also mean meat (it's a radical of 肉). So 脂 (fat) i make story "fat is the most delicious part of meat".
As you can see, more complex kanji is formed from simpler one, and thus heisig method is just learning the kanji from simpler to complex. The order of JLPT kanji is geared towards the common kanji first, so you see the complex 議 (deliberation) before learning 我 (self), though you might have learned 言(say) and 羊 (sheep). So in heisig, my story is "if I put the lamb 羊 of God above myself 我, i will be righteous 義". So, all those debate 議 are sayings 言 to find the righteous 義 thing. Also, in ancient time, people make sacrifice 犠 of cow 牛 to be righteous 義.
You get the idea. There are several sites to find the heisig order. Use the anki to practice everyday for space repetition method. Write the kanji to force your brain to give output for faster memorize.
Finally, try to assign a vocabulary for each kunyomi and onyomi for the reading part. Heisig skip this part because it focus on you remember the kanji and meaning first. And thus after completing all kanji, you will have strange feeling of can understand kanji but can't read it. When I see 会議 (conference), what I saw was 会 (meeting) + 議 (deliberation) so a place to do debates? Later on I learn it read kaigi かいぎ. Fun facts, this is what's happening with Chinese students learning Japanese. That's how they excel at kanji but suck at speaking.
@@jonathanosnar7141 In the book Heisig specifically tells you not to think of an animal sacrifice for 犠 because he doesn't want you to confuse it for another later one. One I haven't gotten to yet because I'm only 800 in.
I should definitely try to up my per day because you're the second person i've heard to do 1k in two weeks. I spend like multiple minutes thinking of each card's story
Today I made it to 2k learned words on the Core 2k/6k deck!
omedetou!
Today after almost 2 years i finally reviewed every word in the deck and i've reached over 5000 "mature" cards 😀.
Nice!
I use different deck now, one that contains a bit less than 1k words, but also contains some grammar tips and stuff like that. Love it so far. Will get into Core2k once I'm done with this
One thing I found when using Anki is that I didn't need to worry so much about always remembering every kanji reading perfectly in the beginning. After I saw words and kanji in context during immersion, I started to easily be able to recall kanji readings better than just failing the same card over and over again. I would try to remember readings, but as long as I got the translation correct I would pass the card. When trying to remember the readings as a beginner, it would take hours trying to remember both English and Japanese words for every kanji. It was just to much information to remember early on so I just focused mostly on understanding the meaning first and that helped a lot.
Thank you so much for making this video. I realized that I was using the wrong 2k/6k deck the whole time, where the words were in a really random order. I now started over with the deck you linked in the description and it is so much better!
For me it helped learning kanji separately to anki so words make more sense rather than arbitrary simbols
Thank you for uploading part 2 so quickly!
I'm glad to see that my Anki cards and settings are already very close to your recommendations
Having the word and the example sentence on the front is a good tip. I like to use the sentence as a fail-safe if I need more context.
I didn't expect the next video to come so soon xD
And I don't know why I watch a video about the Core 2k/6k deck when I don't even learn Japanese xD
But the videos are always so motivating and nice to watch :D
Yes these videos are motivating and nice to watch. I keep telling myself I need to study. And I never do 😅
your channel is insanely underrated
I have already made a playlist to watch them when i ll have the time but with no doubt they will be great, thanks for the videos and have a great day
Personally I had a lot of trouble memorizing words from i+1 sentences at the beginning. I couldn't figure out how people were spending so little time memorizing so many cards per day as memorising the words was really hard for me. What I had to do (I had already gone through RRTK) was to create stories in order to help me memorize the word. For example if we take the word 完璧 in the tranlsation field I would also add a story like this:
(perfect + sphere) The perfect かんping is somewhere in Japan to play FFX and try to complete the sphere grid of the characters eating ぺきng duck! Absolutely PERFECT scenario!
I've seen other people explaining how they make Anki cards but I honestly don't now how they manage to memorize these words without making stories...
By the way great video, I subscribed and can't wait to watch more and follow your progress!
Another amazing video! Once I get to the 2K/6K deck I'll use your advice to its fullest. Thank you.
I just finished a 600+ word n5 deck, I really enjoyed learning a new word and then hearing it in anime or other japanese media. Anyways moving to a 6k deck
the idea of sentences on the front of the 2k/6k is so good i’m not sure how i never thought of it! i retain vocab far better from my sentence mining deck so why not try it out for the vocab deck as well
double video is amazing great work
I've been wanting to switch to Vocab cards for a while now for my mining deck and your idea of just having both on the front is definitely what I'm going to now. That's perfect for me
Thank you for your videos! I fell inspired every time you upload new language learning content!
I also wold like to hear your opinion on reverse anki cards. Like cards with meaning on a front and reading/kanji on a back. They are extremly easy to set up and I have been using them for a while, but I havn't seen a lot of mentioning of this method in language learning community
They're output/production cards. They train your recall/output ability for those words, but if you don't focus on immediate output ability, then they don't provide much value in my experience.
If you're need to/want to output early, and if they're common words, then they can be helpful.
Thanks for showing how to edit the card template for putting the sentance on the front. It really helps.
When I started using anki, I decided that I wanted to focus on recognizing words through hiragana. Since I heavily read and write kanji, I realized that whenever I saw a word in hiragana (for college) it became really difficult. So I have a bunch of decks that are kanji on one side and the other side is the reading in hiragana along with the english translation next to it (for example: 水/みず - water) and vice versa, except I keep the translation on the back side (so for example: みず/水 - Water) but I never thought about having sentences with highlighted words- that’s definitely an idea I want to incorporate next!
2 livakivi vids in a row? i have been blessed
This is an exceptional overview of Anki. Thanks!
I am learning Chinese but I am a complete beginner, even I know a variety of Kanjis. I used to study through Anki but I found it boring then I downloaded Quizlet and I found it way better, it has a friendly interface and you can vary that you will study the cards. I use now Duolingo to learn basic things and it's helping me a lot. Furthermore, I make my own cards of what I learn from Duolingo. I usually go over a lesson more than once in order to intake better the information.
Great video! I installed anki and this deck a year ago but I didn't touch it yet lol now, I'll make my way up until I learn many vocabs. 😁
Absolute Chad for posting part 2 this early
I'm getting very inspired by these videos and want to start learning Japanese again soon, but at the moment I use anki to remember tables, terms and stuff for my exam in the summer, so learning Japanese on top of that would just kill me.
Continue making videos! Hope you'll get big in the future. Maybe try laking not only about Anki but more about other stuff about learning language.
Love watching your channel grow
So kind of you to teach us that and to remind people that "Again" is not school and just means Again, not Failure
Thank the author of the channel for making this beautiful and useful video for us! Many people are embarrassed to speak a foreign language if they have no speaking skills. People are afraid to hear criticism from others in their address. It all comes from having a psychological complex - to make a mistake. But, after all, he who does nothing is not wrong! In Yuriy Ivantsiv's workshop "Polyglot Notes. Practical tips for learning foreign language" states that we need to talk as much as possible: with yourself, with the mirror, with inanimate objects, with children and with pets. Find an interlocutor in real life or online. Talk without shyness. People won't care how you speak. They understand that you are a foreigner, as long as they understand you. They may even acknowledge your progress in their language and compliment you. However, always be prepared for criticism of your speaking skills. If you have the will to speak, you will gain an interesting interlocutor to consolidate your knowledge. Everyone is strewn with mistakes - don't be afraid to learn from them. As the Latin wisdom says, "walk and thou shalt not go astray". In the book "Polyglot Notes" by YuriyIvantsiv an entire chapter is devoted to the development of spoken language. Here you will find many useful tips and each student can choose a technique that suits him or her best! I wish you all the best of luck in your language learning!
Man your videos are insanely helpful I probably would have given up on learning by now if it wasn't for your super helpful videos!
awesome video, once again :) super excited for the sentence mining/immersion video, as immersion's always been one of those "am i even doing this right" type of things. and don't even get me started on sentence mining
repeating the word of a sentence out loud just after heaeing it is known as shadowing and is actually a good way to train pronunciation
(so you need at least the sentence audio or the word audio)
Shadowing requires you to listen to the recording of your own pronunciation generally, if you don't, you could be saying it subtly wrong without even realizing it.
I think only having the Audio in the front is better, I relate more on sounds and so I can watch more anime with no subtitles at all
Nice video, man! Keep it up!
It would be nice to have a vídeo that shows me how to actually use Anki, without the advanced parts, just the first lesson of the app, nothing too deep.
For the sentence, I try to read and understand it the first time I see the card, and also if it's been a long while since I last saw it (it does not influence whether I hit again good easy etc. though)
Doing it more often would be pointless, as I get to a point where I don't have to actually try to understand the sentence because I just remember what it means.
I also set the color of the english translation to like #1F1F1F so it's super faded otherwise my eyes get drawn to it before I finish understanding the japanese sentence
Also I really don't see the point of sentence cards, being able to read sentences is REALLY not something you should learn through SRS, just maybe like memorizing really common sentences.
Instead of seeing the same sentence 10 times (over like a month) I'd rather see 10 different sentences one time, e.g. by watching a few minutes of anime and making an effort to read and understand every sentence.
(I'm talking specifically about trying to understand the entire sentence rather than vocab cards that give you a sentence as a clue)
@@tcoren1 I also don't really use sentence cards for the sake of sentences, but just for the sake of learning words through my immersion, like I demonstrated in the video at 5:45
That being said, I can see some value in sentence cards for memorizing grammar points, as in my experience, when you take stuff like ～ないわけに（は）いかない; ～ずにはいられない; ～ないではいられない in the vocabulary card format, it just becomes hell.
I love your videos, hope you talk more about motivation, art and other stuff too, like you did before ;u;
I might make Part 5 as the final episode for now, where I talk a bit more about things like that.
About how you do the cards on Anki, the way I'm doing is reading as much of the card as possible.
If it's a vocabulary card I always read the phrase that comes along with the word. Don't this helps to remember instead of just paying attention to the word in isolation? Also, doing this I get a bit of experience "reading". Only downside if that if you don't read extra outside Anki you may decorate the phrases and only remember the meanings on the context of those phrases... risky but a worth risk.
Decks with sound I also try to play the sound at least two times.
I read the word/phrase, play the sound, read it again, play the sound one last time.
This is also risky, maybe this is the reason it made me almost give up in during me second semester studying. When I look at the complete statistics now on Anki I can see that during those times I started taking 3 longer weekly to do the reviews with an increase of only 10-20% more cards reviewed. This almost destroyed me, I got that feeling of doing too much and learning too little. Now that I'm full on back and look at the statistics again and I see that I'm studying the same amount or a bit more weekly but I'm doing 3 times more cards, because now know a few words and can read the phrases much faster.
In the end you have to adjust to what works for you.
How? I can only wish you luck, but stay around and less persevere.
But now something I want to say...
I also use the "hard" and "easy" buttons, because I simple can't understand and accept how some of you can "learn" so many cards so fast. I want to extract the most from each deck, so if I don't feel that I can instantly recognize a word, but don't have much trouble recognizing it and feel that the meaning is well understood than I mark it as "good", if not, if I feel that I still have trouble understanding it, that doesn't feel natural, that I need to think a bit too much I mark it was "hard". Only cards that feel natural to identify and understand I mark as "easy" to push their reviews further and give space to the other words I still need more time to learn.
Seriously, I really don't believe people saying that they learned hundreds and thousands of words just because they finished a deck. Did they really learned all those words? Do they really remember those words? I doubt.
I personally don't use Anki. I prefer reading a book because the words are part of the story. You will also get natural spaced repetition because the words repeat themselves in the book.
Doing reading with dictionary lookups also works instead of Anki, in fact, its the main thing I'd suggest for someone who doesn't like Anki. Although, you definitely need to do TONS of reading for that, and some people don't like reading at a beginner level, or don't like reading at all.
The way I generally do my reviews is very similar to yours but a have a key difference: I don't try to remember the pronunciation of the card, only the meaning, the reason is that I gonna have tons and tons of input from audio and I don't see the advantage to try and keep the sound in my read when I will already hear that word a lot
I am also taking around 10 words per day now, doing a little over 25~30 minutes of Anki every day
I know this is so late but I thought about this on my core 2k. Is this a good idea?
Matt (from Matt vs Japan) who's has reached native-like fluency used/uses it a lot. I'm referring to him as you've mentioned his name quite a few times in your videos. Anyway. I think "cloze delition" is something worth looking into. That could be the topic of a future UA-cam video.....
saw this vid in december of 2021, i now know 1000 plus kanji and am still using the deck
Time traveler gang
@@Livakivi meant the other video lol
@@TimelessXen Still learning? And if yes how did you memorise kanji.
@@johnmthembu Im at 4k anki cards known now, how did I memorize? Just do the core 2k/6k deck, also sorry for getting back so long i didnt see this. memorizing kanji isnt as hard as you think, just do 8 new words a day, your brain has pattern recogoniztion, you will be able to remember them trust
@@johnmthembu also, ive never missed a day of anki, and tbh, if you dont have adhd it should be kinda easy for you to knock it out, i got adhd and it takes me all day sometimes if i procrastinate, but recently i get up in the morning and do anki first thing and crank it out and that seems to help
I love your videos !!!
sheesh, u uploaded pretty fast
what are your thoughts on Heisig's RTK? Some people says you need to work with Heisig's RTK while using anki for knowing the story behind the kanji.
Is there any way to get the sentence before clicking for the answer? It’s really frustrating learning a kanji that has multiple meanings, but I have no context to go off of. For instance, 上がる can mean to raise or improve, but it can also mean stage fright. How am I supposed to know which without seeing it in a sentence first?
Edit: nvm found my answer at 6:18, this will be a life saver for me 😂
"I usually do as many reviews as I can the moment I wake up"
The time of the day with the most reviews is 12 PM to 1 PM
*hmm*
😎
I've just finished rtk 2200 in
Thanks a lot from Brazil! Keep up the good work, you are a inpiration.
Huge thanks! I wish you luck on your journey!
Great video as always, Livakivi. There were some very useful tips on Anki here that I wish I knew sooner. I am looking forward to the next two videos in the series!
Sorry if you have already addressed this in one of your other videos, but do you think it is more beneficial to use and complete a larger deck such as core 6k (or even bigger like core 10k or 30k) before switching over to learning any/all new vocabulary from immersion/sentence mining so that the input is more comprehensible? Or do you think it might be better to start with a smaller deck, for example core 1k or 2k, and getting into immersion/sentence mining for new vocabulary sooner? I have seen people supporting both sides, but I am not really sure myself which is better.
I have been using the core 2.3k deck by Anacreon (which is based on iKnow's core 6k deck) for a little over a month now, and have learnt around 40% of the cards so far. However, I am starting to wonder if ~2k words will really be enough before I switch over to making my own cards with sentence mining, or if I should be using a larger deck like you did.
Imo 10k to 30k is an overkill. I started sentence mining at 6k, and I easily could have started earlier, even at around 3k to 4k probably. Some people start at 2k, which is like the minimum I'd recommend. You can start after at 2.3k, the benefit is that you start immersion earlier, but you're going to mine thousands of words that you'd get from most frequency based premade vocab decks. It's really up to you, and what you can stay more consistent with. If you're hyped to sentence mine, go for it, but if you find it tedious for now, you can just keep on taking premade cards and immersing on the side to build your foundation a bit more.
Keep it up Dogeman!
3:49 Noo not that image 😭😭. I keep forgetting that card, and the when I turn the card, this dude is just looking at me like. 'Yeah you don't know this word do you?'
Hi! If I read just a word and don't know the meaning but when I read a whole sentence with the word and because of it I know the meaning, then should I hit the button "good" or "again"? Btw. thank you for great tutorial!
Yay part 2 that was quick haha
I'm guessing the only thing holding me back is myself...
I know how terrible I am at getting myself to read source material and reading for tests.
To put it short: I like the idea, but I don't like the premise of studying, lmao 😅
About the "again" and "good" buttons, maybe I missed, but did you changed some setting to only show those two buttons?
Its the Migaku anki addon: ankiweb.net/shared/info/1846879528
I'm tired of not remembering the reading of the words, I multiplied the card by 4, only one with vanila 2k/6k format, each card now has 4 variants, the word vanilla format, the audio and furigana only in the front format, the sentence format, and the sentence audio in front format
fire vid
Hi, what's your take on Anki cloze deletion feature? Any luck you could release a video about it? Great video btw as always. I smashed the like button.
I unfortunately haven't really heard much about it nor tried it out. And thanks!
that was quick!
Lajk w ciemno, as we say it "Like before watching"
I started learning Japanese this month, and I need help knowing if I should start with these 2k/6k decks on Anki, or start with my own cards with words I learned.
You can start making your own cards from day one, but I honestly recommend using a premade deck such as the Core 2.3k from the description and then move on to making your own cards through sentence mining. It might be a bit too time consuming to make cards for all these extremely common words, or sentence mining might be a bit too hard at first, but its up to you, the important part is that you're constantly increasing your vocabulary.
I often wonder whether I do something wrong when reviewing my cards. I consistently took 10 new cards for almost a year and Anki still only takes me maximum 30min a day (i have to review about 80 cards a day). How did you pile up so many cards so early on and had to review for about an hour a day? Is it perhaps because you used to use the easy/hard buttons in the beginning and therefore change the ease factor?
When will part 3 be released?
Probably within march!
@@Livakivi thanks mate, I’m about to start the next 2 parts in my own journey but it all seems very overwhelming ! Looking forward for your guidance
So I read that the CORE decks use the most common words from newspapers back until the 80s. SInce reading newspaper is not really what I wanna do, should I still follow with it? I have now learned about 800 cards in the 2k/6k deck.
While using the deck I'm finding it easy to memorize the characters and the meaning but not the pronunciation. Does anybody have any tips on how to remember the actually pronunciation easier
heya! a lot of this has been really useful, just a question though about starting off with the 2k/6k deck. is it supposed to be really really tough to get the readings down for each vocab? the meaning i can get relatively consistently but i've spent 30 minutes or so today on just 15 words trying to get the reading, i feel like i'm kind of forcing things or that I'm doing something wrong. just at the point where i dont think i can complete a review fully
Those words are most likely new. It can be pretty hard at first, yes, it gets easier the more comfortable you get with the words as you'll be able to predict their readings over time. Reducing number of new cards per day can help when its getting too difficult, and immersion/reading practice can help too.
Also, don't be TOO strict with the reviews too, sometimes getting 1 letter wrong in the word isn't the end of the world, especially if you felt like you'd get it right the next time. Don't get too relaxed to the point you're hitting "Good" even if you know you got it completely wrong, but if you're extremely strict, its not the best either.
@@Livakivi Alright I'll try to adjust things a bit, really appreciate it!
I appreciate it a lot, my Baltic neighbor
whats the difference between core2k and core 2k/6k deck?
Thank you
What is that clocked hours extension used called? I have seen u use it in previous video and I want to download it
TogglTrack
should you learn Hiragana and Katakana before using Anki?
At the risk of sounding repetitive but just to make sure
Should I literally recall the translation in English or just visualize it
I personally think recalling the reading is more important. I often don't recall the exact English word into my conscious, but I feel like I know the meaning just from intuition or just via the context if I made the card myself.
Thanks
wow that was fast :D
I cant find the collection media folder in that location u mentioned in the guide
Hey again 🖐 I’ve been wondering if you can make a video on (Kanji learning) I just learn kanji from vocabulary but I don’t want it to be a bad habit when I need to understand that kanji by itself.Any suggestions? Thanks before hand 😊
I'll talk a bit more about kanji in part 3!
Does somebody know a similiar deck to 2k/6k for learning chinese
Idk where else to ask this question and I haven't been able to find one
Question. What were your anki deck options, seems like anki worked for you I just want a setup that seems to have proven to work :)
nvm just needed to watch preivous video
Umm, yeah! I do have a question, which core 2k/6k deck should I use? The first one linked in this video's description or the 2md one? (The alternative one with pitch accents and stroke order) and so that I'm sure I have the right deck, maybe you could tell me what was your first card? Thank you!
It's up to you, those two should be equivalent but one just has pitch accent graphs for the words which can be useful. There's also the Core 2.3k deck which only has 2300 cards, which is shortened so you'd start sentence mining earlier, but at the end of the day, the cards are the same, but maybe in a slightly different order.
Imo the order doesn't matter that much if you're in it for the long term, they're all more or less equal as they're all very common words anyway. You can't go wrong with any of them if you're going for fluency over the long term.
I don't remember what the first word was, but it might have been 一つ or 一.
@@Livakivi Thanks man! That's so helpful, and yeah! I'm committed and taking you as a role model. Geat job! ❤
So if i “complete” the 2k/6k deck, i Will have reached N2 in my vocab?