work smarter, not harder
I had hit a road block in studying kanji for Japanese. The beginning had gone well, but as I had gotten through the first few hundred the number of reviews in Anki started increasing. Then when I missed a couple days I opened Anki to see that I had almost 200 due. Not exactly motivating.
However, after several weeks of half-heartedly trying to catch up and succeeding temporarily, but not really getting back into the habit, I reached a valley where I felt that I would never learn Japanese.
The good part was, even though I wasn't learning kanji, I was watching J-doramas and browsing around the Reviewing the Kanji forum every so often.
Last night on the forum I read about other people's struggles with Anki reviews piling up, and realized that I had been taking way too much time. I had been trying to improve my writing and was spending sometimes 2-3 minutes writing out the newer kanji. This made my sets really long and made the whole review process feel interminably long.
Advice from forum members was to not write but just go through the cards, and not to spend too much time rating your performance on each one. The important thing is to keep going. Makes sense to me! Although I think I may still write them out, but just one or two times.
I also downloaded an Anki plugin called AnkiWarrior. It's a little video game type add-on designed to make reviews seem more fun/addicting. The scenario is that you are "conquering" Japanese towns starting from the smallest population size on up. With every card you conquer or convert a certain number of people in that town. Once you've gotten everyone you move on to the next town/city. The last one is Tokyo of course, when you've finished card # 3007. I played a bit with it and it's no Bejeweled but it does make it a bit more fun :)
The other thing I found was a technique called Reading/Listening. The whole premise is that you can reach fluency through a combination of parallel reading in the 2nd/your native language, and listening to the audio in the 2nd language. I downloaded the materials for Le Petit Prince and we'll see how that goes!
However, after several weeks of half-heartedly trying to catch up and succeeding temporarily, but not really getting back into the habit, I reached a valley where I felt that I would never learn Japanese.
The good part was, even though I wasn't learning kanji, I was watching J-doramas and browsing around the Reviewing the Kanji forum every so often.
Last night on the forum I read about other people's struggles with Anki reviews piling up, and realized that I had been taking way too much time. I had been trying to improve my writing and was spending sometimes 2-3 minutes writing out the newer kanji. This made my sets really long and made the whole review process feel interminably long.
Advice from forum members was to not write but just go through the cards, and not to spend too much time rating your performance on each one. The important thing is to keep going. Makes sense to me! Although I think I may still write them out, but just one or two times.
I also downloaded an Anki plugin called AnkiWarrior. It's a little video game type add-on designed to make reviews seem more fun/addicting. The scenario is that you are "conquering" Japanese towns starting from the smallest population size on up. With every card you conquer or convert a certain number of people in that town. Once you've gotten everyone you move on to the next town/city. The last one is Tokyo of course, when you've finished card # 3007. I played a bit with it and it's no Bejeweled but it does make it a bit more fun :)
The other thing I found was a technique called Reading/Listening. The whole premise is that you can reach fluency through a combination of parallel reading in the 2nd/your native language, and listening to the audio in the 2nd language. I downloaded the materials for Le Petit Prince and we'll see how that goes!
