I’ve been using Anki for just about three weeks now (the first card was added to Anki on Sunday 18 April 2010, though I used Mnemosyne for one day before that), so it looks like a good time to review my progress. According to Anki, I’ve seen 97 total kanji, and just under 300 vocabulary cards. I’ve seen all the grade 1 kanji, 14 from grade 2, and a few scattered about.
Thirty kanji a week, more or less, will get me through the jouyou kanji in 64 weeks, which is a little slower than I’d like. However, I haven’t actually been doing as many new cards each day as I ought, owing to my laziness–I just didn’t enter enough cards often enough. I suppose it wasn’t entirely laziness, though, since a part of that reason was that I was still trying to work out how to structure my cards. I’ve got that pretty much worked out for now, so I’ll be going with what I have–the perfect is the enemy of the good, as Voltaire said. I’ll try to keep at least a couple of days ahead with entering cards. If I can keep it up, I have a pretty good chance of getting through the jouyou kanji in a year.
The 300 vocabulary cards are a mixture of kanji compounds, words represented by single kanji, and words (mostly? entirely?) from my textbook written in kana. I’m replacing the kana words with kanji as I learn them, but I judge that it’s worthwhile to learn them even without the kanji, since it will make it easier to remember them when I do learn the component kanji.
I still haven’t continued with grammar, but I have high hopes that I can force myself through a bit more of Adventures in Japanese over the next few days, if only so I can be through with it and move on to better books. As for how well I actually know the kanji cards I’ve seen: I know the meanings pretty clearly for all of them, and I can write nearly all of them with little to no trouble (prompted by meanings and readings). I still have some trouble with the readings, which I expect to continue, but I pretty much know the readings for the older kanji, so I assume that I will eventually learn the readings for all of the kanji I’m studying.
Despite the difficulty I’ve been having remembering readings, I’m quite impressed by the results I’ve gotten using Anki. Although I do end up failing reading cards over and over (and over…) again, eventually, the reading sticks well enough to get me through a few days. And then, after recalling it and seeing it again, I’m good for a little longer… indeed, spaced repetition works. It’s like magic–without much specific effort on my part, I go from not knowing the reading to knowing it a little to knowing it pretty well. Meanings are easier still, but the same process is happening–just faster.
For a while I’ve been considering whether I ought to forgo learning the reading, as Heisig suggests. I have, at length, decided that I will carry on learning readings along with the meanings. It’s my understanding, from seeing others talking about using Remembering the Kanji, that I’m not learning that much more slowly than people using RTK1, with the benefit that I know the readings and a bit of vocabulary, too.
In summary, I’m satisfied with my current methods. I need to be sure I input enough cards, but if I hold up my end then I think that Anki will help me to learn well enough. It’s my hope that I can learn something like 40 kanji and 100 vocabulary each week, which should work out to a fairly impressive amount of Japanese at the end of a year of study. I hope to have something to say about my progress with grammar next time.
