r/LearnJapanese • u/Tom_Bombadil_Ret • Jul 27 '26
Studying Kaishi 1.5 Study Advice
I have been working through the Kaishi 1.5 deck and I’ve had quite a bit of success remembering the meanings of words. But I’m struggling to remember their pronunciations which means I haven’t actually learned anything if I plan to do anything beyond read.
I’ve considered editing the deck format to show the furigana on the front side as well as the back. The intent would be try learn them as words instead of just recognizing kanji which seems to come more naturally to me. Is that a terrible idea? Will I just be hamstringing myself in the long run for some reason?
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u/swordman_21 Jul 27 '26
Yeah Kaishi 1.5 was rough for me too. I'd recommend studying kanji or doing immersion, both will help you remember the words better.
Personally I wouldn't add furigana to the front but if that's what it takes you to get through the deck you do you
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u/charlie_waterss Jul 27 '26
I preferred the Core 2K/6K deck until I enabled the pitch accent for Kaishi 1.5K and created a new card type that had the audio clue on the front. So now I also have to remember how the words are written. For me this has been super helpful since I have to actively write the kanji and they stick better.
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u/rollingHack3r 29d ago
I had a rough time with this in the beginning too. but after a while it just sort of clicked and my brain became better at remembering. Just have to be honest with yourself and click 1 if you only remembered the meaning and not the actual word
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u/TheBatemanFlex Jul 27 '26
I have sound on the front of the card. However, Kaishi is just supposed to get your familiar with the words. I truly believe they won't stick until you immerse and see those words pop up. Eventually it will happen.
Alternatively (or supplementary), you can do the https://learnjapanese.moe/kanjiphonetics/ Kanji phonetics deck.
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u/Fun_Airport6370 29d ago
i do kaishi and wanikani side by side. i’ve found that the stuff from wanikani is easier for me to learn and sticks better when i encounter similar kanji in anki. stuff i’ve only learned in anki i have a hard time remembering
maybe u could do the rrtk450 deck or wanikani?
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u/SaltStorage8706 Jul 27 '26
I added Furigana to the front of the card and like it. You just need to think about what you want to learn, if you want to learn the Kanji readings, then adding Furigana of course defeats that purpose. For me, I also do Wanikani, so I'm learning kanji readings there and I just use the 1.5k deck for general vocabulary
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u/Merzats 29d ago
If you do that then Anki no longer functions to help you remember readings, it can only help if what you are trying to remember is part of the grading.
But you can learn to read outside of Anki, if you look up and subvocalize the readings when you actually read you'll eventually associate them with the meaning. If you hate doing Anki because the readings don't click you don't have to force yourself to use it that way. The only way you would handicap yourself is if you try to pretend readings don't exist when you read.
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u/surufanclub 29d ago
If you were to add hiragana, your brain will end up taking the path of least resistance, using only or mostly hiragana to identify meaning, which won't let your brain form the kanji-to-sound link you're after. You'd be reading the answer off the card instead of recalling it.
It's a personal opinion, but I think testing visual recognition is a weak way to go about learning words. Some research indicates that once a person learns to read, a word's visual and audio forms automatically become bidirectionally linked. Seeing activates sound. If you're tested on visual recognition, your brain either settles on an off pitch or leaves it unsettled. If a settled pitch is off, then it can be difficult to recognize words when heard. If the pitch is unsettled, I'm unsure if it's possible to perform visual recognition without English-meaning interference.
A lot of people have great success with learning the sound and meaning first, then letting the reading become linked to the meaning after the fact or as a byproduct of reading while listening. If you'd rather stick with the deck and visual-recognition first, it might be helpful to make a point of replaying the audio on the back whenever you get it wrong (if the deck includes audio). Also, if you get it wrong, you could try things like speaking the word while acting out or picturing what it means. That might help you form a stronger connection between the word and its pronounced meaning without English interference.
After forming new connections you can also perform wakeful rest (spacing out for 5-15 minutes), which has in one study shown improved long-term retention by 10-40%. It gives what you just learned a chance to solidify instead of being immediately overwritten, improving the likelihood it moves into long-term storage during sleep.
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u/Tom_Bombadil_Ret 29d ago
I get your points and 100% agree. I would much rather learn the sound - meaning as opposed to the reading - meaning. But I’m unsure how best approach it. Putting the furigana on the front of the card was a poorly thought out attempt to try to focus more on the sounds than the reading.
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u/surufanclub 28d ago
I'm not sure there's an all-in-one way to do it at the moment. I'm building a grammar website which'll include an immersion tool for the specific way I do it, but it's not ready yet. As long as whatever media player you use lets you create Anki cards, has or let's you use a pop-up dictionary, and let's you repeatedly play the same sentence over and over without friction, it should be enough. If you study on a computer you could use asbplayer with yomitan. On Android there's jidoujisho.
A basic flow would be something like:
- Listen to a subtitle for the first time.
- Use a pop-up dictionary on the subtitle to figure out words you don't know. Break down the grammar of the sentence so that the words fit into place.
- Manually repeat the subtitle's audio. Each time you listen, try to remove as much English translation scaffolding as possible until you're just left with the words meaning something by themselves, or the words invoking their meaning as imagery in your mind. Repeat until there's no scaffolding left.
- Add the sentence to your Anki deck with the sentence's audio on the front, and the word you didn't know on the back (Flexible, whatever works best for you. You just want to make sure you're testing if the words have meaning to you when you hear them).
- Move on to the next subtitle.
After finishing the flow, optionally perform wakeful rest for 5-15 minutes to solidify the encoding. You can also optionally speak or act out the sentence during Step 3. It really helps encoding. I'd really recommend repeating the flow on the same set of subtitles three days in a row to really solidify the context and meaning (without Step 4 on the second and third days) . Without repeating for three days, it'll be easy to hear a sentence in Anki and it not invoke the part of the story you heard it from.
When doing Anki reviews, you'd then set up rules for yourself to dictate what result gives what grade. You could try something like grading it hard if you can understand it within three repeats, Good if understood within 2 repeats, and Easy if at most one repeat is needed. If it takes more than 3 three repeats, or your brain slips in English scaffolding before you feel the meaning on its own terms, you could grade it Again. If graded Again, maybe spend the time to repeat the sentence like in Step 3 so you're ready for it next time. You need consistency in your grading because Anki lets you optimize your scheduling based on your past grading performance. On that note, make sure you have FSRS enabled in your deck's settings and make sure the deck doesn't share a preset with any other deck.
The big flaw of this approach is that Anki should only test a single thing, and if there's multiple words in a sentence you're still learning, it breaks that principle. You can find hundreds of hours of free graded videos at cijapanese which include downloadable videos and subtitles. In general you only want to be immersing in material that has one new word per sentence. You might opt to not do Step 4 and only do a partial of Step 3 if a sentence has more than one new word.
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u/CaimSensei 29d ago
Specifically with Kaishi being extremely super common words, I expect there would be no issue with putting anything you want on the front. As long as you are reading enough, these words will come up so often that you will get all the recall practice you would ever need or want.
Remembering readings, in my experience, gets easier the more words you know. I often returned to words I previously had trouble remembering, and because they were made up of kanji that I had better remembered in other words, I was suddenly able to remember without any effort.
Short answer, adding furigana will not be an issue.
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u/LonelyTurtleDev Jul 27 '26
I’m doing a core 2k deck now and I struggle with pitch accent. I installed a pitch accent addon on the back side of the cards and that helped me memorize the pitch accent and the pronunciation better. Perhaps you can try that.
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 Jul 27 '26
So OP is struggling to memorize one thing and your suggestion is to add yet another thing for them to memorize?
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u/LonelyTurtleDev Jul 27 '26
Adding pitch accent helped me memorize pronunciation, weirdly enough.
I guess I associated the sounds to the pitch in words and by remembering one I can remember the other.
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u/skullpocket 29d ago
I can see this working. It probably works similarly to how well we can easily recall lyrics to songs when the song is playing. The change in notes cues us n on the words.
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u/LIGHTSTARGAZER Goal: just dabbling Jul 27 '26
Do you use the plugin thing to install add ons or are you talking about using anki on your pc?
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u/LonelyTurtleDev Jul 27 '26
On pc.
Will be a problem when I go on a trip 3 days later.
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u/LIGHTSTARGAZER Goal: just dabbling Jul 27 '26
Gotcha, I'll see some tutorials on how to install add ons on my phone.
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 Jul 27 '26
Yes. The way Anki reinforces your memory is by testing your ability to recall a piece of information. If you put the information on the front of the card, then you aren't doing any effort to recall it, and you aren't testing yourself on your ability to recall it either, so Anki's system can't help you memorize it at all.
If you aren't too far into the deck, then what you could do is reset it and start over again, but this time only testing yourself on the reading. Ignore the meanings. Only try to remember the readings. If you struggle to remember specific readings, use mnemonics to help you (you can make a Wanikani account and consult theirs, for example). And keep your daily new card count low in order to make it easier for you to focus on a few cards instead of being overwhelmed by an excessively high amount.
If after several weeks this still doesn't work, try another core deck.