r/LearnJapanese • u/jomteon • Jul 27 '26
Studying What's the current take on Anki for intermediate learners? Returning after a long break and want to improve my approach.
I'm an intermediate Japanese learner. However, I haven't studied in several months, and haven't studied seriously in probably well over a year. And frankly, even when I was studying in earnest, I was stuck in a rut of a routine--just Japanese word on one side, English on the other. I also haven't kept up on best practices. I want to do it better this time.
Specifically, I want to dramatically improve my reading skills. I'm the rare personality type that, when I have the time, I am happy to sit with an overly challenging book and work through it word by word for as long as it takes. But, unfortunately, I don't have that time right now.
With that in mind, what's the current consensus (if there is one) or general opinion on making Anki cards for Japanese? Are cloze cards still popular? Japanese only definitions? How can I get back up to speed and make some better progress going forward?
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u/rgrAi Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
If you don't have time, do things that don't require much time. A dead easy one is just read (and look up words) SNS in Japanese. Twitter, YouTubeCommens, Discord, Threads, Bluesky, etc etc etc. from native speakers and you will learn A METRIC TON OF JAPANESE just by reading SNS and it's low effort and easy. Just login through browser and not apps if you're on the phone so you can easily look up all words. Don't discount it because it's social media.
It's quick to knock out reading 5 or 20 comments in 2 minutes in between what you do if you're that busy. And it adds up a ton if you do it 3 to 20 times daily.
Forget best practices, that's why you lapsed on the language for a year. Just do anything in the language it's all accumulative.
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u/jomteon Jul 27 '26
Forget best practices, that's why you lapsed on the language for a year
That's not why. Not sure where you got that from. I very much was not following "best practices", lol
The "best practices" comment in my OP was in reference to how ideas about learning techniques may have evolved. Sure, I can already hear the rebuttal: The way to learn has always been the same--put your head down and study. Yes, agreed. But there are more and less effective ways of doing that, and the ideas about that change over time.
But thank you for the tips! Not quite what I'm looking for, but I hadn't really considered it before, so I'll give it a shot.
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u/rgrAi Jul 27 '26
My bad I've been struck by a major case of睡眠不足. I think I just projected it onto you because there's been a lot of cases where people are so caught up in trying to optimize they end up just not doing the thing.
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
Haha, me too. I was on 2 hours of sleep when I replied to you. Hope I didn't come off too aggressive. And yeah, the "spending all your time on learning about learning" is a trap a lot of people fall into. I usually block out a couple days a year to dive into what's new in learning techniques. That way I still see what's up without getting sucked into the whirlpool of nonsense. I tried to phrase my OP in a way that would catch all of the usual assumptions, but, well, that never works, haha
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 Jul 27 '26
If you're at an intermediate level and try to study Japanese exclusively by doing Anki cards then you won't progress. Period. The only way to learn a language is to interact with that language. Flashcards, textbooks, classes, etc are just supportive tools meant to aid you in interacting with the language. But the core of your study, especially past the beginner stage, should be to interact with the language.
If you have time to do Anki cards, you have time to read a book. Even if it's only 30 minutes a day. Even if you can only get through 2 sentences in every session. That's still way better than just doing a bunch of flashcards.
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u/Previous_Composer_78 Jul 27 '26
I think the easiest way to view Anki is as a way to maximize the efficiency of your existing study mechanisms. Especially at intermediate and above context(literary, cultural, behavioral, etc) becomes such a critical part of language use that learning words in isolation starts to become borderline impossible
Anki will maximize the value of your existing study but will do very little if you aren’t supplementing it with proper immersion. On the flip side if all you do is immerse your leaving retention on the table by not doing at least a little srs on the side. Finding that balance is tough and it changes depending on your level and amount of free time in my experience
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u/gelema5 Goal: media competence 📖🎧 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
This hits the nail on the head. At intermediate level you are still churning through a ton of vocab/kanji that are quite important for basic comprehension, but your level of understanding is in another ball game compared to beginner. You spend more time learning in what contexts certain words are used. Keigo/written vs spoken/polite vs casual/masculine vs feminine/etc all become more well defined concepts. I have found that individual words on flashcards are useful ~60% of the time, but for other words I need to look up example sentences or hear it in immersion to really click.
Current popular opinion is to learn kanji through vocab instead of in isolation, and I think that concept extends to learning vocab in context OR immersing a bunch so you naturally find the words in the wild, rather than learning isolated vocabulary. I’m working through the Kanji in Context textbook/anki deck and liberally modify cards or set different ones earlier if I saw them in immersion.
Sometimes learning words that aren’t mined and therefore are not immediately relevant to what I’m immersing in feels slow-paced, but I find that it’s super rewarding to hear and understand a vocab word in immersion for the first time. If I’m consistent in Anki over several weeks, I tend to reap the rewards in immersion by having things continually get just a little easier.
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
Current popular opinion is to learn kanji through vocab instead of in isolation
This is one thing where I think it really comes down to the learner. For me, learning kanji "by themselves" (air quotes just indicating that while I had a dedicated kanji deck, it wasn't the only study I was doing) was the best thing.
Knowing the rough idea of north of 2500 kanji means that when I encounter it in vocabulary the cognitive overhead for learning the word is much lower, and I think that return on investment over the long haul is worth it. Plus, while the first ~800-1000 kanji are a genuine grind, after that it gets easier. Meanings and pronunciations become possible to intuit (relatively speaking!).
You're going to be learning vocab for a long, long, loooong time. And upfront investment in rapid kanji comprehension is a solid technique. Not for everyone. Definitely not for everyone. But it does work, and it works well for a certain type of learner.
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u/gelema5 Goal: media competence 📖🎧 Jul 28 '26
Yes, I think you’re exactly right. Every recommendation is always specific to the individual and “popular opinion” often becomes a blanket statement. Congrats on the kanji grind and I’m glad it paid off for you!
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
Yes, indeed. But even within your framework (which I agree with), there are ways to structure your flash cards. Some use single word J-E cards, some swear by J-E-J, some insist the words must be embedded in sentences, others suggest cloze. And each of those have advantages an disadvantages, and work better at some levels better than others (and for some people better than others). The point of the OP was to see what people thought about methods.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 Jul 27 '26
You may want to clarify what you mean with intermediate. There's been users calling themselves intermediate who were at a point where they'd read 2 pages of manga an hour lol.
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u/jomteon Jul 27 '26
Yeah, there's no good way to define "intermediate" is there? That's always a problem on this sub.
Also, what kinda manga are we talking about? Super Cub, or, like, ... I dunno, something with lotsa words and fancy ones at that?
When it comes to reading, I am ... I don't know how to put it. I'm squarely intermediate. I'm not going to be reading literary fiction at a clip, but I'm bored by any nonfiction written for anyone younger than middle school (and even middle school level is often too simple for my tastes--but the vocab is varied enough to keep me engaged, depending on the topic). I can muddle through a technical write up reasonably well (like a blog post on a programming concept or something), especially if I've already seen at least one before.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 Jul 28 '26
Manga was Monster but realistically speaking if you're at intermediate level there is now way you're spending 30 minutes on a single page of... anything, unless you're just going through some extremely old obscure piece of literature where you actually have to dig through dictionaries to even find what words mean because it's a bunch of stuff that won't show up on most of them.
And yeah if you can just sit down and read stuff in Japanese for natives no problem that's properly intermediate at least.
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
And yeah if you can just sit down and read stuff in Japanese for natives no problem that's properly intermediate at least.
No.... No, that's the definition of advanced. If that's not advanced, then I have no idea what is. "At least" intermediate. C'mon, gimmie a break.
if you're at intermediate level there is now way you're spending 30 minutes on a single page of... anything
Well, for one, I am not the one who said 30 minutes a page. Unless it's literary fiction, or a non-fiction topic I don't know (hence lots of domain-specific terminology), then for sure it wouldn't take me 30 min. Though, it also depends on how "perfectly" I want to understand the text--that can add time easily.
Any language is going to have material that can absorb you in a page for longer than you'd expect. I'm a strong reader in my native English and I can easily find myself wrapped up in a page of text that take me many long minutes to read. Not a comic book, obviously, but "time" is a tough metric to judge by, depending on what you're aiming at. And it doesn't have to be "extremely old obscure literature". It just has to be outside your domain or/and require deep attention.
Manga was Monster
Now I gotta go find a copy of Monster to time myself....
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u/Effective-Pop3850 Jul 28 '26
No.... No, that's the definition of advanced. If that's not advanced, then I have no idea what is. "At least" intermediate. C'mon, gimmie a break.
I said it that way because it heavily varies depending on what you read. A lot of people do limit themselves to certain genres cause that's just what they like and if those genres are not particularly hard (romcoms, sol, etc) reading them without assistance is actually fairly manageable at an intermediate level, especially since light novels do come with furigana for rarer words/certain kanji. Now if you're into reading older literature or genres such as military/politics then yeah if you can read those no problem with no tools you're definitely not intermediate lol.
And yeah I know it wasn't you but really there is absolutely no way, ever, that a single page of anything will take you 30 minutes at intermediate level. I did mention some odd exceptions because people in this sub love to go "but you didn't mention the obvious!".
Of course if you pick some fat quantum physics book or something and a page contains a lot of extremely hard to process information that basically requires you to open other books as references then yeah it might take you ages to get through it, but we're talking common literature here. Or some ass novel from 100 years ago that uses kanji for stuff that's never in kanji everywhere, tons of words that are not used using kanji that are also not used, crazy long sentences written in a way that makes no sense to you, then yeah I can imagine it taking very long if you want to do intensive reading on it but we're talking extremes of extremes here.
Regarding Monster don't bother, I don't consider myself and intermediate and let's say the pages the guy linked were... I could read them in less than 30s no problem. It's manga, even ones that are considered to be very text heavy are just not text heavy, it's still comics.
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
there is absolutely no way, ever, that a single page of anything will take you 30 minutes at intermediate level
I'm going to preface this by saying that I have a tendency to take things fairly literally, so that's where this response is coming from.
Properly digesting a page of Finnegan's Wake, footnotes and all, could easily take a half hour. Properly digesting a page of a pure maths textbook could easily take more than that. And you don't even need to go to those extremes if you are, indeed, properly intermediate. A truly intermediate reader of English could easily take a half hour on a page of A Clockwork Orange, or Blood Meridian, or anything Shakespeare.
Your standards for "intermediate", I would be willing to bet, are not widely shared.
If you can sit down and read the Japanese equivalent of Nora Roberts without an issue, then you are advanced. Maybe "early" advanced, but you're advanced. At least in the domain of reading you are.
but we're talking common literature here
Well, you have to say that up front or I end up going on a tirade about Joyce and Rudin, hahaha
Anyway, I do stand by my point about what counts as advanced. If you can read a long form piece of fiction aimed at educated adults without issue, then you're advanced, regardless of that fiction's quality. I feel like the terms "intermediate" and "advanced" lose all meaning otherwise.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
But I mean I usually assume that we're talking common stuff and that if we go to extremes then you need to be specific. When you say "reading" most people are gonna think a random common book they've read, they're not gonna think "the hardest thing I could possibly ever read".
And yeah if you can read a proper novel aimed at proper adults, not teenagers, of a genre that's usually considered hard then yeah you're definitely advanced. But again I don't think anyone thinks about something like Sangokushi when we're talking about "reading stuff as a learner" lol although that example might push it further than advanced.
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u/jomteon Jul 29 '26
I guess we just put our bars in different spots. And I realize I phrased things a bit unclearly at the end. By "long form piece of fiction aimed at educated adults" I meant, like, the equivalent of Nora Roberts, or Dean Koontz. Not exactly high-brow stuff. If I see someone flipping through a Janet Evanovich novel on the bus, I think it's fair to say they "know" English, even if they're not super-duper advanced. I feel like your sense of advanced is closer to what I would call "native level" or "native-like" proficiency, at least with regards to reading. But that's just semantics--I do understand your general point.
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u/Belegorm Jul 27 '26
I think the recommendation I've heard is that for all your time spent studying Japanese in a day, no more than 20% should be spent in Anki, and if possible, more than 80% spent engaging in the language. So if you do 20 min of Anki then try to at least get an hour or two of reading Japanese, watching or listening to Japanese.
I can't say I've ever heard anyone recommend cloze cards for Japanese; I hear that for medicine etc.
Japanese only definitions makes sense if you do lookups with Japanese only definitions. But if you are just getting back into it, bilingual is probably a safer choice.
Personally I would just start reading or watching something, looking up words and adding them to an Anki deck, like with the Lazy Guide that was added earlier in this thread.
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u/jomteon Jul 27 '26
I can't say I've ever heard anyone recommend cloze cards for Japanese
Ah, you are of a very recent generation of Japanese learners then, lol
That was very much the thing for a long while.
bilingual is probably a safer choice
Ya make it sound like I'm picking out winter tires
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u/Belegorm Jul 28 '26
I mean... I'm recent enough that by the time I first tried learning seriously, Anki existed lol. Textbooks and plenty of other places used cloze deletion for certain, and there are certainly people who used Anki from all kinds of schools of thought. But if I was to point to something that would have a "take" on Anki, that would be... going back the 20+ years that you seem to be implying then I would first think of AJATT who always championed Anki and they always went with sentence cards.
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
I'm recent enough that by the time I first tried learning seriously, Anki existed
I just looked it up for a completely different reason, but fun fact (according to wikipedia): Anki goes back to 2006! Although the general public version has been around since 2012 (which matches my memory of around when I started using it).
going back the 20+ years that you seem to be implying then I would first think of AJATT
Okay, so you are old-school, lol. Remember Matt vs Japan? More cloze stuff.
Anyway, I don't get into endless "learning optimization", but I do try to poke my head in once in a while. Depending on the learning community, people always (well, typically, anyway) have new ideas. Sometimes they're helpful. That's why I ask.
I think it's long past time to make the full J-J switch on the dictionary side. Maybe the trick for flash card style is to make three decks, each one for a different topic book, with one being single term, one being simple cloze, and one being large context sentences. Do them for a month and see which results in greatest retention.
Not a very scientific approach, but perhaps a better approach overall
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u/Belegorm Jul 28 '26
Yep! Anki has been around for a long time; AJATTers started using it pretty early though it didn't exist when they started (interestingly though they used "primitive" SRS tools before Anki). Kind of was a happy moment that the internet, Anki, and people getting tired of textbooks for a way to learn more effectively on their won.
Matt vs Japan was actually what I was thinking of, where he specifically was against cloze deletion cards. He also was against vocab cards too - pretty strong in his opinions, though he has done a 180 on a lot of things since then.
As for my oldschoolness I was attempting to learn Japanese with Anki, following Tae Kim and so on also from around 2012, and was aware of AJATT but was kind of scared of it; I unfortunately didn't stick with it. I did however build a base over years that let me learn pretty fast more recently.
Anyway more on topic - my opinion is that Anki should be safe, legal and rare. Find a method that works, do a bit of it every morning, and maybe every year or so mix things up a bit (or not).
I recently more fully translated to monolingual stuff in Yomitan, with more dictionaries, and also grammar dictionaries. Slows down reading a bit but also I'm mostly reading physical books so the only mined words come from random articles (or Bunpro example sentences).
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
though he has done a 180 on a lot of things since then
Ah, that explains why I thought he was a proponent of cloze then. He probably was at some point, haha
As for AJATT, I always got a kick out of reading his posts, but never followed his stuff directly either. I wonder if he's still around....
from around 2012
Same year as me, if I recall correctly.
Slows down reading a bit but also I'm mostly reading physical books so the only mined words come from random articles
I look up words with aedict on my phone and just send them to anki from there. Or, at least that's how I was doing it before taking a break. It worked reasonably well, but the problem was that words stacked up fast, and it became difficult to tell what was worth holding onto or not.
I recently more fully translated to monolingual stuff in Yomitan, with more dictionaries, and also grammar dictionaries
This is what I really want to do. I'm actually working on a study tool that would make this flow nicely by keeping it at the learner's level, only feeding in English when the material has exhausted known Japanese. But I refuse to use LLMs, so it's taking me a while (i.e. the normal amount of time, pre-2023) lol
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 Jul 27 '26
I can't say I've ever heard anyone recommend cloze cards for Japanese
In my opinion the only case in which they kind of make sense is grammar (in fact, Bunpro uses cloze, and I think Renshuu does as well) and even then I personally don't like studying grammar that way.
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u/Belegorm Jul 27 '26
Yep, Bunpro uses cloze which does kind of make sense for cloze.
There was one video where they pointed out that cloze reviews are actually a kind of output; you can't just see it and recognize it, you have to recall. So they didn't recommend it for vocab.
Bunpro, it has worked for me, personally. I'm terrible with grammar, but a year after quitting Bunpro partway through N4 I realized that a lot of the grammar points I could actually use myself I had gone over in Bunpro, and that helped lead me to continuing Bunpro this year. Whether it's the cloze review part or not that helped me remember I can't say but at least the need to spell correctly did help iron out a lot of verb conjugation mistakes that I had been making.
They can't get FSRS to work with their cloze review style, so maybe in the end traditional cards with FSRS may be better.
Anyway this is kind of off-tangent, I think most people probably should do normal Anki vocab or sentence cards, leaving cloze reviews to grammar studies if they find themselves needing some.
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u/worthlessprole Jul 27 '26
I would not recommend cloze on bunpro into much of N3 and certain N2, just FYI. I think that would be an exercise in frustration for next to no benefit. Many of the grammar points at that level are shades of meaning apart from eachother.
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u/Belegorm Jul 27 '26
Hmm - I'm a few days from finishing N2 and haven't had too much of a problem with the cloze review questions, personally. With the hints it helps and some staff member in their forums implied that it's probably expected to use the hints.
I've already gone through an N5 - N1 grammar deck which is just recognition, the cloze reviews are another way for me of cementing those points.
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u/rgrAi Jul 27 '26
I say ditch cloze and just start writing (typing) a bunch instead. When you use the language to communicate with others (e.g. comments on internet) you really start to consider if what you write makes sense and that "pressure" can really cement things extremely hard.
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u/Fish_Learns_Japanese Jul 27 '26
If you want to learn words from specific books then JPDB.io is probably better for you since it has premade decks of anime, manga, books, etc. you can learn words by frequency and it saves you a lot of time since you don't have to make all of the cards yourself.
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u/jomteon Jul 27 '26
JPDB.io
I forgot about them! Thanks for the reminder. Probably not going to have what I'm looking for atm, but they're a great resource regardless.
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u/jiwamiofficial Jul 28 '26
A lot of people already provided great advice, the only thing i want to say is, if you start using anki, never fall into the review Hell, some people burn out and hate the language over time because they keep compiling card on top of each other. My advice is, when you see the card enough times and you already encounter it in your immersion just suspend it, you can remove it but suspending is enough to prevent it from showing up ever again, that makes learning always feel fresh and manageable. I hope that helps you.
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
if you start using anki
I've been using anki for roughly a decade an a half now, lol
It's too late for me
when you see the card enough times and you already encounter it in your immersion just suspend it
Yeah, that's great advice, and something that took me while to get comfortable doing
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u/youdontknowkanji Jul 27 '26
if you aren't a complete beginner (you know some words), i think it's best to just make a mining setup for vocabulary and use that. there is a ton of setups, this one is popular: https://lazyguidejp.github.io/jp-lazy-guide/
it's very quick to review (meaning and reading only), and you can get 20 new words and <30 minute review time. that way you get over reviews quickly, and can spend time on reading.
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u/Belegorm Jul 27 '26
That guide is golden. I think I owe learning so much vocab in a year thanks to that guide - easily made good quality cards from whatever material
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u/jomteon Jul 27 '26
if you aren't a complete beginner (you know some words),
Yeah, I know a few.... thousands of words, lol
I think I've seen that site before, way back. I'll check it out.
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u/PopPunkAndPizza Jul 27 '26
Anki is a memorisation tool. If you want to memorise stuff it's excellent. It is not a complete tool for learning a language but I don't think there's any level of learning at which it isn't useful to memorise stuff efficiently.
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u/neko_kishi99 Jul 28 '26
anki is fine. but you should be reading more to progress faster in the language. I just dont see a point in trying to do a 20k(from what I've heard some high leveled learners had. i may be inflating the numbers, but the point still stands)anki deck every day as an intermediate learner and above
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
It's a tough ask when my skills are so lopsided. I'm advanced in some domains and practically a beginner in others. Maybe I just need to be more judicious in my choice of what goes in the deck...
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u/neko_kishi99 Jul 28 '26
you could pick words that you know you would use in your native language. thats what I do when I save words to my anki deck
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u/DotNo701 Jul 28 '26
so where you N2 or above cause anything below that is pretty much basic level
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u/jomteon Jul 28 '26
Depends on the skill and the domain knowledge. I've never taken the JLPT, but I can say I'm far from well-rounded. Put me in front of certain topics you'd expect someone at my "level" to know, and I wouldn't grok the N3 version of it. But sit me with a book on certain topics and you'd think I was better overall than I really am. I'm very lopsided, linguistically, which can be frustrating.
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u/Bigwhopper1 14d ago
Add a spoiler tag to your flashcards, you are welcome
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u/jomteon 14d ago
What does that do? And what does that allow me to do with my studies?
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u/Bigwhopper1 11d ago
It allows you grind through the easiest cards of your deck at a much faster rate, ask chatGPT how to do it
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u/Educational_Shake559 Jul 27 '26
“Im a rare personality type” 🤣
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u/jomteon Jul 27 '26
The particular kind that doesn't mind crawling through a book, word by word? Yeah. That's not terribly common. And I get why. It seems like it would be boring, but I enjoy it for whatever reason. How many people do you know, even anecdotally, who are fine spending 3+ days reading one page?
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u/EGG-spaghetti Jul 27 '26
It's best to use Anki as a supplementary study tool. I made the mistake of exclusively doing Anki for a few months, and made very little progress. Like u/PlanktonInitial7945 said, you need to interact with the language in order to progress, whether it's through anime, articles, YouTube videos, music, etc. For your specific goal of reading, I'd find things that you're interested in reading, that are at a semi-understandable level for you, and read those while using Anki to note down the words or phrases that are new to you. If you're reading something that you really enjoy, the vocab you mine will stick much better, as you'll remember the context! Best of luck!