Anki

Anki is a spaced repetition software (SRS) for flashcards. The better explanation can be found on the project’s website.

In general, Anki takes the concept of spaced repetition in the form of decks and flash cards and it shows them to you in a specific order to help you memorize them.

As long as you keep using Anki every day, you will be able to remember the information that is being shown to you.

Most people among the Japanese learning community use it to learn various things, mostly vocabulary and kanji (although it can also be used to train listening comprehension or practice on grammar points as well).

Pre-Made Decks

There are a lot of decks (i.e. collection of cards) made by others that can be downloaded and added, and this is the most popular option for beginners. They can be found directly on the official website.

Custom Decks

The real strength of Anki, however, is in being able to make your own decks from scratch. I briefly touch on this in my Japanese Learning Loop post.

Downside of Anki

By default, Anki has pretty terrible settings which can (and most likely will) lead to burn out and regrets and you’ll start to hate the software. They can be extremely merciless, especially if you skip a couple of days or more of reviews and they start piling up quickly.

This is why I recommend Better Anki Settings to make the experience worthwhile.

2020-10-09

Practical Tips to Facilitate Early Reading
- By just moving your mouse over a word you don’t know, it will tell you the reading, pronunciation, meaning, translation, and a bunch of other details about it. By clicking a button you will also be able to export not only the word but the entire sentence into your Anki# deck if you have set it up using ankiconnect.
- I like using the highlight system to keep count of new words I learn as I read, and then use a tool like this one to bulk import all my highlights automatically into Anki# cards for review later.
Optimal Reading Immersion - Narrow Reading
- It is impossible to gain mastery of word usage by just seeing new words once, even if we make extensive use of Anki#. However, by sticking to the same author or genre, there is a greater chance of coming across the same words being used in similar contexts so we can build a stronger intuition for them[6].
A Full Year of Anki - My retrospective and Advice
- I first started doing Anki# “seriously” (remember, I burned out before) a year or so ago using my own mining deck and Better Anki Settings using the old MIA (now Migaku) anki extension to mine sentences with. I decided I “needed” anki because I realized that although my understanding of spoken Japanese and my vocab level was pretty decent, I was really lacking in ability to read stuff and a lot of games and most light novels were pretty much unapproachable to me. I later transitioned to using yomichan to sentence mine because it’s just that good, honestly. I love it.
Japanese Learning Loop
- The purpose of a starting core deck for Anki# is to get you started with basic words that you absolutely need to be able to start reading native material on your own. Later you will be building your own deck as you learn new words, so don’t get too attached to this one, it is but a starting point to get your feet wet in useful Japanese.
- One tip for Anki# in general is to change the default settings, because they are horrible, so make sure to read up on that (Better Anki Settings) so you don’t suffer from burnout.
Japanese Primer
- Install and learn how to use Anki# (Also read this page)
Japanese
Migaku
- Some of their toolings are still really solid and useful, the Anki# card exporter and mining system are probably one of my favorite to use.
Refold
- Nonetheless, there’s some good resources for Anki# and similar tools that might be worth checking out.
Fitting Bunpro in your study routine
- Grammar mining is a process similar to vocabulary/sentence mining for the Anki# world.
- Since this article was originally written, they went and added extra study features like JLPT-graded reading passages, vocabulary reviews, and even some kansai dialect stuff. I find all of those pretty useless and I don’t recommend using bunpro for them. For graded readings I recommend just finding something you enjoy and not worry about its level too much (see also Practical Tips to Facilitate Early Reading), for kansai dialect I recommend giving a look at this website and for vocabulary reviews I recommend just a normal Anki# deck or even jpdb.io.
Installing Anki on a Chromebook
- The time I spend mining for cards and doing reviews with Anki# these days is evenly split between my Windows PC and my Chromebook. However, when setting up my workflow for the first time I found the resources about Anki on ChromeOS to be quite lacking, so I decided to write something about it.
Beginner Japanese Immersion Material
- One thing that makes this manga quite special is that there’s a lot of online resources and Anki# decks which can help a lot in getting through it.
- The language is very simple and straightforward when it comes to grammar and pacing. Vocabulary-wise, there are a few words that are very technical/specific to videogames and isekai-style fantasy novels, but once you look them up and add them to your Anki# mining deck, the complexity drops significantly for the rest of the book.
Full Timeline
Japanese Learning Resources
- MIA’s specific quick start guide on how to study Japanese using the Mass Immersion Approach tools and resources. MIA’s focus is on extensive immersion and natural acquisition of the language. It is worth checking out for the amount of resources they have mostly related to Anki# but ever since the split most of them are under the Migaku umbrella now.
- Anki#

Better Anki Settings#
- I have burned out many times in the past with bad/ugly defaults on Anki#.