So Cassie and I have both been making heavy use of Anki to study Japanese, but our approaches with it have evolved over months of use, and I thought that was worth talking about.
For those who don’t know, Anki is a powerful, flexible flashcard app. It’s very easy to make simple flashcards, but if you know a bit of HTML and CSS, it’s easy to make pretty flashcards, and my understanding is it’s pretty easy to add in Javascript to make some crazy ones, too – some people add video files or animations to theirs, some people even add minigames.
I haven’t gone that far; I’m just using them for Japanese. I started off by buying a paid Japanese deck; you can find a lot of free ones online, but paid ones tend to be higher-quality. The one I got had very slick formatting and native speaker audio and sample sentences.
The more I used it, though, the more changes I wanted. Luckily, Anki made that easy. So now I have three different types of card – one for Radicals, one for Kanji, one for Vocabulary, and one for full Sentences. (Radicals are the different building blocks that make up kanji, kanji are the Japanese characters that are borrowed from China – aka the complicated ones, and vocabulary is just words made out of kanji, kana, or any combination of them.) I used free software to add machine-generated readings to any cards or sentences that didn’t have them, and some simple HTML to collapse explanations and mnemonics behind answers so I can expand them if I’m having trouble with a card.
But more important than all that is how easy it is to organize and manipulate your own decks. We had been using Wanikani, which is really great and I do recommend it if you’re getting started. But with Wanikani, you’re using their (web-based) software and you’re going at their pace. With Anki, I can decide, “I got this card right, but I hemmed and hawed over it a lot; I’m going to mark it as ‘hard’ instead of ‘good’ so it shows up again sooner.” Or you can say, “I’m struggling with this card a lot and it’s kind of niche; I’m just going to get rid of it/move it to a later deck/whatever and forget about it for now.”
But most importantly, you can be reading a book or playing a game or watching a show, see some words or phrases that keep coming up – and you can just add them to your deck. Been hearing “仕方がない” a lot? Add it to your deck! Playing a game and you keep seeing “英雄”? Add it to your deck! Struggling to remember 英雄’s meaning because you don’t know the kanji? Add 英 and 雄 to your deck!
Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy X in Japanese, just trying to get more immersion. But it’s a little bit of a baptism by fire; a lot of stuff I just can’t parse. So I went to the Final Fantasy X Translations page on the Final Fantasy wiki, easily turned all the tables into cards organized by type, and have been drilling those, now, too! It’s super easy.
It’s also easy to set up syncing between your phone and your computer, so I can modify cards with a keyboard and then run it all on my phone – or vice-versa. It’s a great app, it’s crazy that it’s free.