Better late than never… I’ve finally set some (hopefully realistic) reading goals for this year and set myself up on BookMeter - davids68 - 読書メーター.
My current/soon-to-be-started list:
君の名は will be my first book, so I’m kind of simultaneously excited/terrified.
What kind of fields do you have in those cards? I go by minimum effort with just vocab JP-EN as I find quantity to be more important than precision, but I’m maybe a bit worried I’ll forget a lot of them as they get mature 
. Although I may just suspend cards after a certain threshold. And adding a context sentence to leeches will also help.
Pretty sure we didn’t talk about this last time Anki came up 
, but sorry if I’m repeating myself :P.
I got all of them but have only read about 100 pages of the second one and then stopped… But I want to pick it up again when my exams are over to give it another chance
I read the second one, there are some cute stories in there. I would say keep going if you enjoyed it and want to keep reading it, but there are a lot of other books out there.
@Naphthalene @NicoleIsEnough @TheMunichMunch @EmmaGoto
Thanks all! This thread is great, so many helpful and encouraging people. I think I will stay for a while. 
You’re right, if I enjoy it and it’s good for my learning, I might as well continue. I will try and give an actual book review once I’m done with the series (in addition to the dry stats).
Maybe we have different goals and/or different usage styles for anki, so I apologize if I’m making assumptions here, but isn’t the point of SRS that it helps you not forget them as they get mature? I agree that having better cards to help you remember would aid the efficiency of that, but either way you’ll keep seeing the cards you forget until you stop forgetting them, no?
Anyway, fields! Mine are simple:
Expression, reading, definition (in Japanese with pitch accent), example sentences. Not all of my older cards are complete (mostly in terms of Japanese definition), but for the last few years I’ve been consistent about it, and all my to-learn cards are in this format. Not all cards have example sentences, depending where I learned them from. Some of them have pictures (plants, animals, etc). Some of them I add English under the Japanese definition because it is more logical to me to do so (more obscure plants and animals, diseases, etc). Ones I’m struggling with get spruced up, and if I’m really struggling I’ll add English. I used to try to have audio, but I found that I got irritated while reviewing and muted it, so I stopped bothering a long time ago.
In terms of quantity vs precision, that’s a personal decision. I have had regrets at times in my anki journey about not making more quality cards. Making decisions earlier on about how I wanted my cards to be would have saved me a lot of editing. With a lot of cards to edit, making a ton of changes later isn’t fun. I don’t know how you add your cards, but if you think you might want them to be different later, it might be worth looking into how to make that happen now (via tools/automation or premade decks or blunt force input or whatever).
I did the math today and realized that even if I stay on my current pace I still won’t finish 本好きの下剋上 vol. 3 until the 19th or 20th, which will only give me about a week to read another novel in order to remain caught-up…which will likely lead to me falling behind on my manga goal 
I’m going to try and add another novel to my daily reading for a little while so I’m at least a little bit ahead of the game.
Caught up on what?
On yearly goals, I assume.
I mean, sure. I checked the list and saw 0/12, so I got confused how not finishing a book and instead picking up another book would help, which is why I thought maybe it meant something else. But I got it now.
Yeah. I guess my dilemma is the following. Most of my cards are exports from floflo or my dictionary app, so I don’t give them much thought and they simply look like this:
(The number is the words zipf frequency)
I like my cards this way, since I can flip them through relatively quickly (and often don’t even look at the English definition). I guess my worry is just that since I will probably forget the context with mature cards, my chances of failing them gets a lot higher. So in the end I’m testing myself on contextless cards, while I actually only care if I know those cards in context! So maybe I’ll create just a lot of work for nothing by having bad accuracy, which can lead to unbearable review counts. Currently my mature vocab card accuracy is 73%, however Anki defines that. My saving grace is having a low leech suspend count (4, after which I can create a context sentence and re-add it. so far I haven’t bothered), or ‘burning’ the cards after a certain interval. Or maybe this won’t be a problem (only a handful of cards will be difficult without context) and I’m overblowing it 
. incoming all cards become leeches in the end Still, seeing you have 22k mature cards with just the word on front, gives me some reassurance, though. Even if I don’t have the sentence in the back. And tend to occasionally add 50 cards a day 
.
In the end, my Anki usage does seem to contradict itself a bit, since my goal isn’t to remember the cards forever as they are 
. Maybe that’s ok since a lot of the benefit is just exposing myself to the words (and makes reading more comfortable), and probably I don’t plan to use Anki for the rest of my life.
Phew, that became longer than I thought .
Yeah I meant to have one book finished by the end of the first month, but I’m fast coming up on the end of the second month with only one book (projected to be) finished, so I’m planning to read two books in parallel in order to close the gap.
I think @seanblue’s doubts were, why not finish the first book faster, and then the second book faster, since reading two books in parallel means increased reading time anyway.
But I suspect it’s the case when switching between two stories is sort of refreshing and let’s you read more?
Yep, that’s the plan. Theoretically I might even be able to accelerate my progress through 本好き by overlapping the two and keeping things fresh. We’ll see if that actually works out though. Worst case I’ll just pause the second book and it’ll run slightly into March.
Ah, I see. I do that sometimes with manga and anime, but rarely with books. Sometimes it works as you say, and I end up reading/watching more since I’m in the mood for at least one of the things I started. Other times I get engrossed in one, and the others get put to the side. But I guess if the goal is to just keep reading that okay too!
It sounds like what you’re doing is working, considering your goals! If you’re not looking to remember the cards forever, then putting time into making them better is probably not worth it, but then doing so if they become leeches, and having that be a low threshold–it makes sense to me. I’m now also better understanding your idea of suspending cards after a while.
I get ~185 reviews a day on my vocab deck, so yeah, I’m not closely reading every card either, but when I’m not sure I’m remembering correctly or when I miss them and want to refresh, having the Japanese definition and (hopefully) example sentences is helpful. (In terms of context, etc) I tried to do sentence cards for a while and they did not do anything for me personally. Maybe if I’d started them earlier in my studies. My mature vocab card accuracy is 85%, and I don’t do anything with leeches other than tag them (and sometimes fix the cards later). I’ve adjusted the accuracy part with the algorithm, aiming for between 80-90%, so now that it’s working I don’t want to mess with it, lol. So it does seem like we have a different system and different goals, but also maybe like our respective systems are working (more or less) for us. 
In other news, I finished 本好き 5! It was delightful, as always. I read the last 100 pages or so in a day because they were the best. 
(As usual, I had to push myself to get through the post-epilogue bits, even though I like them. I like them, but I also feel like the book is over and want to move to the next reading thing.)
I started the third spider book, plus I’m going to do 君の名は. I haven’t decided whether I’ll read it to the book club pace or not. Yesterday I started it, barely read anything (it felt like), and when I checked later had finished the first week’s worth of reading. I’m not that fast a reader–the first ten pages or so, at least, don’t have a ton of text. But I’ll take it! A while back I also started another light novel series that is indirectly naphthalene’s fault* (as are all light novel series started by people in this thread, y/n) because they linked in a post above to a list and I crosschecked it against what is readily available to me with local libraries and whatnot and that is how I ended up reading this one. We’ll see if it sticks. I’ve been noticing that while my ‘it’s 2021 I read what I want’ thing I’m doing was mostly meant in terms of quality, my brain has also been interpreting it as ‘I can start however many books at a time as I want.’ I guess that’s okay…
(* I am quite enjoying all my light novel reading so maybe fault isn’t the right word. 
)
Still little to no manga reading, but I’m in the middle of book 5 of my Thief reread. Soon I get to read the new one. 
So do you agree with our selections in your poll for which parts were dense? I was referring to the paper/book/ink making parts. How did you feel about it?
Also, did you cry at the end?
I don’t know about everyone else, but I can personally guarantee that I’ve read at least one light novel series that I didn’t start because of anyone on the forums 
If I were to count more seriously it’d probably be 3 or 4
@seanblue I definitely got through those parts more slowly, but I didn’t find them particularly dense. It helped being able to pause and read other things for a break. I didn’t cry at the end, most likely because in my skimming I saw that you guys did so I was ready for feelings. (I probably would have, though–I cry easily while reading, and it was really good.)
@Ditto20 Yes, I have too–it was a silly joke. I started at least one light novel series before I even knew wanikani forums existed.
Ah, sorry about that. Never know whether to spoiler something like that or not. I’m getting emotional just thinking about that scene again.
