So Drops is a mobile app for iPhone or Android. It’s vocab-only sort of language learning, where you get 5mins, twice per day, to quickly review learned words and grab new words. You can choose topics of interest, and skip words you already know.
Primarily I’m using it because my vocab is lacking, especially when it comes to words primarily written in Kana, and recognizing words in kana if I learned it with the kanji can also be tough for me. Also, it gets a bonus for strengthening my Katakana recognition abilities.
I have no interest in upgrading to the full version because I kind of like that I only get 5-15 minutes per day to work on this, and I can focus more time on grammar and WK.
I am using Drops
Heard of it, Don’t want to use
Never heard of it, going to try it out!
Never heard of it, already trying to forget about it
Well actually I have tried this abouth a month ago. It’s not bad but I used to very often forget to use it so I eventually unistalled it. I already use WaniKani, Anki and Kitsun.io, so I think I am ok for now. I even used memrise for a while but still these three that I mentioned are enough for me.
But in the end it is always up to personal tastes.
For starters, the obnoxious notifications actually helped. “Of course I have 5 minutes” was how I tended to respond.
It was EXCELLENT for what you’re using it for: recognizing kana. I turned kanji off, and just used it to associate some basic things like numbers and colors to the associated hiragana. I did probably about 20 of the categories before uninstalling.
It and “infinite japanese” provided a great bridge between recognizing one character at a time to being able to read two or three hiragana characters in a row and associate them with a concept (word). But as far as an actual VOCAB app, there are far better.
Keep using it until it feels useless, then uninstall.
I used it every day since the beginning of June until just a little bit after the huge update. I was motivated to get through every unit, but when I had 3 or 4 left they dropped that 800+ word bomb. I did a few of the new ones but then fell off the wagon.
Personally I think the best way to memorize is SRS, and Drops isn’t SRS, but 10 minutes a day isn’t bad. After doing all those units though I’d probably only remember a few words if I heard them in the wild. I could do the Dojo review, but eh. There were also several mistakes in either audio/kanji used so that made me a bit wary towards the end.
That’s obviously just my personal experience. As novakac said, use it until it doesn’t work for you anymore.
Yeah, I think Anki users have the least to gain from something like this, because you could just hack your way through a core 10k deck if you had the inclination. I have yet to make anki work for me, so we are doin’ this for now