So I recently discovered the very excellent Wanikani core 10k set created by hinekidori (https://community.wanikani.com/t/so-much-vocab/12050). I’ve used Anki before, but it’s only now as an intermediate student that I find myself needing to customise it a bit to suit my needs.
I’m currently going through the lower levels and suspending all the cards I know, with a plan to then start progressing through the harder stuff as normal. But I also read a lot of moderately specialised articles in Japanese, mostly to do with economics, and so it’s likely that some of the vocab at the tippy top is going to be useful for me a lot earlier than for most people.
My plan was to keep a list of unfamiliar vocab every time I read a new article, then find those notes in Anki and add them into rotation. But I’m not sure what the most efficient way of doing that is? I can search for relevant notes, but I couldn’t see an obvious way of moving an inactive flashcard into rotation from the browser. I was thinking maybe I could change the ‘due’ order of the words I want to add in, but apart from being laborious, it seems like Anki prioritises deck order over due order, even for subdecks. Am I missing something?
My other query was about how the sentences and vocab are stored in the set. Am I right in thinking they’re separate notes. So, for instance, 程度 would have 2 separate notes, one which provides the cards for Vocab Recall, Vocab Recognition and Vocab Meaning, and then one which provides the cards for Sentence Recall and Sentence Recognition? The reason I ask is that normally Anki will bury siblings in certain situations (like when encountering a new note), and in this case it doesn’t appear that it is doing so. I’m wondering if I’d do better to separate out the deck into two decks - one for vocab and one for sentences. Because currently I’m looking at introducing 5 separate cards for every single new word, and I’m thinking that might make for some hefty reviews.
Would be interested in hearing how others have customised their sets!
Can’t answer the rest and would like to know - I keep separate decks currently - but yes, two separate notes. One for the sentence and one for the vocab as you described. Because of this, I was able to suspend all the low level WK vocab card vocab notes while keeping the sentence cards.
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing! I realised I was still messing up particles in some very basic sentences, so they’ll be relevant for a while.
That reminds me actually - do you count yourself as having ‘failed’ the review if you get the vocab in the sentence right, but make a mistake somewhere else? I’m in two minds - for now I’m being strict, but I realised that my feed could quickly get clogged up with vocab I’m not actually trying to learn until much later. For instance, you have something like 日時 as a very early word, but the associated sentence is:
試写会の 日時を 教えてください。
where 試写会 is probably something I’m not super fussed about learning right now.
You have to decide what are you learning. In this case: A sentence by heart or the appropriate word in the context you understand?
Best ofc would be a sentence, where you know everything beside the one vocab, but the sentence are not structured that way, as far as I could tell.
So, learn only one thing would be my advise: As long as you are getting the sentence good enough to chose the correct vocab, you are correct.
Unfortunately, after seeing the sentence a few times, you will learn it by heart, so there is imho no avoidance of that (random sentences for each vocab word would be the best).
Ok so for those that are still interested, I found a couple of ways of doing this.
Firstly I’d missed that there’s an option to ‘reschedule’ cards if you right click them in the browser. You can add them to the end of the new card list, which isn’t very helpful because the new card list is 50000 long when you load up the deck. But you can also add them directly to the ‘review’ pile with an interval of your choosing - in this case 0 days so it comes up for the first time the next time you review. So you skip the learning stage, which is not always ideal, but given that these are vocab that I’m mostly gleaning from articles, it’s probably not all that disadvantageous. Also, because you can set the interval to something much higher, an intermediate or advanced student who is just coming to anki for the first time can reschedule easy cards into the review queue on a delay of (for example) 100-200 days, rather than suspending them all.
Another solution would be to simply merge all the cards into a single deck, so that moving cards up the ‘due’ queue would actually work. This maybe sounds a little disorganised, and I’m slightly hesitant to dismantle the deck structure myself, but as far as I can work out, it’s much closer how anki is designed to work. You never really want to be studying chapters of vocab in isolation, and even if you do, you can use the tags and filtered decks.
Finally, someone on the anki reddit was saying that the latest version of Anki 2.1 includes an experimental V2 scheduler which may provide this functionality:
It says that ‘review cards’ are drawn from all child decks simultaneously, but I don’t know for certain if the same applies to new cards. If it does then it sounds like it would work in more or less the same way as putting all the cards in one deck.
Actually, I have a question about this deck also, and didn’t want to make a brand new topic.
Should I have the subdeck new lessons enabled or not? Is it sensible to progress through all of the sets at once? I haven’t been rooting through 2k, 3k etc. to see what’s in there, I also have limited desktop access rn so I can’t.
Hey, not entirely sure what you mean by ‘subdeck new lessons’? Maybe we have different decks - mine has the parent deck ‘Complete 10k’ containing subdecks 01k to 10k, then each of those decks has 10 more subdecks (Set01, Set02, etc.) nested inside them. If you select the top level (Complete10k) to review from then it will draw cards from each subdeck in the order that they’re listed. If you wanted to, you could jumble up the order in the options, but as I understand it, this would only randomise the cards you get within each subdeck - you would still see all the cards in 01k, Set01 before you saw any in 01k, Set02.
Probably you don’t want to make any changes that would start bringing in random cards from the later decks, because these will contain much more advanced vocab. For instance, at 1k you’re looking at vocab like ‘tree’, ‘person’, at 3k it’s ‘economy’, ‘setting’ and then at 9k you have stuff like ‘pessimism’ and ‘promotion of growth’. But what you might want to do (or at least, what I wanted to do) is start adding in select pieces of more advanced vocab from the later decks once you’ve encountered them through other sources.
Oh my gosh thank you. I’ve had a lot on my plate lately with school and thus Anki. But uh. I haven’t been doing my lessons from the other 9 because I didn’t notice the sub sub decks. (Mobile Anki lol) I really need to get to a desktop and check what’s inside, but this is helpful because it confirms my other intuition about the structure. Thank you so much!
edit: Ah, and I see that it just pulls them all anyway. No need to go deeper than 01k, 02k for lessons. So I’ve been using it correctly, I just didn’t notice how it works. Never used subdecks before, I just have a mess of parent decks w Thanks!
