Word of the day: Inversion
Prioritizing Anki
I’ve long had this issue where my WaniKani reviews were taking up so much time that I didn’t have time to do many Anki reviews. Thus I haven’t been making many Anki cards.
Last week, I asked myself, what if I invert my order and do Anki reviews first?
I still start with one WaniKani review session (which I think I have at 12 items), because my daily review streak is 1,177 days, and breaking that would be too freeing devastating.
Then, I switch over to Anki for as long as I have available to review.
Recent Anki card creation stats:
- 3/12: added 3 cards
- 3/13: added 30 cards
- 3/14: added 0 cards
- 3/15: added 36 cards
- 3/16: added 33 cards
- 3/17: added 1 card
- 3/18: added 0 cards
- 3/19: added 38 cards (and counting)
Selcting Kanji
So far, it’s mostly still creating cards for kanji that I already learned in WaniKani, whether I feel I have a strong recognition of them or not. If I find I really do know the kanji well, I can always retire the kanji and vocabulary cards later.
Now that I’ve done OCR on a lot of manga series (well, seven series), I’ve loaded their kanji into a spreadsheet and sorted them by most used kanji. The majority of the most used kanji is kanji in the first 30 or so levels of WaniKani. (No wonder I seem to do well with reading and minimal vocabulary lookups these days! At least, for these specific series.)
As an example, here’s Flying Witch’s kanji list, with items I already have cards for in Anki hidden, and anything that appears fewer than 20 times hidden:
Once I tackle much of this list, I’ll unhide kanji that show as few as ten items across the 10 manga volumes.
Selecting Vocabulary
From this list (or one of the other manga lists), I pick a kanji to look up words for.
My goal isn’t to learn kanji. It’s to learn vocabulary. But I want to be able to recognize the kanji if an unknown word as well. To help with this, I’m aiming to make cards for the more common vocabulary that use that kanji, to improve my recognition of it.
Flying Witch has the most results, but there are matches in other series as well.
I browse for a line that looks i+1 enough for me, then bring up the image and put it all into Migaku’s browser extension, and from there it goes into Anki (creating the kanji card for me).
Then I exclude this word from my search and look for another word to create a card for:
For 捕, the resulting cards cover the words:
- 捕まる
- 捕る
That list does fall a bit short of WaniKani’s list of six words, in part because I still need to OCR series such as Detective Conan (which uses 逮捕). But that’s all right.
The process is way longer than for people who can simply add a word they see in reading to Anki and learn from it, but this is something that is working for me so far. The real test will be when I get past these kanji I’ve had WaniKani exposure to.
Back to adding new cards.