I posted this elsewhere some months back but felt it deserved a new audience.
For new(ish) students only
I add synonyms as I learn each new item. There is a user script somewhere that you can use to do this. I just add the first letter of the English meanings.
For example, acceptable meaning answers for 被害 (ひがい) are injury, damage, harm.
With the synonym addition, this becomes injury, damage, harm, i, d, h. This relieves me of the need to type out the full words and saves a lot of time doing reviews.
For verbs, “to go” becomes tg
For noun/verb phrases, I just take each of the first letters. “To look back at” becomes tlba; “natural disaster” becomes nd and so on.
If you are deep into the mix, it may not be worth your while going back through each item to do this, hence for new(ish) students only.
For all I know there may be a userscript somewhere that does this automatically. Please let me know if so.
Make liberal but honest use of the “ignore answer” userscript too.
Right, because with this method you have to open up the info box every single time to make sure you actually got it right (assuming you force yourself to say what you mean for the single letter as you enter it). This is as opposed to only opening it when it says you were a little off. Does that really save time?
I personally find that the Anki style script which allows you to tag answers as right or wrong saves time in a similar way, and requires no additional synonyms.
It also means you always see the right meaning at some point, as opposed to here where input, increase, inside, etc all are “i” and you are forced to double check to confirm your i word was the right one.
WK has an edit distance thing in it so that if you typo a bit then it still get marked as correct. I’d worry that you’d run the risk of more false positives than usual with this idea.
What happens if you remember harm, damage, … forgot the last thing? You would have to learn the correct order of the solution as well, seems a bit like “overfitting”, do you really remember all this stuff?
If this actually works for you, you could try this:
with “my” always show the solution mode, with an additional synonym it will always show the full solution for a fast check and repetition.
Isn’t this going to make you associate the kanji with single letters? Even if you mentally say the meanings in your head as you answer, I still have to wonder if you’re either just making learning less efficient or actually harming it in a quest to shave off a small amount of time to your reviews (which don’t take long to begin with).
I think its actually harming. While learning the kana I started off by only using realkana.com and after a while I noticed that I had to remember the keys I have to press for the romaji before I could recall what the kana was, so I didn’t actually learn the kana, but the keystrokes that were necessary to get the answer correct. I had to supplement my studies with the kanji study app to be able to read the kana without having to remember the keystrokes first.
The same thing pretty much applies to this. You don’t actually learn the meaning of the kanji/vocabulary, but the letter you assigned to it.
