I ask because… well my situation is that I’ve been using Anki for several months, and its been very, very helpful. But I havent studied kanji until now, so theres a ton of new info I’ve learned in the 2 levels of wanikani I’ve done. But besides the kanji, there are so many great contextual examples of phrases and full sentences in which the kanji are used… and this is maybe getting me into trouble, ha, Because I know I’m creating too many Anki cards. But at the same time the examples are SO good in wanikani… its just great to see the kanji I’m learning in full, funny, grammatically perfect sentences and I really dont want to see them only once, nor hunt them down card by card again. So for most new wanikani kanji I learn, there’s a provided example sentence that I end up making a card for. They’re excellent, really.
To be clear, I’m talking about, for example:
わたしの子、ビヨンセににているとおもわない？
Don’t you think my kid looks similar to Beyoncé?
I mean, that’s great… and when I read it to my Japanese wife she laughed out loud. And it’s just so helpful.
Is there a place within wanikani where one can read through, say, all of a level’s example sentences, and phrases, in one spot? Rather than needing to click through card by card?
Anyway, I wonder if this resonates with anyone else? Have you started out making lots of Anki cards and then realized its unsustainable?
By the way, of course I realize that wanikani itself is a very good SRS, and the answer is probably to just to study wanikani-learned knowledge within wanikani and use Anki for other stuff, like words found during immersion etc. But it’s just so tempting to get it into Anki. How have you handled it?
I’m not aware, but that would be a great resource. I sometimes rush through lessons to fit them within the day to day life, but feel like I’d like to dedicate more time to reading and understanding the example sentences better (I always end up forgetting to get back to them).
I think that, at the end of the day, you have to know which resources help you the most (and you feel more inclined to use) and how it fits into your study routine. I use fixed Anki decks, and while I agree that including WK vocabulary would be helpful, I noticed that I used to add a lot of words I found in the wild but don’t anymore. I currently spend perhaps 15 minutes a day on Anki, and for me that’s already the upper limit - more than that and I tend to feel overwhelmed and just unmotivated. So for me that would be unsustainable. I prefer to spend time with other resources (currently, a grammar dictionary and using reading for immersion).
How about actually doing as you suggest, and adding the WK sentences to Anki for a while, then reevaluating in a few weeks how you feel about it? It’s ok to feel overwhelmed by it later on and giving up, but I think it’s always great to experiment with new ways of studying and seeing how it works for you
What defines your review load on anki is not how many cards you make, it’s how many new cards you study every day.
I personally find it healthy to have a backlog of “new” cards in my Anki decks. I currently have 118 new cards in my main deck for instance, given that I do max one or two lessons/day these days that’s enough for a couple of months even if I don’t mine anything else.
The main advantages of doing it this way IMO is that you have constant amount of lessons whether you actively mine or not on a given day, and it delays the time between the moment I add the card to anki and the moment I actually start studying it. I find that it makes it more effective that way, it forces me to recall where and why I added the card in the first place.
So I would advise making as many cards as you want whenever you want but stick to a reasonable daily lesson count. If later you decide that a card wasn’t really useful you can always delete it, so it’s low commitment.
I also think that over-curating an anki deck is generally bad because you will end up only with very hard cards you struggle to remember which makes reviewing a huge chore. It’s more enjoyable and rewarding to review 15 cards with 90% accuracy than 5 with a 40% accuracy. For this reason I don’t hesitate to add a few “easy” cards just because I think a sentence is interesting even if not particularly challenging for instance.
Thanks. All good points. I personally don’t like to have a backlog of cards, though, esp. not a large one. And I’m adding cards at a faster rate than I can use them at the moment. So something’s gonna have to give… likely I’ll create less cards. I do agree about not only having hard cards to deal with, and I dont do that, its a mix. Most of the wanikani cards I’m making I already understand, but I feel like theres a lot of value in reading through the high quality sentences.
I can see already that its adding up too quickly. So I’ll just have to calm it down a little. But youre right, I could continue for a while and then give it up/delete cards. It’s hard to stop separating them as it’s such quality content, really a credit to wanikani and of course I’m going to continue with it after level 3.
I’m glad to read this: “I’m not aware, but that would be a great resource. I sometimes rush through lessons to fit them within the day to day life, but feel like I’d like to dedicate more time to reading and understanding the example sentences better (I always end up forgetting to get back to them).” Right? The example sentences are excellent, and couldn’t be more perfectly suited to people who are studying those specific kanji, obviously. I’d love to see them all in one place, it really would be a great resource. (And would solve my problem of trying to take them out individually and overwhelming my Anki world, ha.)
Thats true, but on the other hand I’m finding the one and done nature of the example sentences on the cards to be too little. Thus I do wish they were consolidated somewhere. It would be helpful to for example be able to easily read through them en masse after finishing a unit, or every week or so. I do agree that its not a great match with SRS if too much gets added, thus the question. I’m thinking a separate deck of key sentences to take a look at significantly less often than the regular deck might work.
Thanks, I do. I still wish the wanikani sentences were collected together as a single resource for each unit, as I find a lot of them particularly helpful. The reuse of kanji already learned + the sense of humor is great,
Just a little update to the thread. Not seeing any info here about a way to view a collection of the sentences, I hit the google and found that many people before me have asked the same question. For example,
It does look like there are user-created decks floating around which also could be an option, and who knows what else, but if something current and official and かんぺき were available I’d grab that instead. Or a document would be super.
