Hey everyone, I’m thinking about creating a grammar deck in Anki to study grammar, but before I spend hours creating it/using it, I wanted to ask those that have tried it if it was an effective method to retain grammar points?
Up until now I’ve beed re-reading 25-35 grammar points a day from 2 Tobira chapters and then trying to use them in conversations to improve recall and retention. It has been working quite well for me but reading through those grammar points I feel could be sped up by using Anki without any loss in effectiveness.
I have a small Anki deck for grammar, but it only includes rarer N2 and N1 grammar points (with sentences from the Shinkanzen Master books), because I don’t really see those much in the wild.
I only use it for recognition, not production (I have an example sentence on one side and the general grammar explanation on the other; no English translation because there is none in the book). I don’t plan on using most of the grammar in conversation, so I am fine with only getting them into my passive memory.
I would definitely say that my recognition and recall of the meaning are much better than only reading them from the book once and then never seeing them again. I guess I mostly use the deck to remind me that this grammar exists, since it usually doesn’t show up often. I haven’t tried Anki for more common grammar patterns, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt retention?
If you want something where you have to produce grammar by typing in the answers, where you have to differentiate between similar grammar points, I would also recommend Bunpro.
I still have my BYKI which is similar actually and I have created my own sets with grammar included. It works for me. I like the flashcards options because you can take them anytime and you do have to refresh them as they go stale. I think blitzing and taking them slowly and taking the games/tests that are available in BYKI has helped me mix it up a bit and helped me get proficient though self learning. I have passed N5 as a result an hopefully will get good results for N4 next week.
I use example sentences that are on the simple side, English on the front, so the grammar point in question can be a focus and there aren’t too many ways the sentence could be constructed in Japanese due to the sentences being long.
I force myself to come up with the entire Japanese sentence and then check it.
edit: I also keep them all together in one deck, because sometimes just the chapter name can be a dead giveaway that reminds you what a grammar point is, which is the problem I was having studying in books. I couldn’t remember the grammar point in the wild.
Thank you very much everyone for your great input! It seems that it is quite an effective way to retain grammar points. I will continue working on my deck and give it a shot
