Thanks, this is basically exactly what I was looking for! And their reasoning for it seems to be the same as mine, which helps me feel more confident, haha!
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I will have to read through this thread in its entirety. Watching Japanese wrestling and wanting to be able to read the tweets/articles and understanding the promos is my main reason for learning too!
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This is interesting. I thought the concept of āburningā was somewhat uniquely WK, but I guess āsuspendingā is roughly the same. I never got too far with Anki.
Burning/suspending does give you some idea of progress (in progress and ādoneā), but I suppose even without it you could define progress as percentage of items that have reached some particular stage (say >8 months until next review).
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You might be one of the few people that will actually appreciate the many long wrestling digressions in this thread 
. Iām not sure what kind of Japanese wrestling you like, but I watch a bunch of companies, so I think all of the big ones get talked about here besides Dragon Gate and AJPW, which I donāt watch. I also started a proper thread for pro wrestling at one point (if you read through my study log, youāll find post after post of me talking about wanting to start it, then failing to. Well, I eventually did it!).
I love to talk about this stuff, so feel free to ask questions about my process/resources, or wrestling-specific stuff! Also feel free to post in the wrestling thread! Lately, that thread has mostly been used by rodan and I for posting about things weāre learning or find cool in our wrestling reading. Itās fun to have a dedicated place for that, especially since we can include match links or other fun stuff and discuss things without worrying about cluttering other threads.
Migaku talks a little more in depth about their thoughts on retiring cards. I donāt use Migaku, but I think I agree with their overall opinion here.
For me at least, itās not really about measuring progress (I think my overall number of cards Iāve learned does a fine job of measuring that), but more out of concern for my time. Iām probably going to be adding new cards to Anki for many years in the future. I donāt really want to have to deal with a lot of extremely common textbook vocab circulating back through and having to click āeasyā on hundreds and hundreds of cards that I already know extremely well.
I also think suspending cards on Anki is also a little more reliable than burning things on WK because Anki lets you grade yourself on how well you know something. If youāre not ready for a card to be suspended, you can always have it show it to you again at a lesser interval without it automatically knocking it back to a way earlier set interval like WK does. Itās a lot more forgiving.
I view SRS as sort of a stopgap, anyway. Itās a way to keep a bunch of words in my memory at once until Iām able to properly learn them. My ultimate goal is to eventually be able to move beyond SRS entirely, and learning to let go of individual cards is good practice for that, I think. If I ever get to a point where my active Anki deck has barely any cards left in it, at that point, Iāll probably be fluent enough to learn new words the same way I pick them up in English, haha!
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The only US company I watch is AEW but watch New Japan and Stardom quite regularly. Stardom become my favourite company over the past year. There is just an emotion to it that I think sets it apart.
I used to watch Tokio Joshi a lot a few years back but fell far behindā¦ I really liked that too. Itās not too serious and I just liked seeing everyone improving and it was just fun to watch. To be honest it was after watching their shows (and Hyper Misao especially) that I decided I had to finally learn Japanese.
I have decided to give DDT and Noah more of a go this year as well. I never watched Dragon Gate but am very tempted to try it out and havenāt seen an All-Japan card since the 90sā¦ Iām old.
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AEW is also pretty much the only US wrestling I watch at this point! I got into wrestling in 2019 because I found out about the Golden Lovers story, so I started out just watching DDT matches I barely understood, haha (I didnāt know really anything about the basic rules of wrestling at that point), then the first actual full show I ever watched was AEWās first show, Double or Nothing in 2019, which I watched on bad hotel internet while in the middle of moving across the country. From that point on, I got pretty hooked on watching shows as they happened live instead of watching old stuff, so, following both of the Golden Loversā current paths, I started watching NJPW, and kept up with AEW. It has been a pretty wild experience watching AEW grow from the beginning, especially as a new fan myself with literally no experience watching WWE whatsoever!
Iāve actually struggled to really get into Stardom, despite watching a whole lot of it and following it for a long period of time . The matches are good, but the storytelling has the tendency to sort of rip the rug out from under me, which makes it hard for me to get really invested. I think everything just moves too fast for me.
And TJPW is actually my favorite company! Iāve only been watching since late 2019, but Misao was the character that got me absolutely hooked. Her story that year was absolutely incredible. And yeah, itās definitely an incentive to learn for sure, especially now that Mr. Haku isnāt translating the shows anymore. One of my friends has been translating at least the post-match comments as best as she can, but itās sad to lose all of Misaoās in-ring shenanigans, which are such a huge part of her matches.
DDT and NOAH are both great! I got into both in 2020 during the beginning of the pandemic (Iād watched some scattered DDT off and on before that, but hadnāt been actively watching). Iāve been talking a lot more about DDT lately in this log and in the pro wrestling thread because I started translating the post-match comments for myself and a few friends after Mr. Haku stopped doing them. So if you want to know about current DDT stories, haha, thereās a fair amount of info on those floating around this thread and the other one . A little bit on NOAH, too, though Iām more of a casual watcher, so I miss a lot of shows.
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The real win with WK is the ordering and level system, in my opinion. Because items are unlocked in a constant trickle rather than in big clumps, itās harder to dig a big hole for yourself in the future: reviews for items in later stages tend to also be distributed evenly. Itās only slightly annoying if you have only a handful of ātoo easyā items in high stages to review on any given day, but if hundreds of items from two or three high-level stages are scheduled on the same day, then its more than an annoyance and āretiringā becomes mandatory.
FWIW, Iāve made it a habit to keep an eye on my timeline for the next 120 days to ensure my latter-stage items are reasonably spread out:
It looks like Sunday, Feb 13 and Monday, March 7 might be a little annoying, for example, but perhaps not as bad as Jan 29. I wish some of the 67 master and enlightened items (blue) fell on the 28th, for example instead of all on the 29th.
Of course, only a fraction of these will be āeasy,ā and Iāll only be annoyed by the easy master items one more time (the easy enlightened items will say goodbye).
Anyway, I think burning is mostly a good thing, but Iām not sure if one or two more stages wouldnāt be better. I know Iāve been surprised at several of the items Iāve burned (answered correctly after a four month hiatus but still not confident in my answers). I think an 8 month and even 16 month interval might make me more comfortable, personally.
This, of course, is a blessing and a curse. I suspect most people donāt click ādifficultā as often as they should. I also suspect that WKās automatic got-em-both-right-in-one metric works just as well if not better in practice.
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Thatās crazy about Stardom because I did feel the same way when I watched it at first but then it just started to click with me this year. Back when I was giving both it and TJPW a go at first I was much more into TPJW because of the charactersā¦ even without understanding Japanese the characters came through.
I just watched the TJPW Dash! Glide! Nagoya Castle! show from December as my jumping back on point and there are a lot of new wrestlers on the undercard especially bit Miyu is still a boss so at least it was familiar that way.
DDT is a promotion I always wanted to sample so I will have to check out those threads for recommendations.
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Honestly, Iāve found Anki to be way less stressful than WK, personally . WKās strict intervals can be very punishing. And Anki actually does a better job of unlocking items in a constant trickle than WK does! The default settings only give you 20 new cards a day per deck (ten new items total if you have both recognition and recall cards). In WK, if you donāt pace yourself, itās quite possible to do over 100 lessons in one day. I strictly control how many lessons I do each day, but thatās a limit I imposed on WK myself. In Anki, thatās literally baked into the program.
Lately, Iāve been experimenting with adding new kanji to Anki, as well as the vocab I found them in, and it actually has worked pretty well for me. I feel like Iāve been able to learn both the new kanji and the new vocab, so thatās a great sign for when Iām eventually done with WK and am on my own, haha!
The thing about Anki is the intervals arenāt as regular and rigid as WKās. They become customized according to how much trouble the word is giving you. And youāre never going to have the problem of accidentally burning an item you werenāt sure about, because if you didnāt actually know it that well, you can click the āhardā button and it will show it to you sooner, or if you really didnāt know it, you can basically reset it entirely (then move it up faster if needed the next few times you see it).
Iām pretty strict with my Anki decks. If I get the reading or the definition wrong at all, I click the āagainā button and reset the interval. If I look at it and am able to figure it out, but it takes a minute, I click āhardā. Pretty much anything else I click āgoodā, unless itās an extremely easy word like ćÆć or something. So by the time stuff reaches the really high intervals, I usually know it really well. So far, the only words that have gotten up there are extremely common words that Iām very familiar with. I donāt think I need to be practicing ćÆć, at this point, even ten years from now .
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Yeah, I think TJPW has extremely strong characters! Thatās one of the most important things for me in wrestling, so I think itās a large part of the appeal. I also think TJPW does really good long-term stories, which is another of my favorite things in wrestling (when you get into an entire medium because of a decade plus long love storyā¦ ). In Stardom, the stories are much, much more short-term. I donāt really blame them, considering how early many of their wrestlers retire, and how they have a history of their top talent getting poached by WWE, but itās not really my favorite style of storytelling.
The other thing I really like about TJPW is their emphasis on tag teams, and the way that tag teams are absolutely central to their storytelling. I think their tag team tournament this year and last year are great examples of that, because they have so many teams with such rich history that has developed over years. Something I struggled with in Stardom was that over the three years since I started watching, the teams in tag league have looked completely different every time, because the characters and faction memberships have changed so much, and the roster has changed a lot.
It makes it hard for me to get invested because it just feels like if I really fall in love with a particular tag team relationship, it will likely fall apart or become completely different within the next year. Whereas with TJPW, the Magical Sugar Rabbits have years of history behind them, and Shoko and Misaoās team is fun both conceptually (a kaiju teaming up with a hero!) as well as having lots of fun history (plus the deeper lore of Misaoās past tag team historyā¦), and Itoh and Miyuās team has basically been built up to since Itoh started as a wrestler. As a tag team fan, I love this kind of stuff. But other fans think it feels too static because the changes within the characters and those relationships are a lot more subtle than you typically see in most wrestling.
And yeah, Miyu is indeed still a boss! She has softened a little bit, though, at least in one way. She really loves Itoh now, and Itoh has finally gotten over her insecurity enough to team with Miyu without constantly being afraid of getting overshadowed by her more powerful tag partner.
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Thatās fascinating! It been several years since I even tried to use Anki. My short lived experience was awful. Partly because I barely understood the concepts behind an SRS, but mostly because everything could be tuned and I tried to figure out reasonable settings on my own. I know there are a bunch of plugins, tools, and guides out now that would likely make my experience much more pleasant. Iād not heard of Migaku until this thread, for example.
Serious question, no snark: if Anki works for you, why are you here? (Aside from the interesting people you meet here, of course. 
).
Since youāve real experience with both, Iād really like to hear your take on the pros and cons. My own experience was fascination with Anki at first, then frustration, then WK and never look back. I donāt have nearly enough experience using Anki well to do a fair comparison.
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Oh, I use Anki and WK for different things! I would never have gotten anywhere with kanji without WK. I just didnāt know how to learn them, and I had no concept of radicals, semantic-phonetic composition, rendaku, onāyomi and kunāyomi readings, jukugo, or anything. I think if I quit WK today, I could probably get by on Anki just fine, but it would be a lot of recreating work that WK already does for me, and Iād be missing out on the semantic-phonetic composition information and that sort of thing. But WK did teach me how to learn kanji, and now that I have that skill, I could theoretically go off on my own (and I will have to someday, since level 60 is not reaching the end of learning Japanese!). Iām just planning on making the most out of the program as long as I have it.
Currently, I use Anki for three things that WK cannot do:
- Learning the vocab for Minna no Nihongo
- Learning kanji that arenāt on WK, and testing myself on learning how to write some kanji that are on WK
- Learning vocab that I find in the wild that isnāt in WK
I think itās really important for WK users to figure out a plan for the post-WK life, because there will be kanji you need to learn that arenāt in WK, and thereās loads and loads of vocab that isnāt covered here. Itās possible to learn without SRS, of course, but I think if youāre someone who does work well with SRS, Anki is worth learning.
It definitely takes a lot of tailoring to figure out how to make the most of Anki, but I think the flexibility of the program and the fact that it integrates with so many other tools are some of its biggest strengths. For beginners, these things arenāt super necessary, since you can get pretty far with pre-made decks on Kitsun, Torii, etc. But once you reach an intermediate level and beyond, most people want to tailor their studies to the material theyāre particularly interested in, and Anki (combined with Yomichan or Migaku) really shines in this regard.
Part of why I went with it from the beginning is because I knew Iād likely be using it when I reach an intermediate/advanced level, anyway, and Iād rather just get used to it now rather than having to suddenly learn another new platform. I also think thereās something extremely empowering about realizing that you donāt have to stick to someone elseās premade list of words, since you have the ability to create a flashcard from any word with the click of a button. And I can customize what my deck looks like, as well as the types of information it has. Iām hoping to go full monolingual definitions someday!
Itāll be at least another year before I run out of WK lessons and move to Anki primarily, but Iām looking forward to that because itāll be a lighter SRS workload, and Iāll have more freedom to learn more words that I choose to learn instead of being beholden to WKās list. But thatās only possible for me because of the foundation that WK has already given me.
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