Flashcard Composition

How do people usually make their flashcards? I’ve had a modest mining deck for a while, but I’m becoming a bit wary of its effectiveness.

Basically, my notes are composed of three cards: one to remember the meaning, one for the reading and a third one that shows the meaning and reading and then asks to remember its writing (e.g. given the meaning “to flee” and the reading にげる, remember that it’s written 逃げる). For redundancy and keeping information to a minimum.
I want to see them in separate ocasions so I also use the bury related cards option, but then batches form where first I’ll see the meaning, the next day the reading, then writing, then repeat the cycle with the next batch. The whole process is much slower than having one card per note but I want to avoid using overloaded ones.

I think I’ll start including sentences I understand to review multiple things at the same time, but I’m still not quite sure how to go about it.

My setup is not too different from yours actually. I can have up to 4 cards per note:

  1. Kanji → Reading + Meaning (for reading practice)
  2. Kana → Meaning (for listening and kana-reading practice)
  3. English → Reading (for speaking practice)
  4. Kana + Meaning → Kanji (for writing practice)

I went with this for quite a while (up to N3) but I’ve somewhat cut down on (mostly) the cards (2) and (3) because it’s getting a tad much. To cut down, I mainly added fields where I can specify whether I want the Kanji card (I deselect this on a “usually kana-only” word) and the English card, and I moved the unwanted Kana cards to a different deck (because the Kana card is generated for each note).
I’m currently taking a break from Anki as I’m trying to get WK to a level where I can stop for a while (probably around 53 or so, so almost there) and after that I will pick up Anki again and see how good my retention will turn out to be without studying each word in 4 directions :sweat_smile:

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I’ve always used a pretty barebones style.

For grammar I would have a card with a sentence on the front and bold the grammar point. On the back there would be a translation of the sentence and basically if I understood the sentence then it got marked right.

For vocab I would always just do wk style with the word on the front and I have to get the meaning and reading. I also recently started adding the sentence where I saw it from to the back since I found more convenient ways to do that. No furigana.

I never did kanji cards and would just learn the kanji in words. Past a certain point you don’t need help with the reading in a lot of cases thanks to the phonetic component. In cases where it does use a weird reading, it was always so memorable that the reading always stuck like in 行脚. Same for recognizing the kanji. Usually either I was able to associate it with another kanji because it was an alternate form (汚ー>穢) or its shape was unique and memorable (鼎、漿, 濤). And then the ones that looked similar weren’t used in similar words so they didn’t give me much issue despite not paying it any attention, (欒ー攣, 冶ー治). There probably were some kanji that I would have benefitted from having the card for, but idk if there would have been any way of knowing which was worth it at the time.

So basically I was as lazy as possible with my cards.

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Oh good point, I forgot to mention that this is the same for me. Except that I added Kanji writing cards for Kanken prep, but they are in a different deck altogether.

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Yeah, it’s a lot. I’ve been taking it easy with only 10 new cards per day, but I can see it getting overwhelming with more than that. I’m thinking about making a single card with the vocab on the front, then a voiced sentence on the back with optional meaning and reading. I’d rather show the sentence on the front but I think that’d be too complicated, I don’t know how I’d automatize the highlighting of the vocab to be review.

This is getting me to reconsider making kanji cards. I just really like knowing the meaning of each character beforehand, y’know? I feel it’s quicker than absorbing it from multiple words, what I’ve been doing is checking Taigaini Jisho to make sure it’s relevant. Today, I almost added 眷 from 眷属, turns out it’s got no use outside of that.

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I use two one-click flashcard addons, Migaku and Yomichan, and mine anime/j-dramas for sentences containing a word I want to learn. With Yomichan, I mine articles and such, or create a notepad file of sentences that I can mine from.
What each card comprises of is:

  1. Front of the card has the audio and the sentence containing the word I wanna learn.
  2. Back has the meaning, reading and pitch notes (if/when available).

I’m not sure if I’m learning the words any better than I did in the past but eh. I try to keep my anki time pretty low so I only add 30 new cards a day spread across all my decks, any more than that and I die inside slightly :slight_smile:

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I’d rather be afraid that I don’t properly learn the word in itself but instead only know the meaning of the sentence, so I’m not using example sentences in the query part. I do sometimes add example sentences and display them on the back of the card.

You have to type in each sentence manually anyways, so you can highlight it un-automatically in each sentence, no?

Kanjipedia lists a few words that use this kanji, but the question is whether they are being used in books and stuff, which I have no idea about.
(Also note that most of the “meaning” they give is assigned to individual words, so I’m really wondering whether the more exotic kanji really have one core meaning that’s worth learning, or whether it somehow turns into patchwork more often than not…)

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There is already an effect on recall by virtue of memorizing cards in the repeated environment of Anki, I think if the sentences allows one to review multiple things at the same time and remember the specific vocab in context it could be pretty nifty. It’s what Cure Dolly recommends and she’s got some damn good tips.
For the cards, I use Yomichan integrated with Anki. Very quick once set up. You choose what to add to the fields and one option is the sentence the vocab’s in.
By default, I trust meaning to have a base that extends through metaphor instead of just a list. You could add 刻 as engrave, carve, cut, mince, or you could say it’s about removing unnecessary parts from a material to make something. 発生 being defined as ある状態が生じること was pretty crazy.

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