おはようございますみんな！I wanted to amp up my kanji learning and downloaded a kanji deck and a radical deck off of the anki website. I expected it to be look like wanikani where you are shown the kanji and you input its reading and meaning. Apparantly, it just shows the kanji and it’s readings. I’m at a loss here. Can anyone pelase help me explain the concept. ありがとうございます！
Yeah, Anki is a bit harder to figure out than WK, especially if you want to customise it.
Until you get a better answer from someone more experienced with it than me, I think the basic idea is that ultimately you grade yourself. When shown a card, you try to work out the answer (and depending on the deck that might mean remembering the meaning or reading or kanji for what you’re presented with). Then when you have an answer in mind, you click to see the other side so you can see if you were right or not, then tell the program how you did. If you were right and it was easy, the program will wait for longer before showing you the card again. If you were wrong, you’ll see it much sooner. If you got it right but it was hard, you’ll see it fairly soon but less so than if you got it completely wrong.
Basically the principle is like WK - flashcards, spaced repetition system - but you’re marking yourself manually. I find that time-consuming and more bothersome, personally, but Anki is useful and versatile for learning vocab that WK doesn’t cover, and I expect to have to make my peace with it sooner or later. It also takes a degree of self-discipline and honesty with yourself - there’s much more potential to convince yourself that you were “close enough” or “knew it really” and mark yourself as having done better than you really did, which doesn’t help you.
Like I said, though, Anki is flexible. Though I haven’t tried the following personally, it came to mind and might be of interest to you if you prefer WK to Anki but still want to learn Japanese things with an SRS outside of WK (I don’t know if it’s still maintained or still works): /t/AnkiWaniKani-20/9751/1
Alternatively, Memrise might be worth a look if you haven’t tried it already: https://www.memrise.com/
thank you
To go along with Horusscope’s link there is also a thread with a number of ANKI decks set up to imitate WaniKani’s format. Try them out and see how they work for you.
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