I currently do Wanikani every day:
All Reviews
I try to maintain about 50 cards in Apprentice and do Lessons to increase the value.
After that I do Textfugu with Anki.
All Reviews (around 100 per day) and 10 new cards per day.
I have a Deck with vocabulary for every Season and Chapter.
My Notes have the following cards:
Vocab-Kanji → English
Vocab-Kana → English
Vocab-Kanji → Vocab-Kana
English → Vocab-Kana
I learn every vocab for a chapter until I think that I got everything in my head.
Then I do the grammar for this chapter and add notes about it to my grammar deck.
If the vocab has kanji I don’t know I look them up in wanikani and add a note for them to my kanji deck. I delete the kanji if I reached the wanikani level for it.
I often ask my self if its a good way or if there are better ways.
Make sure you don’t forget to practice listening and speaking.
Is “Vocab-Kana → English” with Japanese Audio instead of text? If not, I don’t see a reason to study the Kana-writing of words if you already study the Kanji.
Really only need 1 card in Anki per word, kanji/kana (depending on what is the common usage) → English. Doing all the extra cards is just more work than is necessary. Doing English → Vocab isn’t worth it either, especially once you get farther in and have a lot of synonyms. You won’t ever know which kana the card is actually asking for and end up putting in a “right” answer but for the wrong card etc. Also, having 4 cards for one vocab and only doing 10 new cards a day means you’re only really learning 2.5 new words a day on average, whereas with only 1 card per vocab you’ll learn 10 new words a day.
@Heiopei
Every note has audio but “Vocab-Kana → English” is Text.
Your right I should add audio only.
@AzusaChan
I have (Vocab-Kanji → English, Vocab-Kana → English) because sometimes textfugu uses kana instead of Kanji
I have a context field in case of a word like River or Skin (かわ)
I understand your point but how do I learn english → japanese without it?
Oh, so you’re only using 2 cards? I guess I misunderstood the OP a bit.
Anyways, as for learning E → J, as you build up your passive vocabulary (J → E) you can turn that into active vocabulary just by practicing speaking/texting natives.
For me, I make cards with Kanji on front, then the kana, example sentence with the word in it and english on the back. Of course, as you start to master the word etc you don’t have to read the entire back every time and can just hit that “good” button on anki. As you build up your passive vocab, it will make reading & listening easier and as you communicate you will turn it into active vocab.
Practice writing and speaking complete sentences. There are quite a few places to try this such as hinative, lang8, italki, and even the japanese/japanese only subsection of the WK forums. You can get feedback from natives and other students there, so they make for excellent practice sites. Context fields can help alleviate some issues, but after a point it gets difficult to manage and doesn’t really convey the natural usage of the words. It’s not uncommon to see people complain about something sounding like “translated english” in the same way we often joke about “engrish”. Using these methods also serve as a way to practice other grammar points, such as particle usage, conjugations, set expressions, ect., as well.
Example
Imo, it’s much easier to learn this kind of thing through experience than marking up cards and notes all the time. This still leaves other words like 娘（むすめ）、少女（しょうじょ）、女子（じょし）and so on.
Word Note: Due to political correctness, the more formal term 女性 [じょせい] is now more prevalent [than 女]. Girl is typically 女の子. Man is 男. Male is 男性 [だんせい]. Boy is 男の子. The terms 男の人and 女の人 can also be used as the polite forms of “man” and “woman” respectively.
I wouldn’t make sentence cards, just add them on the back of the card as an example sentence for the word you’re learning. Too often your brain will recognize the first few words and then just know the meaning of the sentence by the context of anki & beginning word clues etc. So you end up not really “learning” the sentence, but just learning how to recognize what you’re being tested on. For me, reading in the wild (NHK Easy News, manga, etc) is the best way to read sentences instead of via flashcards.
If you mean how you should do the example sentences on the back of the card, add however much information you feel is necessary. I don’t put things like “polite form” because if I read the sentence I know what form it is in. If you’re having troubles with something like that, then it could be a good idea to do that in the beginning when making cards.
With all that said, everybody learns a bit differently so I’m just giving you advice on what helps work for me & my reasons why. So try to experiment with some things if needed and find what works best for you, and most importantly, make sure you are having fun with the material you are studying with!
