Memrise WK Expansion pack or Anki Core 10k?

Japanese Language
#1

Hey everyone!

My goal is to find the most effective way to learn all of the vocabulary that doesn’t appear in WaniKani.

I’m almost half way through the Anki Core 10k Pack, but I found out today that there is a WK Expansion Pack for Memrise.

I just wanted to know which one is the most beneficial? Should I drop the Anki Core 10k and just go with the memrise expansion pack?
I feel like I don’t retain so much on Anki since there are a lot of Kanji that I haven’t learned yet, but it does help to learn through context with all of the example sentences.

Let me know what you all think!

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#2

I’d stick with the Anki deck \o/

I don’t like Anki because it’s not user-friendly, but Memrise’s way of doing things hurts your actual learning so… avoid it :grimacing:

But if you’re willing to jump to somewhere, I’d suggest jumping to Kitsun. It’s a SRS platform created by the WK user @neicul and it’s basically incorporating the best of WK/Anki into the flashcard world while still focusing on being user-friendly. The growth of new features has been tremendous, so I’d check it out \o\

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#3

Interesting, thank you for your reply! What does Memrise do wrong though? I’ve been using it for Genki I & II and Tobira and I feel like it’s working quite well for me, I don’t like learning Kanji on there though.

Regarding Kitsun, are there all of the ‘necessary’ vocabulary that isn’t in WaniKani? My aim is to find the best way to learn all of those words that don’t appear in WK.

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#4

First of all, some of the changes they’ve been making regards user-made decks and the new design isn’t… well… making Memrise any better :grimacing:

With Memrise, the main complaint would be the fact that you’re limited in typing. Wanikani forces you to type your answers because that reinforces your retention. Memrise’s whole system of multiple choice, giving you the letters of the answer, etc doesn’t really compare to the power of actually typing the answers. You can’t really guess how the SRS intervals work either.

Kitsun is basically a system that has a community center, where you can find decks such as the famous Core 10k, the Genki deck vocab and a Katakana deck with 4500 words. The main difference here being that it’s extremely easy to send suggestions to deck creators on Kitsun, so decks there are constantly improving in quality due to the community’s effort. Memrise doesn’t allow that, and Anki is based on dowloading decks and that’s it. On Kitsun, since everything happens online, you get the updated versions the moment you open Kitsun. I’ve had 2800 suggestions approved by deck creators so far, just so you can see how things are quite higher in quality :slight_smile:

Some cool creators like @hinekidori are also actively there creating decks to everyone. Their Core 10k deck looks like this:

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#5

Thank you very much for the detailed explanations! I will give Kitsun a try and report back here what I think about it in a few days :+1: Exciting to see some great alternatives.

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#6

If you have questions, just post it on Kitsun’s thread here on the forums :slight_smile: The creator will certainly reply to you.

#7

that’s like a lot of vocab to learn. :sweat_smile:

If you’re already halfway the Core10k (5,000 words) you have enough vocab under your radar to just pick up a book, watch shows, etc; overall you can just enjoy activities and take from there the vocab that it will be usefull too you.
If you don’t read newspapers much (which is where vocab from the Core10K comes from) that second half of the deck might probe to be less valuable than the first half.

Since you’re using Anki, lately I’ve found that using tools like Voracious for watching shows and a Kindle to read with the vocab builder feature (saves looked up words with the corresponding line from where it came from) have made transfering new words to Anki as efficient as it comes while keeping things much more related to the content I’m consuming, instead of a premade list that someone came up with which might or might not reflect what you’ll progressively encounter.

Also if you are using frequency lists because you are not sure if something you plan adding to the SRS will end up been uncommon (and might not worth the effort currently just now), there’s an add-on for that too in Anki, both for frequency in books and in shows (anime / jdrama) .

So yeah. Anki has a lot of merits for making you the one who choose what you learn. It might take some days to make or (even easier) reaconditionate a premade deck to suit your needs and then… you’re set to go :slightly_smiling_face:

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#8

That’s likely to be harder than you expect. For example, the 6th edition Kojien dictionary has around 240,000 entries. Good luck! :+1:

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#9

Hahaha I mean the necessary vocabulary that doesn’t appear in WaniKani, not 100% EVERY SINGLE VOCAB NO EXCEPTION! :smile:

Thank you very much @Ncastaneda for your suggestion, I will be sure to give it a try!

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#10

Yeah, totally agree with this. I used Memrise for a few months and while I could often answer the questions during reviews, it was mostly because you would get so many choices that couldn’t possibly be the answer that you can usually get the right answer more than 50% of the time through simple elimination. If I would ignore the multiple choice typing and try to type in readings on my own using a kana keyboard, my retention was way, way lower than between WK’s SRS levels.

The multiple choice is just simply a terrible idea and gives you a false sense of learning.

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#11

It’s not that bad. At 50 words/day, it will take you around 14 years :eyes:

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#12

I can already see the next project. :smiley: How are those 100 Manga coming along?

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#13

Yeah, reviewing a card with the content and context from a show that I’ve watched is something else when I compare it to vocab reviews in WK or vocab lists.

When I get a card like this:

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I remember not only the meaning of the word, but the context; so If it’s a word with multiple definitions I can see where they fit in a given situation. Besides that you get a sense for where those words are actually used. Then specially for formal words you start getting the “when and where” of such words.
All this I always felt was missed in WK (cause well it’s a kanji app after all), and with vocab lists it’s kinda the same imo.

Today I was talking about this topic too with a guy who is learning japanese following his jiujitsu passion… and well he was buying some DVD’s to rip that video and subs and make exactly this, 'cause why would he want to learn the 10k more common words appearing in newspapers if he’s into martial arts?? the tools are all there… :man_shrugging:

don’t make it about learning words, make it about what interests you, and then learn those words :+1:

Anyway… a bit carried away there :sweat_smile:

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#14

Going great :stuck_out_tongue: I left it at 0/0 on that reading thread to create some suspense :crazy_face:

Next project is probably figuring out how to learn 2 languages at the same time :grimacing:

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#15

Nice. So you’ll be going 0 to 100, very exciting. :+1: :smiley:

Depends on the languages you’re learning, I’d guess. Learning two languages that are similar to each other has drawbacks and advantages, and the opposite would be true for very dissimilar ones.

Of course, then you have to factor in possible similarity to already known languages too!

Are we talking about Japanese +1, or 2 entirely new ones, both starting from scratch?

Also, which language(s)? :smiley: (Arabic? :thinking:)

I get the feeling I should also address the OP. Sorry bout that. :smiley:

Personally I tried Kitsun, Torii, and floflo for additional learning, and none of those stuck. I like Kitsun for the layout and the user base, I guess?, Torii for the convenience (vocab is pre-sorted by WK level of the Kanji when applicable, otherwise I think it’s sorted by frequency, and it’s also only vocab you don’t learn on WK <-this actually seems to fit what you’re looking for pretty well? You can also suspend words you already know), and floflo for the possibility to view vocab that appears in a specific text and sort by frequency.

They all have a different focus and will fit different study types and needs. If you try them out, maybe one of them will be it for you. Or not, maybe you already have your ideal study tool. :wink:

For me it’s just that I’m pretty saturated in the SRS field already with WK and the Anki I’m doing. Keeping track of another SRS system became too much of a hassle. Maybe when I’m done with slow down on WK I’ll go back to one of them.

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#16

It’s not that hard as it might seem. :eyes: You can basically do one language full-time while spending from 10 minutes to an hour every day on another language. Worked for me just fine. /o/ Then after finishing some big tasks with Japanese, you might spend more time on another language, once it becomes intermediate-like level (and you can start reading something) And with Kitsun/Anki memorizing vocab is not a problem. \o/

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#17

Japanese +1! I’m not that crazyyyyyyy :crazy_face:

Yeaah, they’re not very similar, so that’s good :stuck_out_tongue: I’d say that just the fact that I’ll only have to do 2 layouts (target word => meaning | meaning => target word) instead of 3 (target word => reading | target word => meaning | meaning => target word) for SRSing vocab is making me feel a lot more comfortable. Plus, the alphabet is not the roman one, but it doesn’t deal with kanji so that’s good :stuck_out_tongue:

Not Arabic, sorry :stuck_out_tongue: But I want to keep it a secret for now :eyes:

Ohhh, you seem to have a lot of experience learning two languages at the same time, huh? Anything else you’d like to share with us? :eyes:

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#18

Not much, to be honest, the only thing I found difficult is learning Chinese while having Japanese at not such a high level. That was messing me up. But if the language is not similar to Japanese, I think you might be just fine /o/

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#19

Portuguese?

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#20

Yes, how did you know?? The truth is… I’m Japanese and I was using WK to learn English all along. Now I’m going after Portuguese: the coolest language in the world :eyes:

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