Yeah of course, after a couple years of using it and refining how I go about it, hopefully there is at least one thing I know that’ll help you out.
So just to generally structure this, I’ll write out general things that I do and why I do them so you can decide if you agree with my reasoning and want to do them yourself.
-
Search the word in my book before adding it on some occasions: So this one is really only doable if you have the ebook imo, but it comes with a few benefits. To illustrate a couple, lets take one of the first words I learned on floflo: 素振り. This word usually means behavior or something, but it can also mean practice swinging. Rather than just going with “behavior” I checked in my book and realized that it was used by a girl practicing kendo. In that case, the reading is not そぶり but rather すぶり. Thanks to checking ahead, I avoided learning the wrong definition and reading for the word I was going to be coming across. Basically anytime I see a word that has a lot of very different definitions or even readings, I will check. The only con is that it can rarely result in spoilers and really requires an ebook.
-
Only add the words that you are going to do the lessons for that day: Its not a big deal if you go over a bit, but I would avoid putting like 100 words in your queue. The reason is basically what I mentioned last paragraph about how usually you have to know which definition and reading you want to learn for some words. If you add them too far ahead, you will end up forgetting which definition to use for some of them and it’ll just be an unnecessary waste of time. Been there done that.
-
Learn your x amount of words for the day and then read your book until roughly the last word you added: Two things here: Seeing words in context is important. Its important that after adding your word to your srs, you actually read your book and see how it was used, by what character, and in what situation. Secondly, I recommend adding words beforehand because you want to minimize interruptions while reading. You’re already going to be stopping to look stuff up, so theres no reason to pile more on top of that. If you add your words and then go read, around the time you are done reading the first review for those words will be coming up. Do those reviews and try to connect them to the sentence you saw them in to boost memory. If you can remember where you saw a word, your chances of remembering it shoot up a frickton.
-
Get used to making your own mnemonics: Its a bit of a pain, but you’ll get better and start creating your own patterns. I’ve gotten lazier with it since a lot of words I add are more obscure now, but at the start its important to spend a solid amount of time during your lessons to make sure you really understand stuff. Higher accuracy means faster reviews and less reviews to do, so its a worthwhile investment of your time.
-
Have fun: Read shit you wanna read. Don’t even bother worrying about what will be the most beneficial for you. You might feel some obligation to start with something easy or something that isn’t a fantasy with a lot of “weird” vocab, but at the end of the day you’re gonna learn all the same words eventually. Read what interests you and you’ll naturally work harder and pay more attention, so your studies will progress faster.
-
Understand that reading at the start is going to be hard no matter what
Rather than type a paragraph, heres a picture from my journal when I started 3 years ago
61 goddamn days to read my first book and I added 1160 words to my srs. All those words were from the frequency 2 list (meaning they appeared 2+ times in the book.). But notice how the second book took far far less work. Things get a lot easier really quick, you just gotta put in work.
Final notes: This has all been preferential, but this last part is especially preferential. Personally, at the start I learned everything in the frequency 2 list. After a few months, I started doing the frequency 2 list and overlapping frequency 1 lists between your book and the next ones you wanna read. Once you get to the point where there are like less than 400 unknown words in your book TOTAL, I recommend learning every word you don’t know in the book.
I also didn’t know you could manually set it to the frequency you want, so that’s really handy as well.
