Pace of Reviews
Training recognition speed & recommended add-ons
In Anki, your goal should be to train your brain to read/recognize the target word as quickly as possible. This is because the ultimate goal of Anki as a tool is to reduce the amount of friction you encounter when immersing. Anki reduces friction by re-testing your brain on kanji readings, briefly re-exposing your brain to words you have mined, and most importantly, reducing the time it takes for you to read words, all 3 of which are extremely useful for your immersion.
Start out at your own pace, but over time aim to reduce average seconds-per-rep to below 5 seconds for beginners, and below 3-4 seconds for Intermediates and above. Use the PassFail add-on to limit answers to "Good" or "Fail" for even quicker reviews.
This doesn't mean that Speedfocus should auto-flip cards when it reaches 5 seconds. Cards where you allow yourself to "struggle" for the answer can provide the most benefit. If you feel like you can get to the answer but it will take a little more time, give yourself 10-15 seconds and then mark it wrong (even if you eventually came to the correct answer). This way you get the benefits of allowing your brain to work hard to recall the answer, but you can quickly review it again to train recognition speed.
How Much Anki You Should Do
The 80/20 Rule: Anki is the fuel, immersion is the engine
Anki should always make up a fraction of your study time compared to immersion. In Anki, you only need to learn the initial spark of a new word. To make that word actually stick and transform into intuitive ability, you must immerse in native content.
Drilling readings, priming new vocabulary, and reviewing SRS intervals. Never spend more than 45–60 minutes in Anki per day.
Reading novels, visual novels, manga, watching shows, and listening to native content where words appear in context.
Take at absolute maximum 10 seconds per card
If you can't remember something in 10 seconds, then most likely you won't remember it in 15, 30 seconds or even minutes. Fail the card if you can't remember it in that timeframe. 10 seconds is a maximum—try to aim for under 5 seconds.
How Daily New Cards Impact Reviews
Simulating long-term review loads & the compounding cost of inconsistency
How Daily New Cards Impact Reviews
Simulated review curves under FSRS parameters at 85% retention, assuming a maximum of 10 seconds per card.
How Missing 1 Day Affects Your Workload & Echoes for Days
Missing a day makes the review amount of the following day double, as well as the time needed to finish those reviews. If you are expected to do around 85 reviews on a given day and you miss it, you will have to do ~180+ reviews next time. From a larger volume of reviews done at an unoptimal retention interval, you will press "Again" more frequently, causing those failed cards to echo on short graduating intervals for the following days and compounding on top of your deck's natural growth.Daily reviews naturally trend upward over time as your deck expands. The green dashed line shows an illustrative baseline progression. Missing a day creates temporary compounding debt on top of this growth before stabilizing into a new normal that is a bit closer to what was expected before.
How Irregular Study Avalanches Into an Unmanageable Backlog
While missing a single day is a temporary setback, being constantly inconsistent (skipping 1–2 days every few days) triggers a dreaded death spiral. When cards are reviewed late, memory retrievability drops, increasing your lapse rate. Instead of recovering, your daily queue snowballs, while your retention collapses.
I hate Anki and I dread doing it everyday so much so it demotivates me
Avoiding burnout & prioritizing sustainability
Then drop it.
If you don't do Anki at all, then make sure to counteract it with tons of active immersion, where you read and listen a lot. Otherwise you'll keep forcing yourself and eventually burn out. You can learn a language with and without Anki.
Warning for Beginners:
If you are just getting started and drop Anki right away, you will have a hard time advancing forward into immersion. You need some kind of foundation to immerse, and that initial springboard (e.g. Kaishi 1.5k) is usually achieved fastest through Anki. Once you have built that core base, you have much more freedom.
How to eliminate the dread without dropping Anki completely:
- Split your reviews: You don't have to finish Anki in one monolithic session. Do 5–10 minute bursts on your phone during dead time throughout the day.
- Lower your new cards to zero: If you feel overwhelmed by a backlog, freeze new cards completely for a few days. Knock out only your reviews until your deck feels breezy again.
- Don't do Custom Study: Once your daily reviews are finished, close Anki and go immerse! Spending extra time doing custom study is better spent consuming stories.
When you can stop doing Anki
Anki is always good to do, but after doing a lot of immersion you will reach a point where new cards in Anki have such a low frequency that they are barely used in your target language. Here you have three choices:
- Continue learning rare words: If learning them has specific personal value or utility to your domain.
- Suspend rare words: Focus only on reviewing your existing cards and mining more common words instead. Being intermediate, you can better judge if a word is common enough to bother with.
- Stop doing Anki completely: You can only do this and have minimal drawbacks if immersion is part of your daily life so much so the contents you are immersing with are part of who you are. The target language is no longer a subject to be studied, but a medium for living. At that point, you pick up words naturally just like in your native language and remember them easily without Anki.
Leeches
Handling stubborn cards without frustration
Suspend or delete them.
When a card keeps failing repeatedly (a “leech”), do not waste mental energy repeatedly getting frustrated over it. Suspend or delete it immediately without guilt. You will encounter that expression through immersion again and again, and exposure over time will balance it out. When it reappears in a different, more memorable scene, it will often stick effortlessly.
The Mnemonic Solution
If you really want to keep a stubborn word in your deck, create a mnemonic to remember it. Make your mnemonics as weird, bizarre, and visceral as you can. The weirder the mental image, the more readily your brain remembers it. This website can also help in this process by using the radicals in the kanji to create a story around it.
Immersion Clubs
Choose your preferred medium to immerse in and quickly mine
