Yeah, learning kanji with words (and words with sentences) is essential, for this sorta reason imo. My issue is more I keep mixing up similar, kinda related kanji (ex 露 霧 霞 or 裾 袖 袂 袴) or something like 忌 - I’ll probably get 禁忌 or (less often) 忌々しい from context, but I’ve totally forgotten the kanji itself. Or I’ll recognize 趣味, but didn’t recognize that first kanji, when I see it in 趣旨
Yeah this is great - I’m just kinda hitting the limits/shortcomings for it. Sounds like it’s working well for you though!
Speaking of WK (which I no longer use), I’ve been thinking that if I wanna practice writing, I could just go through the kanji in the order they have them there. Theoretically I could use any order, but I like theirs, and related words are right there if I want them.
I switched to JP-JP cards to slow myself down a bit. Tho since I’m reading & visiting my mom today, the reviews will probably pile up on their own anyway
All the kanji in the jpdb reviews has been torture - and it was definitely a good idea. I keep getting tripped up on so many similar kanji - so now it’s forcing me to internalize the difference.
After getting overwhelmed by review count (too many decks), I’ve decided to stick to anime (or custom) decks going forward - since they’re comparatively small, and I can go in small chunks. Since I don’t have any specific show I’m using them for rn, I’m just gonna do in difficulty (remaining words) order
Phase 1 decks
Deck
Known
Total
Remaining
拝啓、在りし日に咲く花たちへ
9
11
2
シムーン ゲーム
152
187
35
シムーン アニメ
224
299
75
処刑少女 (anime)
2923
3131
208
Remaining: 320
Phase 2 decks:
Deck
Known
Total
Remaining
水星の魔女
2802
3097
295
FSN UBW anime S1
3368
3709
341
SAO 1 anime
3873
4273
400
SAO 2 anime
4045
4608
563
FSN UBW anime S2
2644
3204
560
暁のヨナ
3842
4766
924
夏の少女は還る (maybe)
2996
3569
573
不登校の幼馴染… (maybe)
3355
3869
514
Kanji: 1163/1551
Long-term decks
Deck
Known
Total
Remaining
Fate (prologue)
3436
4153
717
声優ラジオ 7
3925
4850
925
鋼の錬金術師 2003
4846
6312
1466
薬屋のひとりごと 1
4522
6295
1773
処刑少女 3 (novel)
4798
6594
1796
Fate/Stay Night prologue
3350
4154
1904
SAO 6
6294
8625
2331
Flowers
6347
9311
2964
Katahane
8546
12244
3698
Fate (セーバー)
8848
13467
4619
For phase 1, I have about 536 words left, 321 of which are new. Hopefully a lot of the Simoun words will already be Known, once I hit them thought. I’ll try leaving the 処刑少女 deck in, even after I’m done w/ the anime, but I might just erase it instead, to keep the word counts down. Update: onto phase 2 now. Consolidating & keeping anime decks is working so far
Reading & Watching:
I won’t continue FSN rn (or probably until I’ve gone through the Saber route deck)
人斬り still have like 6.5 hrs left, cuz of all this SRS and stuff. Expect to finish at end of week
Stopped 花物語 上 | L38 for now, in the interest of keeping my reading pile manageable
Adding subs for 処刑少女 has made a huge difference. Wish I’d done from the beginning
Conversation lesson went pretty well. Thought I did a decent job of finding what I was trying to say most of the time, even if it was occasionally extremely 片言
I’m starting to think I should spend more time reading JP あらすじ for things I’m watching and reading, so I’ll be better able to describe them. Also I need to stop forgetting 多い lol
Isn’t it wild how like the most beginner words will trip you up? I had a similar realization lately that a lot of times the word I’m looking for is いっぱい
Well I got waaaay too into this, and I went through a ton of decks over the last few days. Been doing episode decks, and then consolidating when I finish the season. This has been brilliant, bc it’s small and associated word sets - so dopamine+ not getting overwhelmed. When too many reviews pile up 3-4 days later, I just delete the decks and re-add & do reviews, one by one. Some of the kanji really are torture though - especially if they’re unfamiliar. Otoh it feels somewhat vindicating to realize a lot of the kanji I’ve been confusing are actually similar - usually Kanji B will be “Kanji A but with an extra component” sorta thing
To my surprise, I wasn’t so crazy about the UBW 1 deck’s vocab set, and it didn’t really overlap with the VN prologue much - though it did with the Saber deck. Maybe I’ve just done the common vocab already.
New Game is turning out to be very easy so far, which is nice cuz SAO 2 has a few intense parts.
I did discover 2 LNs with a relatively small word count (500ish remaining) - one of which I’ve read already, and the other I’m actually interested in reading! But even that’s a lot in one set. Hopefully it will be lower by the time I’ve finished the anime decks.
It feels weird making so little reading progress lately, but otoh when I’ve sat down to read 『人斬り』少女、公爵令嬢の護衛になる | L27 I’ve felt a bit more confident. It’s the weekend now though, so I’ll definitely get a bunch in.
Realized something extremely beneficial (and dangerous)… https://jiten.moe/ exists, and had a ton of decks that jpdb does not. So I can export decks I’ve really been yearning for! Thx to @earwen for mentioning this a while back
jpdb crap
That said, I’m not adding anymore decks for a while, bc my active decks look like this (bold decks are active):
I’m more stressed by large word count than high review frequency
jpdb’s initial review period is too long for me
jpdb’s inability to do a single deck at a time is frustrating
Writing out the leeches helps, as do mnemonics
Writing a sentence with a vocab word from that kanji would probly be most optimal though
Blacklisting is a good idea sometimes
For learning new things, I still think text is much better. But SRS is good for reinforcing
So in the future, I’ll try to do less at once, with more frequent reviews… which for now means I deleted most of the decks (again)
Did a bit of “writing out the leeches” earlier. That plus mnemonics definitely help to some extent. But at this point I’m a bit fried, and have started blacklisting leeched or rare kanji, and some vocab. I might make those into an Anki deck.
Speaking of Anki, apparently there’s a way to do typing mode in Anki:
I do feel like my comprehension has gotten better lately - at least with watching shows with subs. Most of my seasonals have subs, surprisingly. Otoh my audio-only recognition is still まだまだ, as evidenced by my reading 明日の世界で星は煌めく 3. I did feel more comfortable reading the fantasy stuff in 百合姫2025年9月号 | L24?? and saw some of my vocab words pop up - so it’s been helpful.
Ended up dropping the BL club, cuz I just wasn’t in the mood for the book (tho I reserve the right to rejoin later). But anyway, given that 乙嫁語り and 百合オタ are starting next week, and VN club is starting, it’s better to drop. I haven’t quite been in the mood for 付き合ってあげてもいいかな 1 | L24 … tho now that I’ve finally grabbed it from the other room, I may just sit down & read it all in one sitting or something - just so there’s one less thing, and cuz it’s an easy read.
Still haven’t started my next non-book club novel (and not counting Memories Off in that). Hopefully I’ll do that today
Edit: I started Memories Off, and I can read faster than the slow auto (tho it’s a slight push), but not as fast as the normal auto
Ooh, I’ll have to check this out. Being able to export Anki decks is really nice.
Edit: I wonder if there’s any good way to auto-filter the imported cards and remove the ones I already have in Anki… I guess I’d probably need a script for that…
Import into Jiten first, then do the export with an exclude
I was just having the same thought tbh, since the one thing Anki does for me that jpdb doesn’t is that it lets me review a single deck at a time… Which rn I’m replicating by deleting stuff… which is a little tedious
Edit: if you’re coming from jpdb this is not reliable, bc it doesn’t import blacklisted words, and jpdb has various “blacklist xyz particles/katana/names” things, but Jiten only lets you import those by frequency… Which is anyone’s guess. That’s disappointing.
Otoh, jiten’s parsing seems to be better than jpdb’s. I imported 2 eps of 水星の魔女 from jiten, and got about 19 or so more words than the preset - only 3 of which were obvious (to English speakers) katakana words. So it’s a bit more manual (since I have to check the right export settings per episode/deck), but I’ll probly just use those instead, going forward
Well now you guys are making me want to go check out Jiten…
(jpdb has been great for being able to get premade decks and make my own from texts, but there’s A LOT about the site that drives me a little crazy…)
Actually this is not consistent… like Jiten’s New Game! S1 deck somehow had about 500 less words than jpdb… Maybe there’s a limit on how many lines/characters you can paste into jpdb at once? It was only 2987 lines though - that doesn’t exactly seem extreme.
jpdb:
Anyway, I’m liking this “less words, more frequent reviews” approach so far. Current settings:
Shorter review intervals
Kanji on (don’t lock vocab if kanji are unknown)
Sub-vocab on (lock vocab if sub-vocab is unknown)
Enable initial short-term learning period (forces failed cards to show up again within 10 minutes)
I think that’s basically fixing my issues. I got kinda sick with the decks I had, so now I’m messing around with 暁のヨナ and 鋼の錬金術師 one ep at a time (tho making liberal use of the Blacklist for the latter)
Video games:
Memories Off is pretty easy reading level. I can scan a lot of the sentences - which has proven essential, b/c woooooow this is dull as hell so far. Looked up 29 words in 1.5 hrs of gameplay (tho it would have been more if I wasn’t scanning). I might need to give it more of a chance, but like I can’t think of many books I’d still be giving a chance 1.5 hrs in… I’m gonna wait for other people to catch up/get ahead, and give their impressions
Otoh I played a bit more of the Tsukihime remake, and I’m really impressed. That’s got me interested to continue. I can still get the gyst if I’m being lazy about lookups.
Read a bunch of the Simoun game instruction manual & bonus manga earlier, plus all the doujins… ironically, I only liked the cooking one (the food portion was actually pretty small, and not very ingredient intense).
Otoh I put in half the vocab from the 月姫 VN deck (jiten), and I guess that’s up to the sex scenes - cuz I’m getting a lot of “fun” biological vocab. Which I may or may not have encountered before, but was too lazy to look up the reading. Here I was expecting to get hit with all the serious lore vocab
些か、此の、此処、胡散臭い、之、彼奴等、厭 for me. Mostly in older books, but a few I’ve seen in modern stuff (胡散臭い definitely) - not common tho.
I mean in theory I’ve seen most/all of these in Tsukihime when I’ve tried playing… Tho I hadn’t gotten super far yet. And I’m pretty sure it’s the sorta thing that uses kanji “just cuz”
I feel like I should have been keeping a list of the sex-related ones too - they’re a good chuckle. I got lazy tho
I feel like 此処/其処/彼処/何処 (and their related words) are fairly common. And especially 此こ/其. I don’t think I’ve seen 因み or 厭, but I have def seen the rest.
嗚呼 is probably the most ridiculous, why is this a kanji, that has come up for me organically.
I did know that before 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱, but that’s what I always remember that one from now.
Mm I think I learned 憂鬱 from a トゲナシトゲアリ song (tho maybe came across it before), but it’s one of those “recognize when I see it, but never properly paid attention to the kanji”
I’m annoyed at myself that I didn’t immediately put 涼宮 together rn - cuz that’s one of those “should know/be able to guess” names for me
Yeah it is usually の - particularly in names, but これ is a correct reading/ it is a spelling of これ… seems to be an old chinese-derived thing, but you’ll find it in the dictionary at least… or if you feel like reading this: 漢文の「之」これって読むんですが、書き下し文するとき之って、そのまま書く... - Yahoo!知恵袋 - which I don’t rn
When I come across it in the game (assuming it’s actually used in the remake), I can update on whether or not it’s actually used that way in the game.
I just hit one of the biggest weaknesses of jpdb… if you don’t have internet, or it’s having server issues, you can’t do reviews
Otherwise as jiten goes, pay attention to the export options. I was wondering why the exported 月姫 deck had about 6k less words than the jpdb one… turns out it doesn’t, but the “frequency” option was set to 5,000 (instead of 15,950)… and seems to refer to the number of words - not frequency. Which explains why I was getting up to the sex scenes so early in the deck…
There’s also a setting about example sentences, which if you’re bringing into jpdb, you probly don’t really want (since it has those, and you’d be getting a lot of unrelated vocab)
I checked the file I exported from jiten, and the jpdb deck, and my entire vocab list, and couldn’t find 之 in any for them. So I think that kanji/word might have come from text I pulled from 「戦後日本の『少女の友』『女学生の友』における異性愛文化の導入とその論理」 (a paper by 今田絵里香 I’m reading to see if it mentions any contemporary authors to 吉屋信子 who were writing エス stories, and for the general pre-war shoujo history). I thought I’d deleted it by then, but maybe not.
That said… When I pull up 之 kanji page, it shows this:
I’m gonna do a personal challenge. Minimum 5 physical books a month. Counting books read today as August. At this rate, it would take me 7 years to get through all the unread physicals I have. Anyway I think this shouldn’t be that hard. Will consider upping in future. Also I’m fine with partial reads, but will aim for full
Being able to export Anki decks is really nice.
彼奴等/此奴等 are close seconds, though; feels like I’ve only seen them once or twice.
