Anki is fucking boring. I dread the idea of having to go through flashcards and while I understand the importance of spaced repetition and how good of a tool Anki is for that purpose, let's be honest with ourselves. It is fucking boring.
Not to mention how much Anki will punish you for neglecting it. God forbid you miss two days after a 12 day Anki streak, because the moment you decide to take any breaks you are welcomed back with over 100 cards due. How is that motivating in any kind of way? How does that make me excited to learn languages?
After a month of learning Japanese with the assistance of an Anki starter deck I had a realization. When it came to immersion, I only used about a fraction of the vocab I learned in the starter deck. That means for all the time I spent studying with Anki, most of that time was completely useless. To make those matters worse, the vocab which I did find useful was used so much in anime to the point that there was no reason to have them in my deck in the first place!
The rest of that vocab, while being potentially useful to me in the future took so much time away from allowing me to study other vocab that would actually serve a purpose in immersion. This is because starter decks are not configured for your individual purposes in any way. It just gives you common beginner vocab, which isn't necessarily bad. But if you want to live with a language instead of just studying a language, this entire process becomes mind-numbing and incredibly demotivating. It's just bloated knowledge.
Let me be clear, Anki is still a very useful tool. In fact my gripes are less to do with the program itself and more to do with pre-made starter decks.
My philosophy in language learning, whether it be French or Japanese is similar to Cure Dolly's which is that I do not wish to study these languages, but rather I want to live with these languages the same way I do with English. That is incredibly hard to do at an beginner level, but it is a far more enjoyable and fulfilling way. If you're learning Nip because you are almighty otaku then why don't you just focus on continuing to consume more anime and manga instead of what is essentially studying for a daily test?
So what is my new approach? Well if you are at all interested in LIVING with your target language, you should avoid pre-made decks entirely. Instead, you should make it yourself. Now that isn't to say you should add every single word you are unfamiliar with. You should instead treat is as if you are making your own starter deck consisting of relatively simple easy to understand vocab.
For example, the first anime I chose to immerse myself in was Cardcaptor Sakura. It's something I'm already well familiar with, it's dialogue is relatively simple, and most importantly its cute and fun and my lovely cute daughter Sakura is really cute and fun and awesome. Also, Kero uses Kansai dialect which makes this anime incredibly good to start with IMO.
Now as a beginner, I had to dissect every single line of dialogue, which is good because by doing so, it will be very easy to notice certain patterns. That is, assuming you have the fundamentals down (I highly recommend Cure Dolly's playlist on Japanese structure. RIP sensei). Just by watching a single episode you are going to notice certain vocab that come up over and over again due to the nature of the plot. Say for example you see the word 姿. Should you add this to your deck? Well it depends. How much does this word come up in one episode, and how important is this word to the plot? Is this word something like a highly specific noun or is it something more general? Is it something you can imagine seeing in many different instances? In this case, 姿 is said pretty much in every episode. Towards the end of most episodes whenever my cute, kind and lovely daughter Sakura does her heroic cardcapturing, she says this:
"汝のあるべき姿に戻れ... クロウカード
That might look a bit loaded, so a beginner instinct would be to add each word to their deck right? No! Not at all! Not a single one!
First of all, 汝 is not natural Nip. There is no reason why you would ever need to add that to your deck and memorize it. It is a complete waste of a card. Second of all, Sakura says this in every episode. You're looking for spaced repetition? You got it! She's the one giving it to you as a reward for getting to the end of each episode entirely in Nip. That's four unique words that wont be taking up space on your Anki deck. What a kind and considerate young girl!
Now let's say you come across a word like:
Should you add this to your deck? Again, let's ask the same questions:
How often am I seeing this word in my immersion?
How often can I imagine this word being used in everyday Nip?
In my case, I only saw this word come up about as many times as I can count on one hand. On top of that, this is a very general word. I can imagine it being used at least the amount of times I was able to count it on my hand in any anime. Meaning, it's a common word that isn't really that common. That is perfect for Anki.
By the end of each episode I would assume you would collect at least 15 cards (hehe) consisting of words that seems like it would be common, but isn't really that common. But what if it gets to a point where a word in your deck becomes too easy?
Say for example:
Easy, just suspend/delete it. You should honestly be spending the least amount of time in Anki as possible, because the more time you spend in Anki, the less time you're spending in immersion. And the less cards you have in your deck, the less time you're going to be spending in Anki.
What should be the purpose of Anki is to force yourself to engage with unfamiliar vocab. Not to reassure you in the fact yes, you are very very intelligent and are very good at memorizing symbols and are nothing like the other gaijin. Good for you dude. You possess the very basic human ability of language acquisition. You're totally so much smarter than everyone else because of it.
Anyways, if you have reached the point where a word like 見つける is too easy, then just plain pure immersion should be enough spaced repetition to ensure that you will stay remembering this word, and it's effects will be far greater because it's something you discover out in the wild as an obstacle to your enjoyment of some kind of media. At that point, it hasn't become immersion, but instead it has become part of your life. And when you reach that point.... you have gained a new soul.... Remember that you can fit many more souls if you have the will!
I never cared about any of this stuff honestly. I think audio can be helpful, but if I'm grabbing the words from an anime then what do I need the audio for? It's just extra work spent in Anki that isn't really necessary. Tone graphs? Who fucking gives a shit? Use your ears dumbass. Sentences are probably the only thing I think is worth adding to your cards, especially if it is utilizing other vocab in your deck. That can be lines of dialogue you get from the anime you are watching, or even better, sentences that you write out yourself. I have not done much writing in Nip, but I do intend to hone in on that as a New Years Resolution :-)
The only gripe that I have with sentences is that I can imagine some people using it as a replacement for immersion, which again, you should take every measure to avoid doing. As a matter of fact, I did include sentences during the first 1-2 weeks of making my own deck. I found it particularly useful for starting out and really getting the rules of nip implanted into my head but it shouldn't be your main study method.
But yeah aside from that I think anything else is just more junk that makes you spend more unnecessary time in Anki. That being said, If you find yourself benefitting from having audio clips or tone graphs or pre-workout with your decks then by all means keep continuing. But remember that Anki is only a temporary tool that you only need to use for as long as you need to until you can understand 80% of the everyday Nip you come into contact with.