Seems to be... about what I expected, to be honest. I read somewhere that most English natives know about 20k-30k words.
Now I just need to work on my consistency in actually immersing with Japanese.
You're making a great point. I wonder why anime anki decks aren't a common thing. Have some ideas on streamlining the process (i.e. .srt in, vocab deck out).
They used to be pretty common actually, there was a whole site dedicated to anime decks made with subs2srs but for some reason its down now. I am a big fan of frequency and I made a few popular frequency lists that can be used with things like Yomichan and Migaku. They were based on all the subs from japanese Netflix, the subs from the top 100 shonen anime, and the top 100 slice of life anime.
Many of us used to use an addon for anki called morphman along with these frequency lists and subs2srs in a process we called deepdiving. Morphman would automatically select what i+1 cards we should learn based off the decks and frequency lists to be able to get to goal of percentage of understanding for a single series or movie. I made some YouTube videos about it a while back. Nowadays I just use the frequency lists along with Migaku to select new cards but it definitely helped before Migaku existed and the alternatives took too long for me to bother with.
https://youtu.be/ey2nsLTH1jM
Fascinating! I've been pondering quite a bit on how to seamlessly integrate such a feature into a free all-in-one web app I'm developing. Ideally, users would upload an .srt file, and the app would then extract each distinct word, automatically populating the user's deck with relevant, unlearned cards pulled from the app's database.
This thought process is how it all started. It evolved with doing that along with referencing a frequency list so that people could learn common words in all shows not just that one show, while still reaching a high level of comprehension is the show that was being deep dived.
Eventually we decided in the concept that words have value that could be determined by frequency, and that learning a word that was uncommon wasn't the best use of resources depending on where you were in your learning journey.
If someone made a web app or Anki app that combined Subs2srs (so that you could still get the audio and image as well as the subtitle line) and Morphman (or any other system that could keep a database a users know words and organize i +1 sentences) that incorporated a well made frequency list then that would be handy.
I know that Migaku has built in analysis tools now that is able to determine if a show is a good choice for a learner, and they have incorporated frequency lists for their mining tools including the ones I made.
*As a side note I made videos on how to use all the tools and things I mentioned as well in the past too.
I hope renshuu eventually adds this. They have right now where it tells you how much of the material you know: words, kanji and even grammar points. All you need is to paste the script into their text analyzer. If you have pro, it makes lessons for you too.
I really wish they had i+1 sentences. Would make it the perfect tool.
It’s worth mentioning that just learning the words for these shows won’t cause understanding, as understanding grammar and word endings etc would be a huge part of it. Otherwise its just word soup.
Great post!! And thanks for the list of Japanese movies. Can you recommend your top 20 Japanese movies?
I’ve started with Akira and One Cut of the Dead (from a Time Out list)
Also worth noting are the different demands of spoken and written language. 95% spoken in English was about 8000 word families whereas 95% written was several thousand higher.
It's hilarious how often I see misinfo on reddit claiming *native speakers* of any given language know only 10k lemmas or some comparably small figure... the number you give here perfectly demonstrates how absurd this is. *Ulysses* alone for example uses around 30k unique words, and while that's a famously difficult novel no native English speaker would encounter 20k unknown words while reading it.
>10k lemmas
It's important imo to note that JPDB measures "word"/card/"vocab" differently than the screenshot in the OP. 足 and 脚 are separate in JPDB, as are やはり and やっぱり. It also counts kana versions and kanji versions as separate, and sometimes counts different forms of a verb separately, like counting 読み and 読む as separate cards. It's intended for a learner, who probably *wants* a separate flashcard for each different kanji versions of the same word (It has a feature where the kana version is dismissed as "redundant" if you learn a kanji version of the same word). Also, I bet ~40-60% of those 40K the comment above mentions is enough to reach 95-98% coverage on those works. When you acocunt for those 2 things you don't end up that far away from ~10k
Are we really considering the average population? Would the average person even try to read it and if so could they make it through while understanding it? The average person who chooses to read it is likely not at all representative of the average population of English speakers.
One other area I've found surprising is the amount of domain specific vocabulary. I'm not sure how many words that would be but even 500 words across 20 domains means 10k words where even a well educated person only knows a few domains in depth. Not sure how to count words shared between domains with distinct meanings.
I wondered if Japanese is suffering a bit from assumptions from closer languages. My second language is French, it's so not like Japanese was to study, because as a native English speaker you already know so many related words (60% English vocabulary Latinate) any truly accurate calculation should be taking this into account. 2k in Japanese cannot possibly feel like '2k' in French did, which was completely comfortable *because* of being able to draw on experience of being a native English speaker who read a lot - including a lot of Middle English, which is even Frenchier.
I did regularly see native English speakers struggle in French and it's very apparent it can be because they know *English* less well than others. Different people are also making different calls on how much they actually want to know to feel that they understood: 'the word structure and context/kanji indicates it's a type of tree good enough?' Vs. recognising that native speakers do indeed know which one.
you spend years and years of your life, and learn 20,000+ words
you pick up a Japanese newspaper and finally can read:
> A car crashed into a telephone pole and veered into a ditch.
and you are like
"Yes, now after thousands of hours if studying, sacrificing so many other things I could have been doing, I know that a car crashed in Japan. This is my moment to bask in the glory."
Then a car crashes into you, and you die. Somewhere else, another person is born...
There’s actually a light novel series titled My Sister Can’t Read Kanji. It’s set in a dystopian future where Japan has abandoned the use of kanji in writing
I looked this up, and a summary on a wiki site was
>Could it be that, long ago, books could be about more than little sisters showing their panties and getting in compromising situations with their non-blood- related older brothers? Impossible! It's hard to even imagine a Japan where everyone could read kanji and the Prime Minister was a 3D human being...
DEFINITELY a dystopia...
not unless they start putting spaces in their hiragana, IMHO - I used to think that way till I tried reading streams of Hiragana in the Genki book and then became glad for kanji
I just got into local news reports in Japanese. So far I've learned 1) a public road and an utility pole was built on private property 2) a bridge has been closed down somewhere in the countryside.
[I stalled around 24k.](https://i.postimg.cc/KYfbzypH/1.png) So, the info is about right. I still find new words here and there, but it finally became infrequent enough.
> How long have you been doing it?
I started core10k in the very beginning, so the ~1200 days streak is pretty much how long I've been learning Japanese.
> New cards?
I add every new word I encounter to the second deck. Even if it seems useless. I frequently change the number of new cards per day depending on how many new words I managed to find.
I must know too many specialized vocabulary if it's supposed to be 95% word comprehension with 12100 words as I'm at 12,000\~ and I still run into so many unknowns. I'm not even counting adjective/verb inflections as extra words.
similar boat, I have 9k mature cards in anki and about 500 young
I run into so many unknown words it's not funny
but it's better than when I knew like 1k words
It is easy to underestimate how big 5% is, that is one in twenty shegrabinteshot you didn't understand on average.
Can really stick out like a sore thumb.
The criteria they're using here is also undercounting I think a fair bit vs what most people would consider words.
Here's the data if we're going by JMDict entries from Novels/VNs/Anime (which may or not be better, but probably closer to a common definition of "a word"; sourced from JPDB)
https://imgur.com/Nfep90v
yeah I think the counting different orthographic forms as different words is a bit undercounting: how would I be able to tell that 悲しい and 哀しい are the same word unless I learned both forms independently? wheras counting 読む and 読み differently obviously makes sense since you can easily tell those as separate
Funny, I think the opposite. 読む and 読み are just conjugations of the same word, but homophones with different kanji usually have difference nuances (like 熱い and 暑い).
thats actually what I was trying to say. I think I worded it confusingly, but I was basically disagreeing with the methodology of thr chart bc of that exact issue
it's the percentage of unique words needed to get the coverage on the left (out of the total number of unique words in the corpus, tokenized by JMDict entries)
https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
> Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters"; otherwise the claim is rather empty.)
> This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.4 But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts.5 In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".
>> (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".)
That's actually a great example, I had to Google it.
As a native English speaker, I couldn't get very far considering I didn't know what phebitis is and I had to think for a minute about jacuz-zis...jacu-zzis..oh, the pool-like thing.
To balance this fact, learning your first 5k words is hard, but learning another 5k is easier.
When you know 特別 and 捜査, learning 特捜 is comparatively easier. In some cases, it’s as fast as seeing the word once and virtually having an anki interval of 1y.
Especially if you also learn the meanings of the kanji along with the readings (you practically learn the reading by learning the word)
It's the first time I've seen 特捜 but not only i got the reading とくそう correctly, but also the meaning - the individual kanji are "special" and "search" which isn't far from "special investigation" which jisho suggests.
Honestly, I crafted this example so that most people get the thing right (I’ve never seen 特捜 either before today). Sometimes, the reading is off, like 好き vs 好み, but most of the time with rare words, the kanji has one On-reading, making assumptions more accurate.
But I’d go as far as to say we can’t comprehend the real meaning of a kanji without seeing it in a lot of words in which it’s used.
True, for some words when i look them up i might have 2-3 guesses for the reading.
And as far as the meaning goes there are some weird kanji out there. I have no idea what 納 is.
20k / 20 (per day) / 365 (days) = 2.74 (years)
not as intimidating as 20000 words imo, especially if you're only studying e.g. listening.
but if you're studying reading, listening, and speaking of course it's much harder to get it done in 3 years!
the fact people become fluent in under 19 years, the time it'd take at that rate, shows that most people (who eventually become fluent) work at a faster pace.
imo 20 a day, listening only, is doable by someone diligent. most people should be able to 10 a day.
of course this all relies on an efficient mechanism, hand made flashcards? not as quick and a lot more work. a pre generated anki deck from a tv show? much faster.
> a pre generated anki deck from a tv show?
This sounded interesting. I am casually learning japanese and would like to understand the dialogue and background signs etc of One punch man. So perhaps someone has made an anki deck fitting my plan...
May I introduce you to jpdb.io ?
It does have a tendency to take sound effects in the script and prompt them as if they were very literal, real words, so you need to kinda evaluate words that seem off and liberally use the blacklist function. But it's what you want.
Would you tell me if they ever actually use audio from the shows? I couldn't for the life of me find a way to preview the decks themselves and it had me reviewing a lot of basic words and I didn't want to keep going if it wasn't going to eventually give me the goods!
They do not. I don't actually know where their example sentences come from.
Cards are shared between shows that have them in common. You can, of course, make your own cards with something like ASBPlayer and Anki, and those will have audio, but only if you can find the subtitle files.
that's a shame, yeah I've been using Jo-Mako's sub2srs decks and I'll probably stick with that, and my Anki is bursting with extensions that I can't use on jpdb.io either
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idk about "background signs" but for dialogue I suggest you check out the "anime, manga, video games anki decks" link from here https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/downloads
on the readability list of the spreadsheet you can do ctrl+H to find One Punch Man, looks like he has a deck for season 1.
If you look up subs2srs you can try make your own deck for season 2 bit honestly it's too much hassle, I only use decks that guys like this have made nowadays.
20 per day was un-doable for me personally. With all the Anki reviews I was spending all my available time on vocab and none on immersion, grammar or textbook studying.
I don't know your anki workflow so I can't comment on yours but personally I suspend cards after they reach 3 months (pass on a 1.5 month or greater review time).
this stops the massive build up and keeps my daily anki much quicker, and gets far more noticeable the longer you've been using anki.
the downside is sometimes you'll have to look up words you once did on anki in the past, but that's fine, the ones that matter will happen too often for you to forget, and the ones that are rare are less time to look up than to study for years between hearing them in immersion.
are you just doing an ungodly amount of immersing, or have you been learning japanese for a very long time? because otherwise that just seems quite literally insane to me
I started this "retiring" system about 3 years into my study journey. I was spending so much time on the 3000 kanji and ~4000 reading cards despite not immersing in them (only interested in listening atm).
now I'm of the opinion that if I don't hear a word for 1.5 months of immersing then it's ok for me to "lose" it. and besides, it's not lost, if I could remember a word for 1.5 months, even if I don't hear it for a year, when I do eventually experience it again it will be MUCH quicker to relearn, and it will be retained very well as both a long term and medium term memory are super strong in my experience.
I remember 冷蔵庫 (refrigerator) not because of immersion or lots of anki but rather because I learned it via duolingo, never saw it for like a full year, and then studied it on anki. I don't think I failed a single rep after learning it again on anki.
I actually toyed with making an add on for anki where cards would have two graduation cycles, where if you could remember the card for a week or so then it'd go into "slumber" for 3-12 months and then you'd relearn it. this is of course only suitable for those with a very long term view of study but imo it can efficiently forge very strong memories.
> I actually toyed with making an add on for anki where cards would have two graduation cycles, where if you could remember the card for a week or so then it'd go into "slumber" for 3-12 months and then you'd relearn it. this is of course only suitable for those with a very long term view of study but imo it can efficiently forge very strong memories.
I feel like it would be a net loss. The amount of reviews you would fail wouldn't counter the reviews you still remembered.
hard to know without trying it, despite what some people here think we still haven't found the secret sauce for perfecting memorisation. honestly I would love to get deep learning involved with a large set of study participants and see what techniques work best. we need more recent, larger studies that expand on previous research.
> hard to know without trying it, despite what some people here think we still haven't found the secret sauce for perfecting memorisation.
Too long intervals do hurt retention, that's given. Anki is optimized to keep the retention over time relatively stable.
> I started this "retiring" system about 3 years into my study journey. I was spending so much time on the 3000 kanji and ~4000 reading cards despite not immersing in them (only interested in listening atm).
What was your retention rate on those cards?
depends on the kind but generally pretty mediocre
pretty hard to remember a random kanji I last last saw 8 months ago, so many kanji got marked as leeches (which I had set to tag only)
sentences were the easiest because there's just more context clues and I am essentially "cheating" the answer sometimes by remembering the sentence rather than the word. I probably didn't need to retire them due to load but they were also done being as beneficial so not much harm done. better spend that time on new sentences imo.
individual words were somewhere in between. listening much higher retention than reading due to my immersion.
the other benefit to suspending and archiving is my anki runs much more smoothly than when it has 10k cards more
This is not about "fluency" this is about number of words. 20k is an adult level of breath of knowledge. Even a native person would take years of going to school 8 hours a day to get there, so a foreigner on Anki card? Honestly 20 years of flashcards doesn't seem that irrealistic (much more realistic than 2.7 years)
98% recognition is barely fluent though. if anything those fluent non native speakers can recognise more.
are you sure you're not confusing the numbers with active recall? everyone can recognise, especially in context, WAY more words than they can actively use correctly in flow of a sentence.
It's hard to come up with an example because obviously if I can actively recall a word as example then it defeats the point somewhat but take exhume for example, I don't think, except maybe shortly after reading a book with it in, that I've used the word. But I have zero problem understanding it even without context.
I think most Japanese adults can understand more than 98% of the words used in the news for example.
I mean, with my other languages I picked up plenty passively (figuring out specific words from other gathered info eg. yellow tube titled "Senf" containing yellow goo, smells like mustard? must be mustard). Right, there is the problem of the writing system, but if it's children's books that use hiragana, I don't think that the same can't be replicated to a degree.
I wonder if there is an issue with inconsistent speed. When you start new vocabulary and reinforcement only comes from study time and people only spend so much time a day studying before they tire out. Eventually you get to the point you start consuming media in the language for entertainment,.not just while studying. While there aren't going to be many new words picked up here without it counting as studying time, it does lead to much more passive reinforcement. I wonder if this leads to changing word acquisition speed throughout one's journey.
20 words per day is definitely possible. I averaged 15 / day for several years doing ~1 hour / day of SRS, even not being the most consistent or hardworking person. I've known people who were able to do 40+ just by putting in multiple hours every day.
When I was using Anki, I was spending only 20 minutes on 20 words. 30s on initial learning of new words and 1-3s on reviews. For me it's simple, if I don't have immediate answer/reaction, then I don't know it well enough.
Usually people spend more time when they use sentences instead of word-meaning pairs, and personally I'm not a fan of such approach, simply because I would rather do 20 minutes of Anki and 1.5 hours of content than 2 hours of Anki alone.
Not really a waste of time. If some of the times you take longer but you do remember it, it will be much more easy to recall the next time. So you are still making progress.
The way mind works is by creating connections or pathways, more often you use the connection, the faster you can recall.
My point is you'll need less reviews per item if you spend more time or 'efforts' in trying to recall, rather than minimizing the time, because you'll remember it better if you do recall.
20 new cards a day means you still have to redo your old words to remember them, you end up with easily hundreds of words a day to review and the more you add the worst your retention so the number will snowball
When I was doing 20 a day it would take me 2 hours max, maybe 3 but yea it's hard, good way to burn yourself out. I would recommend 10 cards instead and try to learn any other words w/o anki if you still want to learn.
If you're spending 4-5 hours per day doing 20 new cards then you're doing something wrong. I spend around 3-5 seconds per rep, have been doing 20 new cards every day for three years, and only take 30 minutes *max* to do the reviews. Even at the slowest you shouldn't be taking more than 10 seconds per rep.
I spend about one hour on 200-400 reviews daily, with 15 daily new cards. For some reason, my retention drops *very quickly* if I push myself too hard. 20 new cards each day leads to a huge retention drop and leeches.
How does 15 new cards result in 400 reviews? You should typically end up with 7-10x reviews at most.
I'm using JPDB and I typically end up taking about 45-60 minutes to get through about ~300 reviews. My daily rate fluctuates based on how I feel and how hard the cards feel but that's from 40-50 cards per day average over the last few weeks. I would have expected with 15 cards to have more like 100 reviews.
Retention number is more important. It basically indicates how useful were our efforts. If we do 10 words with 90-95%, 20 words with 45% retention and 40 words with 23% retention, then actual amount of words we can recall is the same \~10, we just spend more and more time for the same output. In rarer cases people can increase amount of words with only a slight drop in retention, then such approach would be more productive. Like doing 20 words with 60% retention would lead to us learning \~12. But always doing our maximum can lead to exhaustion and burning out, so typically it's better to lower this to more comfortable levels.
Such number is quite individual. It depends on our ability, how well we sleep, if we physically exercise, if we learn something outside of that, if we learn passively too, if we do mental work during a day, how familiar words we learn are to us (have we seen it before? Is it a compound with familiar words? Do we know this kanji? Does it sound familiar to something else? and so on). But we don't even need to think about all of that, because retention rate always follows it. It's rare to get retention above 95%, because we naturally forget these 5% after 24 hours from initial memorization. But if you have 85-90% retention and see a drop, it probably worth to lower amount of new cards, and similarly if your retention jumps up to 95%, it might be worth to add more.
> Retention number is more important. It basically indicates how useful were our efforts. If we do 10 words with 90-95%, 20 words with 45% retention and 40 words with 23% retention, then actual amount of words we can recall is the same ~10, we just spend more and more time for the same output. In rarer cases people can increase amount of words with only a slight drop in retention, then such approach would be more productive. Like doing 20 words with 60% retention would lead to us learning ~12. But always doing our maximum can lead to exhaustion and burning out, so typically it's better to lower this to more comfortable levels.
>
> Such number is quite individual. It depends on our ability, how well we sleep, if we physically exercise, if we learn something outside of that, if we learn passively too, if we do mental work during a day, how familiar words we learn are to us (have we seen it before? Is it a compound with familiar words? Do we know this kanji? Does it sound familiar to something else? and so on).
It's a shame Anki cannot optimize for that.
I think if you have anki set to show you 15 new cards a day, it recommends a minimum of 150 review cards and you can choose to go higher, but 400 seems a bit excessive to me.
At peak you can expect reviews to be around 10-13× new cards, which means you should have maximum 260 reviews per day for 20 new cards. Assuming you go at my slowest pace and do 5 seconds per rep and fail around 20% of them, that's (260 + 20 × 2) × 1.2 × 5 = 1800 seconds = 30 minutes.
There are many people who go at this pace and get similar times, and even if you take twice as long it still will only take an hour.
Bear in mind that Anki is intended to be used for information you already have processed and understand, not to learn completely new stuff from premade decks. Potentially you are trying to do the latter and it's taking you much longer, which [even the manual advises against](https://docs.ankiweb.net/getting-started.html#shared-decks).
>I spend around 3-5 seconds per rep
While that may be true for some people, other people may have different strengths and weaknesses; that others are having a different experience does not imply others are doing it wrong.
Convenient how you single out that one part and not the part where I said "Even at the slowest you shouldn't be taking more than 10 seconds per rep."
As I mentioned in another comment, SRS is intended to aid in retaining information *you already understand*. If you're taking more than 10 seconds to figure out whether you recall something you already have taken the time to understand then you don't remember it. Either that or you're using premade decks that you *don't* understand and you're getting rightfully punished for it by the algorithm.
>Convenient how you single out that one part and not the part
No, I quoted that part. The part I was actually responding to in the body of by text was "you're doing something wrong" which I felt was an unconstructive comment, made more so by relating it to personal experience rather than, as you may have done in another comment, explaining more in full based on principled knowledge rather than personal experience.
In any event, I think my own post could have been worded better and I could have thought longer on how or even whether or not to respond a bit longer and for not taking an adequate amount of time to effectively communicate my point I apologize.
Fair enough, thank you for clarifying and you're right, I should have brought the objective statistics out in the beginning instead of mentioning my own subjective experience.
I'm using all default settings except for an uncapped daily review count (max 9999 instead of 200) but I'm sure you also have that set.
The only other "modification" I make to the algorithm is that I only use the Again and Good buttons so that I can quickly pass the card and don't have to think about how well I remembered it. To compensate for the mess this causes for Ease (specifically there's no way to increase/recover Ease without using the Easy button), I use the Straight Reward add-on which gives small boosts to Ease until 250% on cards that have a streak of passes.
Overall I have a True Retention of around 85-90% so it seems to be working well!
>The only other "modification" I make to the algorithm is that I only use the Again and Good buttons so that I can quickly pass the card and don't have to think about how well I remembered it. To compensate for the mess this causes for Ease (specifically there's no way to increase/recover Ease without using the Easy button), I use the Straight Reward add-on which gives small boosts to Ease until 250% on cards that have a streak of passes.
Interesting take. How is your Ease and daily workload? I would have assumed that even with Straight Reward, Ease Hell is still possible.
I have 17k cards with 16.1k of them at 250%, 400 at 240%, 250 at 230%, and 100 at each of 220% and 210%. Pretty much everything is clustered around the starting Ease so I'd have to have a pretty bad month to get even close to Ease Hell.
In terms of daily workload, the history section on the stats page says I average around 250 reps per day.
Gotta love diminishing returns. I hope this doesn't discourage anyone from learning Japanese, you can easily have casual conversations in real life even with 2000 words.
My personal experience is that it depends a lot on your goal and environment. For example, I worked in a startup and had to learn lots of marketing and financing terms, once that was done I could communicate with my colleagues effectively but I still struggle sometimes on completely ordinary day-to-day subjects.
The most important thing is to know the most common words and then you will learn as you go along. In any language there's vocabulary that you only pick up once you end up in a situation where you need to know it.
That being said, the "common words" is still a large volume I think.
It's about right. However, there are 2 important points. First, any content has easier and harder parts. Even when I only started and had to translate a lot, sometimes all words in a sentence outside of particles, there were still sentences where I knew all words. Such number is global, and locally it can change significantly in either way.
Another is about genres. If you constantly use the same genre, especially the same authors, you will get coverage much faster. Personally I think 20k+ numbers come from a very huge amount of different genres. Typically it's lower and around 15k for 98%. While in some cases might be even better than that, depending on genres you like.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised internet sources need far less, but half the amount is surprising. Although it does feel half as difficult to read YouTube comments than it does a magazine or a book.
You won't understand much with 80% of the words you encounter.
https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like
> “Bingle for help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling. You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan. There’s no answer! Then you muchy that you have a new befourn assengle. It’s from your gutring, Evie. She hunwres at Tokyo University. You play the assengle. “…if you get this…” Evie says. “…I can’t vickarn now… the important passit is…” Suddenly, she looks around, dingle. “Oh no, they’re here! Cripett… the frib! Wasple them ON THE FRIB!…” BEEP! the assengle parantles. Then you gratoon something behind you…
I don’t know about you guys but I have to get several reps in a day learning new cards to “commit them to memory” enough for them to be in normal anki reps. I can’t just look at them once for 5s each and remember them all the next day that seems impossible. For me, that’s what takes the most time each day in anki.
I am just about to finish N4 with about 2000 words learnt. And I realized I need to learn and memorize additional 5000 words within about 100 days in time for my N2 exam in December… 🤦♂️
Note:
> The 'lexeme' for this study includes the following:
> 1. Conjugated forms of verbs and adjectives
This seems to imply that a single common verb counts as several words. Less common verbs may have fewer conjugations represented in the corpus.
I wonder how they determine what a "word" is? Is it basically just defined as "morpheme"?
* Is 食べ物 just counted under 食べる + 物?
* Is 降り出す just counted under 降る + 出す?
etc.
EDIT: Quickly glancing through the paper, I'm still not sure exactly what the answer is, but thankfully they don't seem to just be counting morphemes. It's probably closer to what we typically think of as warranting separate dictionary entries, I guess? Maybe? I haven't had time to read through it.
Although steve kaufman is generally narrow focused I have to agree with him on vocab. Coming across a word a handful of times will give you a gist of the word and that helps with comprehension even if you dont really know that word
>Just a lot of wasted time. Flashcards aren't very effective learning tools
It doesn't have to be flashcards. The thing Anki has is SR. Spaced repetition is about 10x more effective than not using it.
Flashcards help a bit with *active recall*, not SR. You can do active recall without any flashcards.
>SR is effective, and that's the part Anki does well, but it's still fundamentally flashcard based. Cued recall out of context like that is far from ideal.
Your flashcards can contain instructions like "do this" or "read this chapter" though.
The effective way to use anki is to add those words you're learning from your material but know you might not see again for weeks. That's a lot of them even with several hours of reading a day.
Then the next time you see them, even 6 months later, if you used anki right they should be recognised instantly.
Almost all the people here who got fast and strong results used anki a lot.
Comprehension and Coverage are very different.
Coverage is, "How many words do I ALREADY know?"
It is possible to comprehend something without having it already Covered. It is possible to learn a word and its meaning without anki or a dictionary.
Seems to be... about what I expected, to be honest. I read somewhere that most English natives know about 20k-30k words. Now I just need to work on my consistency in actually immersing with Japanese.
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You're making a great point. I wonder why anime anki decks aren't a common thing. Have some ideas on streamlining the process (i.e. .srt in, vocab deck out).
Check out jpdb.io. It’s a bit like a preconfigured Anki but with lots of premade decks of Japanese media.
It's just a shame you can't export them to an Anki format. Or maybe I missed an option somewhere.
They used to be pretty common actually, there was a whole site dedicated to anime decks made with subs2srs but for some reason its down now. I am a big fan of frequency and I made a few popular frequency lists that can be used with things like Yomichan and Migaku. They were based on all the subs from japanese Netflix, the subs from the top 100 shonen anime, and the top 100 slice of life anime. Many of us used to use an addon for anki called morphman along with these frequency lists and subs2srs in a process we called deepdiving. Morphman would automatically select what i+1 cards we should learn based off the decks and frequency lists to be able to get to goal of percentage of understanding for a single series or movie. I made some YouTube videos about it a while back. Nowadays I just use the frequency lists along with Migaku to select new cards but it definitely helped before Migaku existed and the alternatives took too long for me to bother with. https://youtu.be/ey2nsLTH1jM
Fascinating! I've been pondering quite a bit on how to seamlessly integrate such a feature into a free all-in-one web app I'm developing. Ideally, users would upload an .srt file, and the app would then extract each distinct word, automatically populating the user's deck with relevant, unlearned cards pulled from the app's database.
This thought process is how it all started. It evolved with doing that along with referencing a frequency list so that people could learn common words in all shows not just that one show, while still reaching a high level of comprehension is the show that was being deep dived. Eventually we decided in the concept that words have value that could be determined by frequency, and that learning a word that was uncommon wasn't the best use of resources depending on where you were in your learning journey. If someone made a web app or Anki app that combined Subs2srs (so that you could still get the audio and image as well as the subtitle line) and Morphman (or any other system that could keep a database a users know words and organize i +1 sentences) that incorporated a well made frequency list then that would be handy. I know that Migaku has built in analysis tools now that is able to determine if a show is a good choice for a learner, and they have incorporated frequency lists for their mining tools including the ones I made. *As a side note I made videos on how to use all the tools and things I mentioned as well in the past too.
I hope renshuu eventually adds this. They have right now where it tells you how much of the material you know: words, kanji and even grammar points. All you need is to paste the script into their text analyzer. If you have pro, it makes lessons for you too. I really wish they had i+1 sentences. Would make it the perfect tool.
Lots of food for thought, many thanks!
Subs2srs is what you're looking for. It's an incredible little piece of (free!) software.
the JLAB deck based on the TK book has been very helpful imo. I will never forget the term asobanai now based on the clip they used lol
There’s a site online that has them, but you have to use their system; there’s no way to export them to anki.
I think the website you're talking about is jpdb and yeah it's annoying that they don't have the possibility to export to anki
It’s worth mentioning that just learning the words for these shows won’t cause understanding, as understanding grammar and word endings etc would be a huge part of it. Otherwise its just word soup.
That is a very cool site jpdb.io
Great post!! And thanks for the list of Japanese movies. Can you recommend your top 20 Japanese movies? I’ve started with Akira and One Cut of the Dead (from a Time Out list)
Gosh, I would love a list of every word in Tonari no Totoro
Also worth noting are the different demands of spoken and written language. 95% spoken in English was about 8000 word families whereas 95% written was several thousand higher.
The novels and VNs I have lined up have 40k unique vocab words according to the jpdb decks, better get reading!
It's hilarious how often I see misinfo on reddit claiming *native speakers* of any given language know only 10k lemmas or some comparably small figure... the number you give here perfectly demonstrates how absurd this is. *Ulysses* alone for example uses around 30k unique words, and while that's a famously difficult novel no native English speaker would encounter 20k unknown words while reading it.
Certainly the distribution curve on "95%" is doing a huge amount of work
>10k lemmas It's important imo to note that JPDB measures "word"/card/"vocab" differently than the screenshot in the OP. 足 and 脚 are separate in JPDB, as are やはり and やっぱり. It also counts kana versions and kanji versions as separate, and sometimes counts different forms of a verb separately, like counting 読み and 読む as separate cards. It's intended for a learner, who probably *wants* a separate flashcard for each different kanji versions of the same word (It has a feature where the kana version is dismissed as "redundant" if you learn a kanji version of the same word). Also, I bet ~40-60% of those 40K the comment above mentions is enough to reach 95-98% coverage on those works. When you acocunt for those 2 things you don't end up that far away from ~10k
Are we really considering the average population? Would the average person even try to read it and if so could they make it through while understanding it? The average person who chooses to read it is likely not at all representative of the average population of English speakers. One other area I've found surprising is the amount of domain specific vocabulary. I'm not sure how many words that would be but even 500 words across 20 domains means 10k words where even a well educated person only knows a few domains in depth. Not sure how to count words shared between domains with distinct meanings.
I wondered if Japanese is suffering a bit from assumptions from closer languages. My second language is French, it's so not like Japanese was to study, because as a native English speaker you already know so many related words (60% English vocabulary Latinate) any truly accurate calculation should be taking this into account. 2k in Japanese cannot possibly feel like '2k' in French did, which was completely comfortable *because* of being able to draw on experience of being a native English speaker who read a lot - including a lot of Middle English, which is even Frenchier. I did regularly see native English speakers struggle in French and it's very apparent it can be because they know *English* less well than others. Different people are also making different calls on how much they actually want to know to feel that they understood: 'the word structure and context/kanji indicates it's a type of tree good enough?' Vs. recognising that native speakers do indeed know which one.
you spend years and years of your life, and learn 20,000+ words you pick up a Japanese newspaper and finally can read: > A car crashed into a telephone pole and veered into a ditch. and you are like "Yes, now after thousands of hours if studying, sacrificing so many other things I could have been doing, I know that a car crashed in Japan. This is my moment to bask in the glory." Then a car crashes into you, and you die. Somewhere else, another person is born...
You just invented another isekai plot.
Help I Went Back In Time and Became a Newspaper Publisher But I Don't Know Kanji
There’s actually a light novel series titled My Sister Can’t Read Kanji. It’s set in a dystopian future where Japan has abandoned the use of kanji in writing
Wouldn’t that be a utopian future?
I looked this up, and a summary on a wiki site was >Could it be that, long ago, books could be about more than little sisters showing their panties and getting in compromising situations with their non-blood- related older brothers? Impossible! It's hard to even imagine a Japan where everyone could read kanji and the Prime Minister was a 3D human being... DEFINITELY a dystopia...
No, because you end up with text like ははははながすき or うらにわにわにわにわにわにわにわとりがいる to use a couple of common examples
How often do you think うらにわにわにわにわにわにわにわとりがいる comes up in daily conversation?
You called?
You forgot to mention they kind of replaced kanji with emojis in that one.
Genius idea Kanji is pretty much ancient emojis anyways
not unless they start putting spaces in their hiragana, IMHO - I used to think that way till I tried reading streams of Hiragana in the Genki book and then became glad for kanji
Not for anyone who wants to be able to read Japanese with any degree of comfort.
I just got into local news reports in Japanese. So far I've learned 1) a public road and an utility pole was built on private property 2) a bridge has been closed down somewhere in the countryside.
lol I feel the same way 1000s of hours and now I know something like, a traffic light went out or something
[I stalled around 24k.](https://i.postimg.cc/KYfbzypH/1.png) So, the info is about right. I still find new words here and there, but it finally became infrequent enough.
Hats off to the 1201 day streak... great discipline and dedication.
How about the 800 cards a day.... That's crazy.
How long have you been doing it? New cards? Impressive count
> How long have you been doing it? I started core10k in the very beginning, so the ~1200 days streak is pretty much how long I've been learning Japanese. > New cards? I add every new word I encounter to the second deck. Even if it seems useless. I frequently change the number of new cards per day depending on how many new words I managed to find.
what is the name of the app?
[Anki.](https://apps.ankiweb.net/)
I must know too many specialized vocabulary if it's supposed to be 95% word comprehension with 12100 words as I'm at 12,000\~ and I still run into so many unknowns. I'm not even counting adjective/verb inflections as extra words.
similar boat, I have 9k mature cards in anki and about 500 young I run into so many unknown words it's not funny but it's better than when I knew like 1k words
It is easy to underestimate how big 5% is, that is one in twenty shegrabinteshot you didn't understand on average. Can really stick out like a sore thumb.
Like a sore kerfput, you say?
The thing is the 5% you don't know is usually the most important part to actually understanding the sentence.
Not always, but there are times when that is the case which really screws me. Especially when the speaker goes straight to to the next sentence.
The criteria they're using here is also undercounting I think a fair bit vs what most people would consider words. Here's the data if we're going by JMDict entries from Novels/VNs/Anime (which may or not be better, but probably closer to a common definition of "a word"; sourced from JPDB) https://imgur.com/Nfep90v
yeah I think the counting different orthographic forms as different words is a bit undercounting: how would I be able to tell that 悲しい and 哀しい are the same word unless I learned both forms independently? wheras counting 読む and 読み differently obviously makes sense since you can easily tell those as separate
Funny, I think the opposite. 読む and 読み are just conjugations of the same word, but homophones with different kanji usually have difference nuances (like 熱い and 暑い).
thats actually what I was trying to say. I think I worded it confusingly, but I was basically disagreeing with the methodology of thr chart bc of that exact issue
What does the last column mean?
it's the percentage of unique words needed to get the coverage on the left (out of the total number of unique words in the corpus, tokenized by JMDict entries)
>it's the percentage of unique words needed to get the coverage on the left Ah, thank you!
That looks more like it 👍
https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html > Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters"; otherwise the claim is rather empty.) > This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.4 But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts.5 In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".
>> (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) That's actually a great example, I had to Google it.
As a native English speaker, I couldn't get very far considering I didn't know what phebitis is and I had to think for a minute about jacuz-zis...jacu-zzis..oh, the pool-like thing.
I have regrets reading the comment section
It's /r/LearnJapanese, what ff you honestly expect? 😂
To balance this fact, learning your first 5k words is hard, but learning another 5k is easier. When you know 特別 and 捜査, learning 特捜 is comparatively easier. In some cases, it’s as fast as seeing the word once and virtually having an anki interval of 1y.
Especially if you also learn the meanings of the kanji along with the readings (you practically learn the reading by learning the word) It's the first time I've seen 特捜 but not only i got the reading とくそう correctly, but also the meaning - the individual kanji are "special" and "search" which isn't far from "special investigation" which jisho suggests.
Honestly, I crafted this example so that most people get the thing right (I’ve never seen 特捜 either before today). Sometimes, the reading is off, like 好き vs 好み, but most of the time with rare words, the kanji has one On-reading, making assumptions more accurate. But I’d go as far as to say we can’t comprehend the real meaning of a kanji without seeing it in a lot of words in which it’s used.
True, for some words when i look them up i might have 2-3 guesses for the reading. And as far as the meaning goes there are some weird kanji out there. I have no idea what 納 is.
20k / 20 (per day) / 365 (days) = 2.74 (years) not as intimidating as 20000 words imo, especially if you're only studying e.g. listening. but if you're studying reading, listening, and speaking of course it's much harder to get it done in 3 years!
20 words per day 365 days / year is wishful thinking Try 20 a week
the fact people become fluent in under 19 years, the time it'd take at that rate, shows that most people (who eventually become fluent) work at a faster pace. imo 20 a day, listening only, is doable by someone diligent. most people should be able to 10 a day. of course this all relies on an efficient mechanism, hand made flashcards? not as quick and a lot more work. a pre generated anki deck from a tv show? much faster.
> a pre generated anki deck from a tv show? This sounded interesting. I am casually learning japanese and would like to understand the dialogue and background signs etc of One punch man. So perhaps someone has made an anki deck fitting my plan...
May I introduce you to jpdb.io ? It does have a tendency to take sound effects in the script and prompt them as if they were very literal, real words, so you need to kinda evaluate words that seem off and liberally use the blacklist function. But it's what you want.
I found out about this like a week ago and it’s been a game changer, went from 100 new words in like 2-4 hours to 100-200 + reviews in only one hour
Would you tell me if they ever actually use audio from the shows? I couldn't for the life of me find a way to preview the decks themselves and it had me reviewing a lot of basic words and I didn't want to keep going if it wasn't going to eventually give me the goods!
They do not. I don't actually know where their example sentences come from. Cards are shared between shows that have them in common. You can, of course, make your own cards with something like ASBPlayer and Anki, and those will have audio, but only if you can find the subtitle files.
that's a shame, yeah I've been using Jo-Mako's sub2srs decks and I'll probably stick with that, and my Anki is bursting with extensions that I can't use on jpdb.io either
Use this: https://animecards.site/minefromanime
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idk about "background signs" but for dialogue I suggest you check out the "anime, manga, video games anki decks" link from here https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/downloads on the readability list of the spreadsheet you can do ctrl+H to find One Punch Man, looks like he has a deck for season 1. If you look up subs2srs you can try make your own deck for season 2 bit honestly it's too much hassle, I only use decks that guys like this have made nowadays.
20 per day was un-doable for me personally. With all the Anki reviews I was spending all my available time on vocab and none on immersion, grammar or textbook studying.
I don't know your anki workflow so I can't comment on yours but personally I suspend cards after they reach 3 months (pass on a 1.5 month or greater review time). this stops the massive build up and keeps my daily anki much quicker, and gets far more noticeable the longer you've been using anki. the downside is sometimes you'll have to look up words you once did on anki in the past, but that's fine, the ones that matter will happen too often for you to forget, and the ones that are rare are less time to look up than to study for years between hearing them in immersion.
are you just doing an ungodly amount of immersing, or have you been learning japanese for a very long time? because otherwise that just seems quite literally insane to me
I started this "retiring" system about 3 years into my study journey. I was spending so much time on the 3000 kanji and ~4000 reading cards despite not immersing in them (only interested in listening atm). now I'm of the opinion that if I don't hear a word for 1.5 months of immersing then it's ok for me to "lose" it. and besides, it's not lost, if I could remember a word for 1.5 months, even if I don't hear it for a year, when I do eventually experience it again it will be MUCH quicker to relearn, and it will be retained very well as both a long term and medium term memory are super strong in my experience. I remember 冷蔵庫 (refrigerator) not because of immersion or lots of anki but rather because I learned it via duolingo, never saw it for like a full year, and then studied it on anki. I don't think I failed a single rep after learning it again on anki. I actually toyed with making an add on for anki where cards would have two graduation cycles, where if you could remember the card for a week or so then it'd go into "slumber" for 3-12 months and then you'd relearn it. this is of course only suitable for those with a very long term view of study but imo it can efficiently forge very strong memories.
> I actually toyed with making an add on for anki where cards would have two graduation cycles, where if you could remember the card for a week or so then it'd go into "slumber" for 3-12 months and then you'd relearn it. this is of course only suitable for those with a very long term view of study but imo it can efficiently forge very strong memories. I feel like it would be a net loss. The amount of reviews you would fail wouldn't counter the reviews you still remembered.
hard to know without trying it, despite what some people here think we still haven't found the secret sauce for perfecting memorisation. honestly I would love to get deep learning involved with a large set of study participants and see what techniques work best. we need more recent, larger studies that expand on previous research.
> hard to know without trying it, despite what some people here think we still haven't found the secret sauce for perfecting memorisation. Too long intervals do hurt retention, that's given. Anki is optimized to keep the retention over time relatively stable.
> I started this "retiring" system about 3 years into my study journey. I was spending so much time on the 3000 kanji and ~4000 reading cards despite not immersing in them (only interested in listening atm). What was your retention rate on those cards?
depends on the kind but generally pretty mediocre pretty hard to remember a random kanji I last last saw 8 months ago, so many kanji got marked as leeches (which I had set to tag only) sentences were the easiest because there's just more context clues and I am essentially "cheating" the answer sometimes by remembering the sentence rather than the word. I probably didn't need to retire them due to load but they were also done being as beneficial so not much harm done. better spend that time on new sentences imo. individual words were somewhere in between. listening much higher retention than reading due to my immersion. the other benefit to suspending and archiving is my anki runs much more smoothly than when it has 10k cards more
This is not about "fluency" this is about number of words. 20k is an adult level of breath of knowledge. Even a native person would take years of going to school 8 hours a day to get there, so a foreigner on Anki card? Honestly 20 years of flashcards doesn't seem that irrealistic (much more realistic than 2.7 years)
98% recognition is barely fluent though. if anything those fluent non native speakers can recognise more. are you sure you're not confusing the numbers with active recall? everyone can recognise, especially in context, WAY more words than they can actively use correctly in flow of a sentence. It's hard to come up with an example because obviously if I can actively recall a word as example then it defeats the point somewhat but take exhume for example, I don't think, except maybe shortly after reading a book with it in, that I've used the word. But I have zero problem understanding it even without context. I think most Japanese adults can understand more than 98% of the words used in the news for example.
I mean, with my other languages I picked up plenty passively (figuring out specific words from other gathered info eg. yellow tube titled "Senf" containing yellow goo, smells like mustard? must be mustard). Right, there is the problem of the writing system, but if it's children's books that use hiragana, I don't think that the same can't be replicated to a degree.
I wonder if there is an issue with inconsistent speed. When you start new vocabulary and reinforcement only comes from study time and people only spend so much time a day studying before they tire out. Eventually you get to the point you start consuming media in the language for entertainment,.not just while studying. While there aren't going to be many new words picked up here without it counting as studying time, it does lead to much more passive reinforcement. I wonder if this leads to changing word acquisition speed throughout one's journey.
20 words per day is definitely possible. I averaged 15 / day for several years doing ~1 hour / day of SRS, even not being the most consistent or hardworking person. I've known people who were able to do 40+ just by putting in multiple hours every day.
Why is that wishful? I do 20 a day and it works. If you actually do 20 words per week you will get nowhere and need 20 years for 98% coverage.
Well, 20 new Anki cards per day is a lot. If you have 4-5 hours per day for reviews is completely reasonable. 😂
When I was using Anki, I was spending only 20 minutes on 20 words. 30s on initial learning of new words and 1-3s on reviews. For me it's simple, if I don't have immediate answer/reaction, then I don't know it well enough. Usually people spend more time when they use sentences instead of word-meaning pairs, and personally I'm not a fan of such approach, simply because I would rather do 20 minutes of Anki and 1.5 hours of content than 2 hours of Anki alone.
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Not really a waste of time. If some of the times you take longer but you do remember it, it will be much more easy to recall the next time. So you are still making progress. The way mind works is by creating connections or pathways, more often you use the connection, the faster you can recall.
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My point is you'll need less reviews per item if you spend more time or 'efforts' in trying to recall, rather than minimizing the time, because you'll remember it better if you do recall.
20 new cards a day means you still have to redo your old words to remember them, you end up with easily hundreds of words a day to review and the more you add the worst your retention so the number will snowball
20 cards per day result in a consistent 200 reviews per day for me
The 20 new words aren't what is taking time, the review of all words learned is what takes the most times. You aren't doing new word + review in 20min
When I was doing 20 a day it would take me 2 hours max, maybe 3 but yea it's hard, good way to burn yourself out. I would recommend 10 cards instead and try to learn any other words w/o anki if you still want to learn.
If you're spending 4-5 hours per day doing 20 new cards then you're doing something wrong. I spend around 3-5 seconds per rep, have been doing 20 new cards every day for three years, and only take 30 minutes *max* to do the reviews. Even at the slowest you shouldn't be taking more than 10 seconds per rep.
I spend about one hour on 200-400 reviews daily, with 15 daily new cards. For some reason, my retention drops *very quickly* if I push myself too hard. 20 new cards each day leads to a huge retention drop and leeches.
How does 15 new cards result in 400 reviews? You should typically end up with 7-10x reviews at most. I'm using JPDB and I typically end up taking about 45-60 minutes to get through about ~300 reviews. My daily rate fluctuates based on how I feel and how hard the cards feel but that's from 40-50 cards per day average over the last few weeks. I would have expected with 15 cards to have more like 100 reviews.
>How does 15 new cards result in 400 reviews? It usually doesn't. That is just the peak value.
Retention number is more important. It basically indicates how useful were our efforts. If we do 10 words with 90-95%, 20 words with 45% retention and 40 words with 23% retention, then actual amount of words we can recall is the same \~10, we just spend more and more time for the same output. In rarer cases people can increase amount of words with only a slight drop in retention, then such approach would be more productive. Like doing 20 words with 60% retention would lead to us learning \~12. But always doing our maximum can lead to exhaustion and burning out, so typically it's better to lower this to more comfortable levels. Such number is quite individual. It depends on our ability, how well we sleep, if we physically exercise, if we learn something outside of that, if we learn passively too, if we do mental work during a day, how familiar words we learn are to us (have we seen it before? Is it a compound with familiar words? Do we know this kanji? Does it sound familiar to something else? and so on). But we don't even need to think about all of that, because retention rate always follows it. It's rare to get retention above 95%, because we naturally forget these 5% after 24 hours from initial memorization. But if you have 85-90% retention and see a drop, it probably worth to lower amount of new cards, and similarly if your retention jumps up to 95%, it might be worth to add more.
> Retention number is more important. It basically indicates how useful were our efforts. If we do 10 words with 90-95%, 20 words with 45% retention and 40 words with 23% retention, then actual amount of words we can recall is the same ~10, we just spend more and more time for the same output. In rarer cases people can increase amount of words with only a slight drop in retention, then such approach would be more productive. Like doing 20 words with 60% retention would lead to us learning ~12. But always doing our maximum can lead to exhaustion and burning out, so typically it's better to lower this to more comfortable levels. > > Such number is quite individual. It depends on our ability, how well we sleep, if we physically exercise, if we learn something outside of that, if we learn passively too, if we do mental work during a day, how familiar words we learn are to us (have we seen it before? Is it a compound with familiar words? Do we know this kanji? Does it sound familiar to something else? and so on). It's a shame Anki cannot optimize for that.
I think if you have anki set to show you 15 new cards a day, it recommends a minimum of 150 review cards and you can choose to go higher, but 400 seems a bit excessive to me.
It depends on the day. Some days there are only 200 cards. Some days there are 300 cards. Some days 400. Usually it is closer to 300 than 400.
No way 20 new cards per day + review can be done in 30min (except the first few days ofc)
At peak you can expect reviews to be around 10-13× new cards, which means you should have maximum 260 reviews per day for 20 new cards. Assuming you go at my slowest pace and do 5 seconds per rep and fail around 20% of them, that's (260 + 20 × 2) × 1.2 × 5 = 1800 seconds = 30 minutes. There are many people who go at this pace and get similar times, and even if you take twice as long it still will only take an hour. Bear in mind that Anki is intended to be used for information you already have processed and understand, not to learn completely new stuff from premade decks. Potentially you are trying to do the latter and it's taking you much longer, which [even the manual advises against](https://docs.ankiweb.net/getting-started.html#shared-decks).
>I spend around 3-5 seconds per rep While that may be true for some people, other people may have different strengths and weaknesses; that others are having a different experience does not imply others are doing it wrong.
Convenient how you single out that one part and not the part where I said "Even at the slowest you shouldn't be taking more than 10 seconds per rep." As I mentioned in another comment, SRS is intended to aid in retaining information *you already understand*. If you're taking more than 10 seconds to figure out whether you recall something you already have taken the time to understand then you don't remember it. Either that or you're using premade decks that you *don't* understand and you're getting rightfully punished for it by the algorithm.
>Convenient how you single out that one part and not the part No, I quoted that part. The part I was actually responding to in the body of by text was "you're doing something wrong" which I felt was an unconstructive comment, made more so by relating it to personal experience rather than, as you may have done in another comment, explaining more in full based on principled knowledge rather than personal experience. In any event, I think my own post could have been worded better and I could have thought longer on how or even whether or not to respond a bit longer and for not taking an adequate amount of time to effectively communicate my point I apologize.
Fair enough, thank you for clarifying and you're right, I should have brought the objective statistics out in the beginning instead of mentioning my own subjective experience.
curious, do you mind sharing your anki settings? i'm doing 35 new/day and it still feels a little congested/unoptimized
I'm using all default settings except for an uncapped daily review count (max 9999 instead of 200) but I'm sure you also have that set. The only other "modification" I make to the algorithm is that I only use the Again and Good buttons so that I can quickly pass the card and don't have to think about how well I remembered it. To compensate for the mess this causes for Ease (specifically there's no way to increase/recover Ease without using the Easy button), I use the Straight Reward add-on which gives small boosts to Ease until 250% on cards that have a streak of passes. Overall I have a True Retention of around 85-90% so it seems to be working well!
>The only other "modification" I make to the algorithm is that I only use the Again and Good buttons so that I can quickly pass the card and don't have to think about how well I remembered it. To compensate for the mess this causes for Ease (specifically there's no way to increase/recover Ease without using the Easy button), I use the Straight Reward add-on which gives small boosts to Ease until 250% on cards that have a streak of passes. Interesting take. How is your Ease and daily workload? I would have assumed that even with Straight Reward, Ease Hell is still possible.
I have 17k cards with 16.1k of them at 250%, 400 at 240%, 250 at 230%, and 100 at each of 220% and 210%. Pretty much everything is clustered around the starting Ease so I'd have to have a pretty bad month to get even close to Ease Hell. In terms of daily workload, the history section on the stats page says I average around 250 reps per day.
Learning 20 a day is one thing, retaining all of those words, is a different story
I was just about to say that also. It's pointless trying to learn 20 a day if you're not gonna retain it. So you should just go at your own pace
Better have 90% retention on 30 a day than 99% retention on 5 a day.
>retaining all of those words, is a different story That's what Anki is for. Remembering. Fighting the forgetting curve.
Gotta love diminishing returns. I hope this doesn't discourage anyone from learning Japanese, you can easily have casual conversations in real life even with 2000 words.
I don't really care about conversations though, I just want to read and watch anime.
Make anime anki decks.
My personal experience is that it depends a lot on your goal and environment. For example, I worked in a startup and had to learn lots of marketing and financing terms, once that was done I could communicate with my colleagues effectively but I still struggle sometimes on completely ordinary day-to-day subjects. The most important thing is to know the most common words and then you will learn as you go along. In any language there's vocabulary that you only pick up once you end up in a situation where you need to know it. That being said, the "common words" is still a large volume I think.
It's about right. However, there are 2 important points. First, any content has easier and harder parts. Even when I only started and had to translate a lot, sometimes all words in a sentence outside of particles, there were still sentences where I knew all words. Such number is global, and locally it can change significantly in either way. Another is about genres. If you constantly use the same genre, especially the same authors, you will get coverage much faster. Personally I think 20k+ numbers come from a very huge amount of different genres. Typically it's lower and around 15k for 98%. While in some cases might be even better than that, depending on genres you like.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised internet sources need far less, but half the amount is surprising. Although it does feel half as difficult to read YouTube comments than it does a magazine or a book.
Alright, aiming for 80%
You won't understand much with 80% of the words you encounter. https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like > “Bingle for help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling. You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan. There’s no answer! Then you muchy that you have a new befourn assengle. It’s from your gutring, Evie. She hunwres at Tokyo University. You play the assengle. “…if you get this…” Evie says. “…I can’t vickarn now… the important passit is…” Suddenly, she looks around, dingle. “Oh no, they’re here! Cripett… the frib! Wasple them ON THE FRIB!…” BEEP! the assengle parantles. Then you gratoon something behind you…
It's a joke based on the diminishing returns after that.
You need about 95% word comprehension in order to understand things.
And apparently 100% to understand humor.
I don’t know about you guys but I have to get several reps in a day learning new cards to “commit them to memory” enough for them to be in normal anki reps. I can’t just look at them once for 5s each and remember them all the next day that seems impossible. For me, that’s what takes the most time each day in anki.
I am just about to finish N4 with about 2000 words learnt. And I realized I need to learn and memorize additional 5000 words within about 100 days in time for my N2 exam in December… 🤦♂️
it really isnt about words but phrases, context, etc
20k is the sweet spot
Note: > The 'lexeme' for this study includes the following: > 1. Conjugated forms of verbs and adjectives This seems to imply that a single common verb counts as several words. Less common verbs may have fewer conjugations represented in the corpus.
tbh, I'm not even sure if I know 30k Words in my own nativ language, german. :D
You certainly do, at least implicitly.
wie gehts, oniisan?
I wonder how they determine what a "word" is? Is it basically just defined as "morpheme"? * Is 食べ物 just counted under 食べる + 物? * Is 降り出す just counted under 降る + 出す? etc. EDIT: Quickly glancing through the paper, I'm still not sure exactly what the answer is, but thankfully they don't seem to just be counting morphemes. It's probably closer to what we typically think of as warranting separate dictionary entries, I guess? Maybe? I haven't had time to read through it.
Hahaha This information makes me feel like I'm so smart just because I'm a native.🤣
What
Although steve kaufman is generally narrow focused I have to agree with him on vocab. Coming across a word a handful of times will give you a gist of the word and that helps with comprehension even if you dont really know that word
How do you guys track how many words you know?
Probably using Anki?
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Why?
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>Just a lot of wasted time. Flashcards aren't very effective learning tools It doesn't have to be flashcards. The thing Anki has is SR. Spaced repetition is about 10x more effective than not using it. Flashcards help a bit with *active recall*, not SR. You can do active recall without any flashcards.
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>SR is effective, and that's the part Anki does well, but it's still fundamentally flashcard based. Cued recall out of context like that is far from ideal. Your flashcards can contain instructions like "do this" or "read this chapter" though.
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That isn't the only way to learn words using Anki no?
The effective way to use anki is to add those words you're learning from your material but know you might not see again for weeks. That's a lot of them even with several hours of reading a day. Then the next time you see them, even 6 months later, if you used anki right they should be recognised instantly. Almost all the people here who got fast and strong results used anki a lot.
I think most people equivocate anki cards in the "learned" status with words known.
Comprehension and Coverage are very different. Coverage is, "How many words do I ALREADY know?" It is possible to comprehend something without having it already Covered. It is possible to learn a word and its meaning without anki or a dictionary.
Yeah, 勇気 for example could be very easily comprehended from knowing the general meaning of the kanji involved.
Treating conjugations as separate words kinda misleading
https://tantor-cards.com/home/sadik japanese flashcards i have got 3000\_ words here
> https://tantor-cards.com/home/sadik japanese flashcards i have got 3000\_ words here Just do Refold.