Today we are going to tell you about an amazing FREE tool that will improve the rate at which you remember Japanese.
It’s called Anki.
This is definitely something you want to have in your Japanese learning arsenal.
Remember those cool trading cards you used to play with as a kid?
Or maybe you still play with them? That’s cool.
Imagine that your fight for Japanese fluency is like those card games.
What skills would you want to have to win the fight?
Hmmm…. How about … SUPER MEMORY?!
Well, anki or あんき means ‘memory’!
Just by using this tool you can unlock and harness the super power of awesome memory.
Excited? I sure am! Let’s look into this a little more!
Anki is a spaced repetition flashcard system.
You can download it to your computer, phone, tablet, etc.
There are tons of different ones available but Anki is Japanese Ammo’s top recommendation. We also like Memrise.
So, what is it? Well, if you’ve ever made flashcards before, you will be familiar with the system.
You write the vocabulary that you need to know on one side, and the answer on another. If you can remember the vocabulary, the flashcard gets put to the back of the pack. If you can’t remember, then you test yourself again.
However, manual flashcards, while okay, are a little rudimentary. They definitely aren’t the most efficient way of learning vocabulary. What usually ends up happening is that you keep needlessly testing yourself on the items that you already know and you don’t test yourself enough on the items you need to remember.
Anki improves on this with a winning formula called Spaced Repetition. Basically, you rate the degree of ease with which you could recall the vocabulary. If you found it super easy, the machine will not prompt you with the same item again until many minutes later. If you ace it again, you will not see that item for even longer – days, weeks, months.
The machine has an algorithim whereby it will only show you items when they are on the verge of exiting your brain for good. You end up revising the minimum amount of times necessary in order to make your revision more effective and efficient.
Hell yeah! We just levelled up and got the power of super efficiency!
Ever heard of the Pimsleur audiotapes? They use this idea as their method.
(Warning: geek speak coming up)
Pimsleur discussed the idea of spaced repetition in learning vocabulary and outlined a ‘schedule of repetitions which is sufficiently frequent to raise the student’s memory level [but] not so frequent as to preempt all the class time’. Pimsleur noted that the optimal schedule is ‘exponential in form’ and that, if the first interval ‘between original presentation and the first recall’ is five seconds, then the ‘next interval may need to come 5² = 25 seconds later, the next one 5³ = 125 seconds (2:05) later’ and so on.
(Geek speak over… Sort of)
Learning vocabulary in this way is immensely rewarding because the rate at which this method allows one to remember vocabulary is very quick. Pimsleur notes, for instance, that if the exponential method of such a method is to be believed, then the tenth recall of a word will not have to take place until ‘over four months’ after the first. This certainly takes away the boredom of mindless repetition.
My suggestion for making the most out of this tool is this: get it on your phone.
If you have a smartphone, you can have thousands and thousands of vocabulary items that you need to remember at your fingertips at anytime you want. Who really has time to sit behind a computer or a set of flashcards at home and study vocabulary? Instead, make use of all the fractions of time that are wasted throughout the day. Waiting for trains, buses, in traffic jams, for elevators, for meetings, for classes, for dates. We spend so much of our lives waiting. Why don’t we put it to good use? Whenever you find you have a spare minute, you can glance down at your app and test yourself. This is also good from an immersion standpoint because Japanese becomes part of your daily life. It isn’t something you study at a specific time a couple of days a week but all the time.
Here’s my tip for inputting vocabulary: put your language on the front of the card. You are training for recall not recognition. And whenever you do not know a word, put it straight into your memorization tool. Make it part of your routine to put in vocabulary and to test yourself.
If you are creating your own flashcards, make sure to use pictures as much as possible! So, if you need to learn the Japanese word for girl, don’t just put ‘woman’ on one side and 女の子 on the other. Go through Google Images and choose a picture of a woman and use that instead of the word ‘woman’. That way you are attaching the Japanese word to the actual thing you wish to remember and not just translating. It also makes your memory stronger and more vivid.
You don’t have to make your own flashcards if you don’t want to. There’s a nice selection available that have already been made by other people. You can download and use those. Japanese Ammo even has flashcards for hiragana. They include cute memorable pictures, audio for native pronunciation, vocabulary, stroke orders, and a logical sequence. I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for SRS flashcards, I would not have learned hiragana as fast or as effortlessly as I did.
One more word of advice: make studying with your flashcards a habit. The easiest way to create a new habit is to link it to an existing one. I study my flashcards while I eat breakfast. That means I remember to revise every morning.
Now that you have the power of SUPER MEMORY, use it wisely.
With great power comes great responsibility.
And great Japanese fluency.
Happy learning!
