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Hi Monique! I am on Season 4 now, and I feel like the difficulty is picking up a little, although it’s not too bad. For helping to remember vocab, there are two things that work really well for me.
If I’m having trouble with a particular item in Anki, I do a Google image search for it, and I find a pretty/interesting picture that relates to the vocab to put on the answer side of my Anki card (not the question side, since that would give it away). If I can find an image from a particular drama or anime or manga or something that I like, even better, since the associations makes the memory even stronger. Something about seeing the image when I turn over the card really helps the memory stick. Plus just the act of Googling it and browsing the images often makes it stand out in my mind and helps differentiate it from other similar items. But just using Anki for long enough will eventually hammer things into your head; although the brute force method might not be the best, I find that it does work eventually. But making my Anki deck pretty and interesting really motivates me to study.
The other thing that really helps is when I come across vocab that I’ve studied in other media, like dramas or music. Music is especially good, since I can shuffle it over and over again without getting bored until I start picking up certain words/phrases in the songs. Once my brain has recognized a word or phrase in a song and connected it to the meaning, I almost never forget it. It’s also really rewarding, because when new things are introduced on TextFugu, I first start to memorize them on Anki, and then after I’ve studied them for awhile and gotten used to them, I’ll suddenly be able to pick them up in songs or in TV dialogue, and it feels really great! As I slowly add more vocab and grammar and keep listening to the songs, I start to be able to piece together more and more phrases and understand the songs better and better.
Good luck!
Finished Season 3! Season 4 begun.
Using 30/30 schedule alternating TextFugu & Anki study with dramas for fun, which is working great right now.
Speaking of ドラマ: sad that Ikebukuro West Gate Park is finished (looooooved it, may watch again soon and draw air hearts around Takashi some more). Really enjoyed Ogon no Buta, which I just finished, and currently watching Hito ni Yasashiku, which is pretty good in its own way, although not something I’m super excited about. Considering watching Osen, Tiger & Dragon, or Yasuko to Kenji next, or maybe Trick. Any recommendations welcome; I tend to finish a season every couple of days, so I am always looking for something new.
@Tobias Anderson: Anki is a great tool, and has really helped my Japanese progress. Eventually it will be like a little library of all the Japanese you’ve accumulated, and you can start adding sentences & vocab from things you’ve watched or read. I also like to add relevant images to various cards, since pictures help create more connections in your memory so you retain things better (so does audio, and you can get native speakers to record sentences for you at a site called RhinoSpike). Plus pictures and sound are more fun to study than just plain text. I like to find pics from my favorite Japanese dramas, horror movies, anime, manga, etc. to illustrate various cards (like, I might use a picture from Gokusen or GTO for the verb “to teach”, so that it shows the picture when it shows the English translation). And I just find pretty pictures on the internet for most nouns, although if I can somehow associate it with a particular show/person/thing that I like, I try to do that, since it helps my memory. In this way, Anki has actually become kind of entertaining for me.
I just came back to TextFugu after nearly a year of ignoring Japanese, and I just got through figuring out where I left off (whyyyyyy did I delete my Japanese bookmarks in a fit of techno-decluttering?), which is mid-way through season 3.
I reviewed a little bit as I was skimming through previous material, but luckily Anki (which I did keep up with during my break) helped me retain most of what I had learned. I may never be consistent at sticking with things (I am an inveterate dilettante no matter how much I try to reform) but Anki really helps me to not lose ground in certain subjects while I’m immersed in others. I use it for everything, not just Japanese.
I hope to power through Season 3 before this coming Sunday. Since I have taken a long break, I’m kind of in the Japanese honeymoon phase again, and I am still at the point where each new grammatical form or common verb helps me understand things better (like when I’m binging on ドラマ), so I am feeling motivated again. BTW, I have recently fallen madly in love with 池袋ウエストゲートパーク (Ikebukuro West Gate Park), if anyone is looking for a new drama to watch. It’s a bit older but one of the most original and interesting dramas I’ve come across.
If they’ve already been suspended, I think you’ll have to manually un-suspend them. To do that, open Anki, go to “Browse” at the top. Then click on the “Suspended” category in the list on the left (not the “Suspend” button at the top). Now select all the cards you want to un-suspend, and click the “Suspend” button at the top to turn it off (it will have a thin square around it when it’s on, which will disappear once it’s off). Cards that are suspended show the due date in parentheses, but the parentheses should disappear once you un-suspend them. You can check to make sure they’re no longer suspended by clicking on some other category in the left-hand list and then coming back to the “Suspended” category–they should have disappeared.
So what I did was open Anki, go to the little gear-wheel-thing icon by your deck, select “Options” and then the “Lapses” tab. There are two drop-down menus at the bottom of the list, “Leech Threshold” and “Leech Action.” I set “Leech Action” to “Tag Only,” which means that Anki will just tag the card as a leech (to make it easy to identify) but not suspend it, so the card won’t just sort of accidentally disappear on you. You can also make the number of lapses in “Leech Threshold” higher so that you can miss it more times before it gets tagged as a leech. The idea behind leeches is that if you keep missing a card, it’s probably for a reason–either you need to come up with a better way of remembering it, or maybe you’re confusing it with a similar card, or maybe it’s a really uncommon word so you never see it anywhere but Anki. So you might want to take a second look at any cards that do get tagged as leeches, but you won’t have to worry about “losing” cards because of the whole leech thing. I don’t actually know how to turn it completely off so that it won’t even tag leeches, but hopefully this is good enough!
I set a 2 minute timer on my iPhone and just do Anki for that amount of time, many times per day. Two minutes does not allow me to start suffering, yet I find that I can get a surprising amount done, especially reviews, since many of them don’t take much time/thought. And since I quit while it’s still fun (or at least not painful), I don’t mind doing it in between checking my email (which I do like a thousand times a day) or reading billions of blog posts. I actually finish earlier in the day because it’s kind of a fun little game, instead of putting it off forever until I can concentrate for one big, agonizing chunk of time.
I also used to hate having music or other immersion media playing (passive listening) while doing Anki or trying to study actively, but one day I realized that if I want to achieve native fluency and actually be able to read/write/talk Japanese with other people around, I can’t just study in a bubble forever. So now I combine Anki with passive listening/immersion, and do it in short, frequent bursts (mostly on my laptop, sometimes on my iPhone). Sometimes my concentration is impaired, but I consider it preparation for less-than-perfect real life conditions (trying to carry on a conversation in a crowded coffee shop, a city street, or over a bad Skype connection, for instance).
