Comment by FranzFerdiNaN 2 months ago
Not buying at all that you learned 18000 words and 5000 kanji in ten minutes per day. Thats 60 hours a year for say five year, or 300 hours. Thats leaves you with about 70 words and/or kanji per hour or less than a minute per word/kanji. A rate which far surpasses native speakers.
Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
I learned 17.5k words comprised of ~3k kanji in around 2 years at about an hour a day of review time. That's reviews + new cards, not including time immersing in order to find the daily quota of new vocab which itself was 2 to 3 hours of study.
So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes.
I've seen a pretty wide variety of people do Anki, and I can say there's a distribution in length of time per card for basically the exact same types of cards among people. The slowest people average around 3x slower than the fastest.
Sentence cards are great and necessary for learning grammar (during which you will learn some vocab too). After that can just focus on pure vocab.
I did the exact same Korean deck as my wife at the exact same time. It was wild comparing our stats in real-time. It would take me 10 ~ 12 seconds to do the same sentences that it would take her 30 ~ 35 seconds.
That isn't terribly far off. I used Anki throughout my A levels, spending about 250 hours on it in total according to its statistics, and had something like 10k cards that I reviewed 50k times.
Now, those cards weren't alone - they were reinforcing content that I'd learnt in lessons. But if they were doing it for 10 minutes a day a few times a day, it seems quite plausible to me.
Whoops, sorry if that was confusing.
Actually, it took me 20 minutes of time per day to do my reviews + new words. I had, on average, 200 cards to go through daily (180 review + 20 new cards).[1] Going through 18'000 words took me around 5 years. 5×365×20=36'500
> A rate which far surpasses native speakers.
Are you comparing me to babies? It took me 2 weekends to learn all kana, but it takes years for a toddler to learn just hiragana. It's not a fair comparison.
> Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
I wonder why you think it's unrealistic. It's not like I'm a genius or anything.[2]
[1] Two cards is one word; one for English -> Japanese, one for Japanese -> English.
[2] Some teachers definitely thought I was a genius because of my memory, but it was all thanks to Anki. And proof is that I was absolutely bad at text comprehension. Anki doesn't make you practice that.