Why I stopped using Anki for Japanese

I started Anki in 2017. I made a deck of the 6,000 most common Japanese words. For the next eight years I reviewed flashcards every single morning, fifteen minutes a day, ninety-six percent retention rate. The blue heatmap on my profile looked spectacular.

Then in 2024 I sat down to read 『コンビニ人間』 — a short, contemporary novel — and I couldn't get through the first page without feeling like I was suffocating. The vocabulary was all there. I had reviewed every single word on my morning cards. But putting them together, in sentences, in context, written by a real person? I had nothing.

The problem with pre-made decks

A vocabulary word in isolation is just a fact. You can know that 掛ける means "to hang." You cannot, from that fact, know that hanging glasses and hanging a picture and multiplying numbers all use the same verb. You can't know which collocations are natural. You can't know what register it lives in. You don't even know what it looks like in a sentence written by someone who isn't a textbook author.

The cards I'd memorised were tourists in my head. They had no neighbours, no addresses, no jobs. When I met them in the wild, they didn't recognise me back.

What changed

I stopped adding words I'd never met. Instead I read. When I hit a word I didn't know, I tapped it. The lookup card showed me the meaning, the reading, and — crucially — the sentence I'd just been reading. The card went into review. Two days later, I saw the word again, and I remembered not just its meaning but where I'd met it.

After three months of reading like this, I went back to 『コンビニ人間』. The first page was still hard. But it wasn't suffocating. The words had neighbours now.

What I'd tell my 2017 self

Start reading sooner. Use the textbook for the first three months, then put it down. Find something — anything — written in Japanese that you actually want to understand, and read it slowly with a good lookup tool. Add words from that, not from a frequency list someone else made for you.

That's the entire method. The rest is just a question of finding good things to read.