My Plan for Learning 10,000 Japanese Words

I've been using Anki for years to idly study Japanese in a wonderfully unthinking way, and I use this one deck of Kanji cards in particular that I am now just under 900 cards away from completing. That may sound like an awful lot of cards, but we're talking completion within a year if I learn three new cards a day, which is very doable and thus I can no longer make excuses. I must finish the kanji deck. I will.

This kanji means 'harvest'.

As for the attached vocabulary deck, no, let's not talk about it. That one hurts.

This big nasty boy has just over ten thousand new cards for me to learn, which would mean an average new card rate of almost thirty per day if I wanted to learn it within a year. This is too much. Not least because it would be additional to those new kanji cards, and all other new cards across my other decks (which I will not discuss here in order to stay focused).

The stats for my kanji & vocab decks, respectively. Let's not talk about the 'relearning' segment.

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So I think my plan is going to be to just to stick to those three new kanji cards each day and learn those - nice and leisurely. I can't get too sucked into spending an untenable amount of time on this (I very strictly keep my language study to one hour per day maximum, because it starts to massively get in the way of more important stuff once it creeps past that limit, in my experience), but three new cards a day is wonderfully relaxed.

Me. I'm weak. 私は弱いです。

And then in one beautiful year, when I've crunched those remaining kanji into my brain, I can get started on the big vocab quest. Maybe I'll opt for ten new vocab cards a day, which would get me to the finish line in about three years. That's a long time, but we're talking about ten thousand Japanese words slotted into my mind, both aurally and visually, so I'd be very satisfied by that timeline.

I've crunched these numbers a few times along the way so far, and I've found that adding more than ten new cards a day starts to get rapidly too much for me, so going for a four-year relatively chill goal that allows me to spend a reasonably minimal time per day on language seems like a good option.

Mmm... wheat.

Realistically, I should probably increase that first number (three new cards per day) so that I can dip the ten a bit lower later on, but I'll experiment with that and see how I feel. I think I sort of enjoy learning the vocab more, because there's more information to attach the memory to (I learn the sounds of the words), so it might be easier to study a higher number of new cards per day when I've moved away from the kanji. I don't know.

Either way, here's hoping I can cram that stuff into my brain!