Practice · spaced repetition

What you are about to forget.

Every word you have met goes into a schedule and comes back just before you would have lost it. Ten minutes a day is enough to keep everything you have learned.

Which words come first

The deck opens with the words you would use on a first day: hello, thank you, sorry, mother, father, water, eat, drink, one, two, three. After that it mixes. Every category feeds the same queue at its own pace, so a week of cards has greetings, family, verbs, numbers and adjectives in it rather than thirty pronouns. Each card says which category the word came from.

The order is not alphabetical and it is not shortest first. Short is not the same as useful, and a deck that opens on これ, それ and あれ teaches you to point at things before it teaches you to say good morning.

How the schedule works

A new word is shown twice in the first ten minutes, then a day later, then at growing intervals: four days, ten days, a month, and on. Getting one wrong sends it back to the start of that ladder and slightly lowers how fast it will grow next time.

Reviews are scheduled by day, not by the clock. A card due tomorrow is waiting from the start of tomorrow and stays there all day, so it makes no difference whether you sit down at seven in the morning or eleven at night. The day turns over at 4am, which means a late session still counts as the day it started in. This is how Anki works and it is worth copying: a schedule that made you wait until exactly 9pm because that is when you studied yesterday would punish you for being early.

Daily is the recommendation, not a rule. Fifteen new words a day is a daily cap rather than a target, and the reviews that come back are whatever the schedule has for that day. Miss a day and nothing is lost: the cards sit there and wait, and tomorrow is simply busier. The habit is the point, and ten minutes a day beats an hour on a Sunday by a distance.

The four buttons are not a score. Again means you did not know it. Hard means you got there slowly. Good means you knew it. Easy means it was obvious and you would like to see it far less often. Answer honestly and the schedule works; flatter yourself and it does not.

Each one changes when the word comes back. Again restarts the word: you see it again in a minute, and from then on its gaps grow a little more slowly. Hard brings it back only slightly later than last time. Good makes the gap about two and a half times longer. Easy makes it longer still, and makes every later gap grow faster too. Pressing Good every time, a word is Solid in about a month. Pressing Easy every time, in under three weeks.

Not the same thing as the games

The word games are for speed and recognition, and they play whatever slice of the daily lessons you choose. They are the fun five minutes. This deck is the five minutes that decides whether you still know these words in June. Do both if you like, but do this one.

Four more decks

This is the main deck, and its contents and order are fixed: every word, mixed across categories. If you would rather learn one topic first, study by category uses the same cards and the same schedule, one category at a time. There is also a deck each for hiragana, katakana and kanji, with every character already in it and ten new ones a day.