>>72585428Yeah, it's important to stress what this anon says is true - you have do study at a sustainable pace and use a method that works for you. What's sustainable and exactly which method that is is different for everyone, so you might need to experiment a little. Do too little and you might get frustrated because progress is slow, do too much and you'll burn out quickly. I settled long-term at around a total of 12 new cards a day, although I did like 20 or 25 when I was starting out because I had a lot more free time during COVID. The RRTK deck helped me to differentiate between different Kanji and radicals with mnemonics when I was new in a similar way WaniKani did for you, but it's not technically necessary, you will need to find what works for you. I stopped using the mnemonics after a couple of weeks/months but they did speed up the beginning, but everyone learns differently. Sometimes you just outgrew these trainings wheels and you don't need them anymore. Also, you said learning difficulty feels exponential. I think the beginning is really hard, then once you are over an initial hump it gets easier and easier, but eventually it flattens out again and you reach a plateau where progress gets less noticeable. Many people get frustrated here, but you should definitely keep going. It's just easy to lose track of ones improvements once one has the basics down.
Also, I would generally recommend starting to mine your own cards from anime or video games over using pre-made anime or drama card decks once once you feel like adding in more than your beginner decks because you tend to remember words a lot better if you can remember the exact content you encountered them in. But of course, that's hard when you don't have much time to consume content to mine from, I get it. It does really help to try and put what you learned into practice like this, though.
>you'll get the picture, sentence and voice line on the front side of the card, so it can happen that you just learn the meaning of the sentence by associating it with the picture - without actually "learning the words"This is why I generally prefer word cards over sentence cards myself, if I see a picture or a whole sentence in the front I often know exactly what the answer is from context is without actually identifying the word. I would definitely recommend moving the pictures to the back, it takes like 10 seconds to edit the template.
>And don't cuck yourself with the "I have no time" argument. Make time. Every day.Yeah, this is the right mindset to have. I'm glad you kept going! I'm sure everyone can find around 30-45 minutes every day between commutes, toilet breaks, baths or just winding down on the couch/in bed after work. You don't have to spent 5 hours every day as long as you make steady progress.
By the way, while we are at it, another incredible resource that has become really amazing since I wrote guide is agent (
https://github.com/0xDC00/agent), a really easy to use texthooking program (for PC games and emulated Switch games in particular) that lets you export the text as you play for a lot of non-VN games so you can scan it with Yomichan and/or make cards out of it. For example, Persona 3, 4 and 5 are pretty good games to play in Japanese once you are decently comfortable, lots of voice acting (with backlog that makes it easy to record when making cards) and everyday vocabulary.
