The lessons teach; the Anki decks are what make it stay. This page is the course’s drilling technique in one place: how to work the shipped decks, and how to build the one deck we can’t ship — yours.

Ten minutes a day

Anki is a flashcard app with a scheduler: it shows you each card again just before you’d forget it, so old material costs almost nothing to keep. That bargain only holds if you show up daily — ten minutes with your morning coffee beats an hour on Sunday, and a missed week quietly doubles the pile. Anki is free on desktop and Android; the official iPhone app costs money and funds the whole project. A free AnkiWeb account syncs them all.

Working the course decks

  • Import each deck when you finish its lesson, not all at once. The decks are deduplicated across the course, so nothing ever drills twice — but material you haven’t met yet is just noise in the queue.
  • Drill sentences, not words. After importing, select the vocab-tagged cards and suspend them (browse → search tag:vocab → suspend). The sentences carry the words; unsuspend an individual word only if it keeps slipping inside its sentences.
  • Recognition cards are listening practice. Material tagged recognition is what Japan says to you — the goal is to catch it at speed, never to say it. If a recognition card keeps failing, that’s your cue to replay its script section in the lesson.
  • Lesson 0’s deck is the exception to all of the above: pure pronunciation echo. Drill it as-is before Lesson 1, then retire it.
  • Don’t edit the course cards. While the course is under development, re-downloading a deck refreshes your cards in place without losing your review history — but it also overwrites any edits you made (and an occasionally reworded sentence arrives as a brand-new card). Anything of your own belongs in your personal deck, below.

Drill with your mouth, not your eyes

This is a speaking course, and a card isn’t done until your mouth has done it:

  • Answer out loud before you flip. Silent recognition feels like knowing; it isn’t the skill you’ll need at the register.
  • Grade your mouth. If the audio played and you understood but couldn’t have said it, take the fail — the card comes back sooner, which is the point.
  • Echo the audio after every card, exactly like the lessons: tap, listen, repeat aloud. Lesson 0’s calibration habit, kept for life.

Your personal deck — two minutes, once

Lesson 2 hands you the harvester — Kore wa nihongo de nan desu ka — and from then on you’ll be collecting words this course never drilled. Give them somewhere to live the day you meet them:

  1. Create one deck — “My Japanese” is a fine name — using Anki’s plain Basic card type.
  2. Front: the English, plus where you met it. “chopsticks — souvenir shop.” The place is free memory glue.
  3. Back: the romaji, exactly as it sounded. hashi. If your field capture was a voice memo, transcribe it while it’s fresh — or record your own voice straight onto the card (the phone apps can do this).
  4. Add the day’s harvest the same evening. A few cards a day is plenty; the point is that nothing you paid attention to gets lost.

Notice the direction. The course decks play audio first — they drill your ear. Your personal deck shows English first and demands the Japanese — it drills your mouth, which is exactly what the trip asks of a harvested word: you knew the thing, you wanted its name, and next time you should be able to produce it without asking twice.

When a word won’t stick

Give it a sentence. A lone noun has nothing to hang on to — so drop it into a frame you already own and put that on the card: not hashi but Hashi wa arimasu ka. This is the course’s own method (sentences carry words) applied to your deck, and it’s the same fix for any course vocab card you unsuspended.