How to Drill

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.

Twenty 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 — twenty minutes with your morning coffee beats an hour on Sunday, and a missed week quietly doubles the pile. (Other budgets work too — “How fast to move,” below, maps your daily minutes to a course pace.) 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.

New to Anki itself? The manual’s Getting Started chapter is a short read — its Key Concepts section (cards, decks, notes, and the card states behind the scheduling) is the part worth absorbing before your first review. Beyond that, three chapters cover every move this page will ask of you: Studying — the review screen and the four answer buttons you’ll grade with; Deck Options — where “New cards/day” and “Maximum reviews/day” live; and Browsing — searching cards and (un)suspending them. The import mechanics, including the update-existing-notes choice this course leans on, are in Packaged Decks.

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. The word cards (tagged vocab) arrive already suspended — the sentences carry the words, so nothing to do on import. Unsuspend an individual word (browse → search tag:vocab → unsuspend) 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.
• Speaking cards ask you to produce. Every lesson’s deck — and every booster’s, and every skill’s that has something you’d actually say — also carries its Checkpoint’s speaking drills: the card opens with a spoken Nihongo de nan desu ka — “how do you say it in Japanese?” — then an English scene (“You missed what they just said. Ask for it again.”). Say the Japanese out loud, then flip — the back plays the answer. They queue up after the deck’s listening cards on purpose: you always hear a line before you’re asked to produce it, and every word and chunk the course teaches — core and boosters alike — comes back through at least one of these cards.
• 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 only if you tell Anki to apply it. On import, set the update option so existing notes are always updated (recent Anki calls this “Update notes” / “Existing notes → Update”; its default only updates “if newer” and will silently skip a fixed clip or reworded note on cards you already have). The refresh also overwrites any edits you made (and an occasionally reworded sentence arrives as a brand-new card), so anything of your own belongs in your personal deck, below.

How fast to move

Each lesson’s deck puts about 80 cards into your rotation (the vocab cards ship suspended and don’t count) — Lessons 3 and 6 run heavier, Lesson 10 lighter. Anki introduces new cards at its default 20 per day, and young cards come back often, so a steady 20-a-day intake settles at roughly 100–150 reviews a day — call it 15–25 minutes with the clips playing and your mouth doing the answers.

That arithmetic gives you a menu. Pick by the daily time you’ll actually show up for:

Two honest qualifiers. These estimates assume Japanese is new to you; if you’ve studied it before, this course is largely review and sharpening — mature cards graduate fast, the review load runs well below the table, and you can move significantly quicker. And they describe active course learning; once the last deck is in, reviews taper on their own — expect roughly half the load a month after finishing, a handful of minutes a day within a few months, and a couple of minutes a day long-term. That taper is the whole point of the scheduler: the course gets cheaper to keep every week you own it.

The super-cram — a lesson a day — is possible. We don’t recommend it, but here’s the honest math rather than a pretense that nobody will try: ~80 new cards a day for eleven days. Anki’s defaults won’t even allow it, so you’d raise New cards/day to 100 and Maximum reviews/day to 9999 (otherwise the intake throttles and the pile hides). You’ll turn the final page on day eleven — and then the bill arrives: 500-plus reviews, an hour and a half to two hours a day, through the following two to three weeks, easing under an hour around week five and only then settling toward normal maintenance. Miss a single day near the peak and it compounds viciously. And the time only buys anything if every card still gets said aloud, at full honesty — speed-tapping through 500 cards drills your thumb, not your mouth. If you have the hours and the stomach, it works; if you’re wondering whether you do, take the one-month push instead.

Three settings notes:

• Leave “New cards/day” at the default 20 — or set it to match your row above. Raising it to catch up after a binge or a break is exactly what builds the review storm.
• Coming back from a break, clear the backlog before importing anything new. And if Anki congratulates you suspiciously early that day, its “Maximum reviews/day” cap (default 200) is hiding the rest of the pile — raise the cap, clear it for real, then resume.
• Boosters and skills follow the same rule after the core: most add a few dozen cards each, so add the next pack when the queue has gone quiet again, not before. They’re also where the maintenance taper turns into spare capacity — a quiet queue is the sign you have room for one.

Drill with your mouth, not your eyes

This is a speaking course, and a card isn’t done until your mouth has done it. Two universal rules: answer out loud before you flip (silent recognition feels like knowing; it isn’t the skill the register demands), and echo the audio after every card — Lesson 0’s calibration habit, kept for life. Beyond that, each card announces its mode with a spoken cue before its audio, and each mode has its own move:

• No cue — a plain sentence card, most of the deck. A line you own, drilled ear-first: listen, understand, say it back at full voice. If you understood it but couldn’t have said it, take the fail — the card comes back sooner, which is the point.
• Nihongo de nan desu ka + an English scene — the speaking cards. The reverse direction. Say the Japanese before you flip, then grade the sentence you actually said — recognizing the answer afterwards doesn’t count. Echo the answer once to polish the delivery.
• “Listen only” — recognition cards. Japan talking to you. Grade purely on whether you caught the meaning at full speed; you never need to say these. If one keeps failing, that’s your cue to replay its script section in the lesson.
• “Listen to this dialog” — the combined scene tracks. Follow the whole conversation without the text; a pass means you stayed with every turn. Treat it as your daily immersion minute, not a line-by-line test.
• “Catch what you can” — the deliberately-too-fast lines. Not a comprehension test. Catch the words you own (the card’s notes list what’s in there) and know which repair line you’d reach for. Two caught words and the right reflex is a pass.
• “Pronunciation practice” — Lesson 0. Echo the sound exactly: beats, vowel lengths, the held silences. Meaning isn’t the point yet. These cards have a retirement plan: once the echo-after-every-card habit is automatic — a few weeks in — suspend them. From then on, every other card’s echo is your pronunciation practice.
• “Read this” — the Katakana and Sign Kanji decks. You’ll only meet these cards if you’ve added those two optional skills — the core course itself stays spoken-only. Eyes first: name what it says before you flip (for katakana, read it out; sign cards you never pronounce — knowing what the sign means is the whole skill).

One more rule, for the speaking cards. Japanese often gives you more than one right sentence, and a card can only show one. The swap you’ll meet constantly is the two please-words — but they are not equal partners, so grade them in one direction only:

• You said onegaishimasu, the card shows kudasai — pass, every time. onegaishimasu is the wider word: anywhere kudasai fits, it fits too.
• You said kudasai, the card shows onegaishimasu — ask yourself one question: can somebody physically hand me this? A bottle of water, a ticket, three postcards — yes, pass. A check-in, a ride to the station, a two-hour booking — no, take the fail. If you can’t tell, take the fail and let the card come back. That is much cheaper than practising it wrong.

For anything else you invented, the same default applies: unless you’re sure it works in the scene, take the fail. And two to fail yourself on however you worded them — hoshii at a register (that one is for telling a friend what you feel like, not the cashier), and X ga ii desu when nobody offered you a choice.

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 drill your ear first — audio first, meaning after — and their speaking cards then flip that around for the sentences that matter most. Your personal deck is all flip: English first, Japanese out of 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.