Using Anki in Immersion

Learn a word in Anki meet it multiple times again in immersion acquire it forever. Anki is the fuel for your immersion not the engine.
Do less than 1 hour a day of Anki. Always immerse more than you do Anki.
Start with 10 new cards. Adjust the amount to keep a 80-90% retention rate.
Spend a maximum of 10 seconds per card. Aim for under 5 seconds.
When immersion feels like "just living life", you can drop Anki without sizeable drawbacks.

How to use Anki for immersion¶

You will never not forget information. To put it more simply one will always forget things. Thats the baseline of how things are. If you learn something then do nothing with it you will eventually forget it. Thats why we need Anki to remember things in the long term.

Anki is there to supplement your immersion by having you learn expressions you mined in an efficient manner that is Anki's spaced repetition system. The key idea is you learn an expression in Anki and acquire it with Immersion afterwards. We differentiate here between learning and acquiring because you apply what you learn from Anki with immersion. Then through immersing consistently only then will that learned expression be acquired by seeing it be used in many different contexts. When something is acquired it will stick in your brain and you hardly forget it. It's the same with your native language where you can understand and remember a huge amount of words because you have seen them so many times in so many different contexts. With immersion we are trying to mimic that which can only happen if we learn new words every day in Anki. Anki is the fuel for your immersion.

Anki and Immersion are not two separate processes. What you learn in Anki will only be useful to you when you actually see it be used in immersion. Anki alone won't make you learn a language. Anki doesn't replace your immersion.

How to grade Anki cards?¶

Good: If you remembered the meaning and reading

Fail: If you couldn't remember both.

I finished my Anki for the day what now?¶

Immerse.

I ran out of new cards what now?¶

Immerse and mine more.

What happens if I learn too many new cards?¶

Your reviews will increase.

I finished my reviews in Anki should I do a custom study and do more reviews for the day?¶

I advice against doing a custom study in Anki.

The time you spend doing a custom study is better spent immersing and learning new things.

Unless you have an exam and want to quickly go through for example your grammar deck, then that's fine.

I don't have enough time today to do my reviews and new cards, which one of these should I prioritize?¶

Try to never miss at least your reviews, make sure to do them everyday. Avoid letting your reviews spill into the next day.

How do I reduce my reviews?¶

Lower the amount of new cards every day,

In what order should I do my Anki? Reviews or new cards first?¶

However you like to. I usually like to do my reviews first then do my new cards all in the same session.

Do I have to finish my Anki in one session?¶

No, you can split it up if you would like to. Some people want to get through Anki first thing in the morning so they don't have to bother with it later during the day. Some people like to split up their reviews in like 10 minute sessions which they do during the day. Some people like to do short busts of reviews then take a few seconds long break then continue with the next batch of reviews.

For learning new cards you are also free to decide for yourself. Some people split them up as well or do them during their day whenever they are free.

See what works for you so you don't wear yourself out! Prioritize sustainability.

Do I have to do Anki in the first place?¶

Not really if you immerse a ton, but doing Anki helps. There are tons of people who got to a pretty high level in their respected target language without having done Anki once in their life.

Referencing How to use Anki for immersion if you only do Anki and not immerse then words won't really stick. You have to use what you learn in Anki to acquire it intuitively like a native which you do by immersing. That's why you only learn one meaning at a time on for each card because thats enough to enable comprehension.

Why does Anki help?

Let's say you have enough time, motivation and the "power" to do 50 new cards a day on top of your reviews in less than an hour, while immersing for 6 hours a day. After three months, you would have learned around 4500 new words which would enable you to immerse even more and in a bigger variety of content which in turn exposes you to the language in more nuanced ways speeding up your acquisition of the language. So actually if you have a lot of time you could benefit from a lot of Anki.

I hate Anki and I dread doing it everyday so much so it demotivates me¶

Then drop it. If you don't do Anki at all then make sure to counteract it with tons of active immersion, where you read and listen a lot. Otherwise you'll keep forcing yourself and eventually burn out. You can learn a language with and without Anki.

For beginners

If you are getting started and drop Anki then you will have a hard time advancing forward to immersion. You need some kind of foundation to immerse and that is usually done in the immersion method by doing Anki.

How much Anki you should do¶

Anki should always make up less time than your immersion time. You don't want to spend a lot of time in Anki because there you only need to learn a new word. To make that actually stick you need to do immersion. That's why Anki should be make up 1/5 of your daily study time. 4/5 of the time should be spent immersing.

Don't spend more than one hour in Anki.

When you can stop doing Anki¶

Intermediate Learners

This section is targeted at "intermediate" learners.

Anki is always good to do. It doesn't hurt learning new words everyday, but after doing a lot of immersion you will reach a point where new cards in Anki have such a low frequency that they are barely used in your target language. You would usually get "nothing" out of learning these words because they are so rare. Here you have two choices:

Continue learning these rare words if you learning them has some value for you. Reference the total life time utility model.
Suspend the rare words and focus only on reviewing your existing cards and mining more common words instead. Being an intermediate you can better judge if a word is rare but still used or actually really rare and unused.

But there is also a third choice you have:

Stop doing Anki completely.

You could only do this and have minimal drawbacks if immersion is part of your daily life so much so the contents you are immersing with are part of who you are. At this point immersion isn't anymore about learning your target language but just a means to keep consuming what you are interested in. The target language is no longer a subject to be studied, but a medium for living.

Think of it like this: In your native language and day to day life you probably are not consuming content because you want to get better at your native language. You just want to keep up with your hobbies and interests, since you are already comfortable with your proficiency in your native language. You don't need to improve anymore because you "made it". You just do now what you feel like doing, which is mostly something in your native language because the content it provides to you are something part of who you are. If you reach this state with your target language then the need for Anki is omitted.

At that point you can pick up words perfectly fine like you can do with your native language and remember them easily without Anki. You hardly forget these words because you are comfortable with your level i.e proficient enough and constantly surrounded by the same domains in your target language that picking up new words doesn't require much effort.

How many new cards should you do¶

General rule of thumb

As many as your retention allows you to. (Using the default Anki SRS algorithm)

Aim for at least 80% retention, anything above 90% is optimal.
If your retention is below 80% then do less cards.
If your retention is above 90% then you can raise the amount of new cards or continue doing the same amount.

For beginners:

Start with 10 new cards a day then keep applying the general rule above. At the beginning your retention will be not good, but that's normal and you should not worry or stress about it too much for now. Your primary focus should be immersing and taking your time to understand the language.

How much time should you spent per card¶

Take at absolute maximum 10 seconds per card while reviewing or doing new cards. If you can't remember something in 10 seconds, then most likely you won't remember it in 15, 30 seconds or even minutes. So fail the card if you can't remember it in that timeframe. 10 seconds is a maximum, try to aim for under 5 seconds.

Choose an Anki Template¶

Every card should contain the expression you are trying to learn on the front. On the back you should have the meaning, reading, an example sentence that uses that word and pronunciation. Pronunciation is most often an audio playing, a graph on how to pronounce it or both. This is called a vocab card.

The most important parts to remember are meaning and reading. If you don't understand the meaning you mined then read through the example sentence. For every card in Anki you learn one meaning (and reading) depending on the language at a time.

On the front there should be no hints that can help you recall the back of the card. The goal hereby is to create a situation where you only have the word as the only information present to recall it. This way you are forced to recall the word purely based on the word itself. This also means no sentence or audio playing on the front or really anything else.

There are also sentence cards where on the front you see the whole sentence with the word you are trying to memorize. These type of cards will be easier and your retention will be higher with them than with vocab cards. Reason being, with sentence cards your brain will most likely, unconsciously or not, use the context, length and or shape of the sentence and where the word comes up in the sentence or really any unique aspect of will give you clues to help you answer thus boosting your retention rate not based on the word but on outside factors.

Additional material for Anki Templates

These are many different template for different languages, but the ones for Japanese are the most customizable and easiest to install. I would recommend Lapis. You can it for your target language if you're not studying Japanese.

How to make remembering easier in Anki¶

A word should be mined according to the guidelines in When to mine and not mine.

Don't mine everything. Mine only expressions that you understand within the context of the sentence. Context is key, since the greater impression an expression/context has on you, the easier you will remember a word in Anki. You can boost the impression of an expression by creating as many associations with the card you can, most prominently adding more meaningful pictures to the card. Meaningful here means anything that makes YOU remember the card more easily.

Backlog¶

Usually when doing immersion you will mine more words than you will be learning each day. This will result in a backlog of cards. For example if you mine 100 words today and do 10 new cards in Anki then you got 90 left in total. The next day you mine 100 words again and do 10 new cards in Anki then you have 180 cards and so on.

How to manage a backlog¶

If you know a card already then you can suspend it. Chances are high you acquired it already through immersion.
Try maintaining a backlog so you don't run out of Anki cards. This comes in handy when you don't have time to immerse for a day.
Sort your new cards by frequency so you will always learn the most common used word out of your backlog. This makes sure you'll benefit faster from a newly learnt word.

Leeches¶

Suspend or delete them. You'll probably encounter that expression through immersion again and again.

Another way is creating mnemonics to remember them. Make your mnemonics as weird as you can.