I recommend reading yesterday’s post discussing my follies with WaniKani the first time I tried learning Kanji.

Over a year and a trip to Japan passed before I made a serious effort at studying Japanese again. WaniKani had failed me in several ways, and I was reluctant to try a spaced repetition system that wouldn’t solve them.

I wanted something that would adapt to my existing Japanese knowledge, letting me avoid redundant flashcards. More importantly, I needed something that would respond more gracefully to getting overwhelmed or returning after a break.

jpdb.io checked both of these boxes. Instead of a fixed curriculum, jpdb.io allowed you to choose exactly which vocabulary you wanted to learn. Even better, it offered a wide variety of pre-built decks with vocabulary from anime, visual novels, and books. It also claimed to handle lapses and irregular time periods between flashcard reviews better by implementing an ML based spaced repetition algorithm.

jpdb.io’s flashcard system/lessons are simpler than WaniKani’s. There are only two kinds: kanji flashcards (which includes radicals) and vocabulary flashcards. Kanji flashcards come with mnemonics1 ask you to visualize or draw the kanji or radical based on its name while vocabulary flashcards ask you to guess the pronunciation/meaning of the word in the context of an example sentence.

I was enjoying the Summer Pockets anime at the time and eager for more content, wanted to try reading the source visual novel as Japanese practice. jpdb.io configured to feed me the most common vocabulary in Summer Pockets, I raced through 30 minutes of flashcards per day, mostly marking that I would never forget vocabulary that I already knew.

Unlike WaniKani, flashcards are self graded — you choose whether remembering the kanji/vocabulary was hard/medium/easy or whether you forgot the flashcard nothing/something.

Anki allows using FSRS as its spaced repetition scheduler providing pretty much the same benefits as jpdb.io’s scheduler.

I was aware that without strongly committing to an answer, there was a risk that I would assume that I would assume my answer was correct, even when I hadn’t really known before seeing the solution. To guard against this I took the time to trace the kanji in the air and subvocalize the vocabulary’s meaning and pronunciation before clicking through to see the solution. Deciding how to grade myself was tricky at first. Sometimes when tracing out a kanji, I would draw the right strokes but in the wrong order. Because I was only tracing into the air, it was hard to judge how accurately I’d drawn the shape, so I opted to grade myself more conservatively.

jpdb.io’s spaced repetition algorithm also lived up to its promises. I’ve noticed two main benefits in practice. First, flashcards are pretty much always the right difficulty. My accuracy on jpdb.io ended up being fairly consistent with my accuracy on WaniKani at ~90%. Despite this, I rarely get a flashcard that I want to mark as easy; usually I have to think at least a second or two, before remembering the correct answer. Second, unlike WaniKani I don’t get flashcards wrong, only to weeks later on my next review still have no idea what the right answer is. Instead, jpdb.io usually shows me the flashcard again much sooner (i.e. the next day) when I get a flashcard wrong.

All of this remained true even when abandoning jpdb.io for longer periods of time, be it several weeks for a trip, or even once for several months. Just continuing to review my flashcards at whatever pace I manage when I got back, slowly reintroduces me to the flashcards I forgot, while giving me credit for remembering a longer period of time, for the flashcards I got wrong. It’s also been really nice to be able to tailor the vocabulary I’m learning to whatever Japanese media I’m consuming over the past year.

I haven’t practiced Japanese quite as consistently since switching to jpdb.io. But, I’ve been using it for at least a year, whereas WaniKani burnt me out after just ~5 months. It effortlessly slots into my life when I want it to, adapting to whatever is going on in my life at the moment, making it as painless as possible to pick it back up again.

Continued in Against foolproof software.

  1. At least the most common ~1000 radicals/kanji have mnemonics. I found that learning the most common words in Summer Pockets, I fairly quickly started running into some kanji missing mnemonics. But jpdb.io lets you to define custom mnemonics, which has the added benefit of making it easier to remember your mnemonic (assuming you try reasonably hard to make one). ↩