7 years with Anki

Over the years Anki has become an important and useful tool for myself to collect, repeat and learn vocabulary. 

More than seven years ago I was determined to improve my English and learn as much vocabulary as possible. When I read articles online I found new words, I added them into a deck, same as from TV shows like How I Met Your Mother, Lost and many more.

I was going to a school class in the evening after work which included two hours of English study - although it was probably too easy, but at least it helped me getting more personal confidence. Plus, I also added words from the classes to my deck.

Around that time I started creating a new English Anki deck every year to collect vocabulary. It got more and more and it helped me a lot. The repetition pattern was truly helpful.

Therefore it did the same with other languages like for the time I lived in Spain I collected lots of words with Anki.

But especially recently I got really efficient using it with Japanese. I downloaded decks to learn hiragana and katakana, started with  personal deck of my vocabulary.

It has more than 3300 entries by now. First, I entered words only in hiragana or katakana, but then I found the "Ultimate" template which has line for kanji, kana and English translation. And luckily, the well-known dictionary app Jisho has a connection to Anki so that I can easily send words from the dictionary to my own deck.

It allows me to increase vocabulary lists rapidly - especially now living in Japan. I collect words from everywhere: Anime, manga, music, conversations, advertisement, manuals, office work, streets signs,...

My settings give me like 100 words a day and it's seems quite efficient. I also created another personal deck with sentences and initially I also filled out the kana line for the Japanese reading, but now I leave it as I expect myself to be able to read the kanji used in the sentence.

Generally, I can only recommend using Anki - it's a great tool for personalized vocabulary learning and especially to recommend for learning Japanese. Maybe because Anki (暗記) is a Japanese word and means "memorization"...

The trouble of learning two languages at once

Last year I lived in Spain and faced the inner trouble of trying to learn two languages at once.

For a job opportunity I moved to Spain and I wanted to take advantage of living in another country by picking up the Spanish language.

I used the Memrise app for getting more and more vocabulary and created my own Anki deck to collect more words myself which I either saw on streets, heard in conversations or in social media. I also started following Spanish social media sites covering my interests - like anime. Even acquired a Spanish One Piece manga.

As for the work in the company I didn't necessarily need Spanish, but sometimes emails were in Spanish - same as conversation between colleagues depending on their background. I tried to immerse to get more and more palabras, but having conversations was still troublesome. I felt more comfortable in reading as it gave me time to understand.

And I didn't start from zero, a few years before I started some self-studying and participated in a course in Valencia, yet still a lot to be learned.

But I was in a conflict: I was also studying Japanese. I even brought a few Japanese manga to Spain to read sometimes. And as Japanese is a much bigger challenge to learn - especially character-wise, I actually didn't have the time to do both. It's actually too much.

Some people asked, if I don't mix it all up, and at first I interestingly replied that it wouldn't be a problem, since it's about two completely different languages. So I thought, but in hindsight I was totally wrong...

It actually caused chaos in my brain, because while trying to speak Spanish I sometimes accidentally almost (and possibly sometimes did) mixed it up putting a Japanese word into a Spanish sentence.

A funny example was the usage of "to drink". In Japanese it's 飲む (nomu) and in Spanish it's "beber" and "a drink" would be "la bebida". However, as I mixed it up, I created a new word called "nomida". So basically my brain took the Japanese infinitive of verb to create a Spanish noun. Total mess, but kinda funny.

There were probably more examples, but that's the funniest one. As mentioned before I filled my memory with lots of vocabulary using Memrise and Anki in Spanish, but I did the same for Japanese. Probably because the learning process was kinda similar (even though) different characters - the way of remembering vocabulary remained in a similar pattern.

As Spain also has anime conventions I went to one where I you could watch the movie "Your Name (君の名は). It was in Japanese with Spanish subtitles. And it really summed up both my back then language priorities. I was able to understand most of the movie, partially the listening Japanese and also through Spanish subs.

Still apart from that, my priority was Japanese and it definitely distracted me from Spanish. For language learning it's definitely better to have full focus on only one like I have now with only looking into 日本語 - that's the best way to actually learn a language. After leaving Spain and now living in Japan, it's really effective with setting my priorities straight.

My personal conclusion was actually also like: As Japanese is for many reasons more difficult to learn I figured that it's also better to learn it the earlier the better. Maybe one day, I go back to learning Spanish again, although I still passively absorb it by social media or listening to working colleagues talking.

Did you have a similar situation with setting priorities on languages? Please tell me yours in the comments!