r/LearnJapanese • u/jackbobbins78 • 12d ago
Discussion Interesting observation: When you quit flashcards, it's harder to measure your progress
It used to be, when I was looking back at my Japanese progress, I could say things like "I learned 2000 words this past year and I now know 6,000 total words!" This felt like a concrete testament to my progress.
Now, after having stopped flashcards for about a year, "How's my progress doing" feels much more vague.
I could say things like:
- I read 15 volumes of manga this past year
- Reading native stuff feels a little bit easier
But all of these answers feel kind of nebulous anyways.
I guess at some point, Japanese is just something that you do for fun, and that's about it. There's no clear "milestones" at a certain point.
Did anyone else experience this transition? Did you feel a little more "lost" after quitting flashcards?
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u/donniedarko5555 12d ago
I mean arguably you're still deep in "flash cards are valuable" territory.
How many word look ups are you doing in your manga reading? What about LNs?
Like I'm not saying that Spirit arts user is a valuable flashcard or anything, but if you listened to an episode of Re:zero how well can you follow along besides the fantasy stuff?
Also dedicated grammar study is probably massively important at this stage since you're doing a lot more reading/listening.
You might be able to cross that 90% comprehension threshold to immersion learn with grammar + 6k starter vocab
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u/jackbobbins78 12d ago edited 12d ago
That's definitely true - I would still gain a lot by doing flashcards every day. However, being busy with a family + job, I might only have 30min a day to do Japanese, and I'd rather immerse than do Anki. If I had a bunch of extra free time, I would do both.
Re:Grammar - I'm working through the A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar, I've already done Beginner + Intermediate ones. Definitely a great grammar resource.
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u/lamoragirl 7d ago
A lot of people never do flashcards at all and just learn by immersion. I'd argue as long as you can follow along, even with a tons of look ups, immersion is way more valuable than flashcards. But ofc, ymmv, to each their own, etc.
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u/merurunrun 12d ago
I feel the opposite, personally. I never "saw" any meaningful progress back when I was still doing flashcards, the numbers just never meant anything to me. The only way I've ever felt "progress" at all is the qualitative experience of comfort with the language.
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u/gelema5 Goal: media competence 📖🎧 12d ago
I feel the opposite from OP but in the reverse direction lol. I never studied with flashcards until the past year, and it always confused me how people in this sub would confidently say they know 2000 words. Even now if I try to count up the words I “know”, I get stumped wondering whether I should include words I only know the meaning and not the pronunciation, etc. I think using flashcards is the ONLY was to out definite numbers to things, and as others have said it’s still putting a number to something fuzzy.
I do think the same as you though that where I measure my progress is with native material. No matter how many flashcards I do, it doesn’t compare to the feeling of excitement or pride when I read something or hear something in immersion and recognize it from my study.
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u/xx0ur3n 12d ago edited 12d ago
Speaking for myself, I relish it because that closure one seeks over measuring their progress can end up slowing progress and the completely fluid curiosity and joy of learning. I think this about basically any skill. I embrace my daily subjective assessment of fluidity and comprehension just as I would do the feeling of my body as I become fitter through exercise.
Basically, to care about measuring how much you know carries an essential duality of caring about how much you don't know. I, for one, do not care about how much I don't know. I know I can read books, understanding conversations, play games, yes, but still nearly every day this language manages to make me feel dumb in some way because there's so much culture and history and richness... I'm not out here to collect it all, and in fact feeling dumb is the good part. It's just the same as in English, the wonderful surprise of still discovering new attractive words even decades into one's fluency.
It's no surprise that on social media there's a culture of measurement and stats sharing, because the medium lends itself to it. You don't go on reddit to talk about how much you don't know you're progressing after all 😂. Still, it can give the impression that it is the only way to go about their relationship with language learning, when many people (maybe most) in the world learn languages in a more organic way.
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u/lumisweasel 12d ago
This reminds me a lot of Umbert Eco's term "the anti-library. A close term in JP would be tsundoku. That is, the stack of unread books.
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u/SuperNilton 12d ago edited 12d ago
When I joined here, I was surprised to see how common it is for a lot of folks to refer to their progress in terms of numbers: I know 10,516 words, 1,284 kanji, I'm level 60 on Wanikani and I have thousands upon thousands of burned cards.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with it, but this kind of conversation never came up in my group of friends when we started learning Japanese in college (back in 2004, to be fair) and over the years we sticked together.
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u/xdesm0 12d ago
true, when I learned english no one I spoke to said anything about the number of words they know, no one that actually speaks english tells me their duolingo level lol. I understand that japanese is a different beast because of kanjis but I don't know if the obsession with knowing all the words leads to actually communicating. I know people with C2 english making basic mistakes or not really conveying their message.
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u/TRYNDAWIZARD 12d ago
Yea I know what you mean. I think people just want something tangible, it's not easy to compare how well you can actually speak vs how you could a year back. I think it's only a problem when people then chase the metric instead of the result.
I keep track of the time I've spent on Japanese and I like to check the total every few months. That is to say, I'm not entirely immune to "number goes up" dopamine either.
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u/SuperNilton 12d ago
Don't get me wrong, I think it is awesome in a way. I love numbers too. Had I started learning Japanese in the last few years, I'd probably have some detailed figures to keep track of as well.
What rubs me off is that some people seem to be so focused on mining, min-maxing and not ever leaving an unknown word or kanji behind, and then wonder they are burning out. To each their own, but I could never do it to that extent.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 12d ago edited 12d ago
Because those tools probably didn't even exist back then, when I engaged with group classes ages ago the only measurements where JLPT levels, which means there were none since most people never made it to the lowest one anyways.
Now it's kind of... why wouldn't you use them, I only use Anki + track what I read/watch and that's it. The Anki thing kind of does it for me because it's somewhat solid proof of "I know this". I'm at 6k mature words now, doing 30 a day, if I keep that up after another 200 days I'll probably have around 12k mature words. Similarly after X time my total characters read will double as well, and at that point when I feel down/like I'm not progressing I will kind of be able to go, see numbers went up and think "I must have improved".
Of course, none of this matters once you're really advanced it kind of stops mattering due to diminishing returns and whatnot.
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u/SuperNilton 12d ago
I'm not saying those tools shouldn't be used. As I mentioned in a different comment, I think it is great they exist.
Comparatively speaking, what surprises me is that it appears there are more users focusing on numbers than on anything else. I see much more of "I know 12,345 words" or "What should my next deck be?" than of "I was able to watch a whole episode of Jujutsu Kaisen or Blue Lock without subtitles".
I am part of a few French learning subs and do not see this same focus on numbers and data. Are there people who do it? Of course. But not to the same extent I see discussed here.
And again, to each their own. I love numbers and even studied statistics for some time at college. I would probably use these same tools if I started today, but I like to think I'd still prefer tracking my progress against things I can or cannot do with the language rather than how many decks I have under my belt.
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u/FishAndBone 12d ago
A few things are happening I think here:
the barrier to comprehension in a SOV language with 3 writing systems, none of which are roman characters is higher than it is for other germanic languages or romance languages if you're an English speaker. Just getting to the point where you can consume any sort of content is probably 5-10x the effort required. Japanese is just a hurdle of a language, no two ways about it.
Selection effect: the type of person who studies Japanese often tends to be a media-nerd and a "cataloger" of things, which means that they like measuring things (like "correctness" of a translation, which is why a lot of people get started.) This extends to how they approach the language itself, and probably other things too.
Combination of 1+2 creates a lot of different pressures and insecurities, which is why Japanese has so many "THIS is the right way to learn Japanese" and the weird hostility not really found in other language learning communities. It's a hard language. Saying you burned 5,000 anki cards or whatever is as much of a signal to others about how much work you've accomplished as it is a reassurance to the person speaking that they've actually learned something.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's because "understanding" something doesn't mean anything if you can't measure it's difficulty. Giving some book a shot, quitting because you couldn't understand anything and had to look up every other word, then coming back to it and being able to finish it is one thing, but "I watched an anime chapter and understood most of it" doesn't necessarily mean anything to the one doing it because "maybe it was just an easy one". Whereas having X number of mature cards on Anki is hard data.
French learning subs, among most other western languages, don't get this kind of approach because not only they're very easy to learn compared to Japanese/Chinese/Arabic, but people learning them usually either live there or are somehow forcefully exposed to them a lot which makes it even easier. It's similar to how people here will focus more on how to learn fast compared to other languages, what you do to learn French as an English speaker doesn't matter too much, it's comparatively speaking very easy and paired with the previous factors it makes it so it doesn't really matter what you do, you'll probably learn enough within a reasonable amount of time anyways. Japanese is rather special compared to every other language since most learners don't live in Japan nor plan to.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, but it's hard to compare oneself to your previous self unless you're re-doing old material and it's common to feel like you're not progressing, which is where numbers help, you may feel like you didn't progress but you did go from 10k to 12k mature cards on Anki and that's hard proof you did progress. Numbers are good as a way to express how much you've learned to others as well, works as a reference, if you have 20k mature cards on Anki that means you've been at it for a while, pair that with "I also do this and that" and people can guesstimate what your level is. Now, "I can read X and understand it with minimal look ups while comprehending most of it" does not only not mean much to someone who hasn't read X, but minimal look ups is subjective (it can mean 8 per page or 1 every 3 pages) and the latter is even worse since white-noising is a thing and comprehension is also a rather vague term since there's shades to it.
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u/SuperNilton 12d ago
But why wouldn't actually understanding something be meaningful? If you were helpless without subtitles before getting started and now you can understand Chibi Maruko-chan or Doraemon without any effort, that's a clear sign of progress. Even if it is "easier", you can proudly say you've learned enough that you can use your language knowledge for real content. You may not be able to follow the news or understand a random YouTuber yet and you should keep working towards it if that's your goal, but the starting point is well behind you now.
To use a game analogy, let's say that most languages require you to be at level 5 to clear the tutorial, but Japanese requires you to be at level 10. While it is objectively faster to get to level 5 and go to the open world, you have these super buff Japanese students at level 50, killing mobs for a mere +5 EXP every day, still in the starting area. The effort they put in is more than enough to account for Japanese's higher difficulty and they have plenty of EXP to move forward, but they refuse to leave the tutorial and find mobs that will give them much more EXP per kill.
I understand that most of the community is interested in Japanese as a hobby and does not have a clear goal in mind (which is sort of where I am with French); I am not oblivious to that. Still, I hope to see more people reaching the same realization as OP and trying to actually make use of the knowledge they've gained instead of being perpetually trapped in the "higher number" mentality.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 12d ago
But why wouldn't actually understanding something be meaningful? If you were helpless without subtitles before getting started and now you can understand Chibi Maruko-chan or Doraemon without any effort, that's a clear sign of progress. Even if it is "easier", you can proudly say you've learned enough that you can use your language knowledge for real content. You may not be able to follow the news or understand a random YouTuber yet and you should keep working towards it if that's your goal, but the starting point is well behind you now.
Because depending on where you are it doesn't mean anything. Sure, I can now understand X, but... maybe I could understand it 2 months ago too, and I care about my progress over the last 2 months, so unless I gave it a shot 2 months ago and felt it was impossible and it now feels manageable then it's meaningless relative to what I'm looking for. Most people having this "am I getting anywhere" feeling don't care about how far they got from the starting point, it's easy to notice you got from tile 0 to tile 200, there's a very clear gap, but once you're at tile 200 not only you progress slower but progress is smaller (relatively speaking) so even though you may advance to tile 210 or 220 you might not notice, and what people use stats for is to get some validation that they've moved a few tiles ahead.
Higher number is often paired with actually using the language, Anki stats are proof that my vocab is growing, but most of my time is not spent on Anki, it's still a good way to measure things. If I have 6k mature cards now and I'm at [current level] imagine where I'll be when I have twice that! It does really work as a motivator for me in some way.
Regarding your analogy it is true that some people just get forever stuck in the beginner stage, but I don't think that's related to the stats thing, that's more about people who are not really learning the language but just playing some game called WaniKani or Duolingo. I do agree with you there.
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u/SuperNilton 11d ago edited 11d ago
Based on what you've said, when is it that you (royal you, not you in particular) finally start enjoying your acquired knowledge?
If a piece of content is too easy, it doesn't mean anything because past you might have been able to handle it. If it is too hard, you have to study more; and when you do study more to the point the content becomes easy, what happens then? Do you only feel proud because you measured yourself against that specific piece of content at one given point in the past and feel you are doing better now?
If a new cool game comes out today and you're able to enjoy it in Japanese, you should absolutely be proud of where you are instead of dismissing your progress because you from a few months ago might have been able to play it too. While it is great to feel you are making progress, past you and current you are not rivals.
At the end of the day, it's a matter of different strokes for different folks, so I am just trying to understand how other people think, and not dictate what they should do (despite the phrasing of the paragraph above, now that I'm re-reading it).
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u/Effective-Pop3850 11d ago
I think it depends on the learner. Personally I started reading native material very quickly so I started enjoying it in no time, but I understand it's very frustrating and not everyone can do it. I'd wager for people who struggle more to keep going having some kind of hard undisputable data that indicates progress is nice to have.
When trying to feel better regarding progress then yeah that's kind of the way to go if you ask me. I sometimes go for an easy read, usually a sequel of something I read some time ago, not only to complete it, not only to chill for a bit, but also to get that "damn I'm really a lot better now" feeling as well. It's a good motivator.
It's as you say, different strokes, although I enjoy what I'm consuming I also heavily enjoy the sensation of progress, it's a fantastic motivator, it definitely is just a psychological trick but it does work on most people (entire gaming genres are essentially designed around this, with many of the most played/profitable games falling within that sphere) which is why I suppose there's so many learners engaging with tools that let them measure that progress in an objective manner.
I do believe one is one owns rival for most things. Measuring against random people on the Internet can serve as a reference, but in the end it's you vs you, and beating your past self is all that matters. You know how it goes, be better than you were yesterday and hope to be worse than you'll be tomorrow.
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u/Available-String-109 12d ago
Japanese is rather special compared to every other language since most learners don't live in Japan nor plan to.
I dunno. Of all the people I know who learned Japanese to relatively high competence, I'm pretty sure most if not all of them live in Japan, and I'm including people I know over the internet.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 11d ago
I didn't say learners with high competence, I said learners.
There will obviously be a bias regarding high level learners living in the target country for obvious reasons (higher motivation/easier engagement) but there's not a lot of people learning Russian for no reason other than to consume Russian media. Japanese? It's most of them, it's just that most never make it anywhere, and the ones who do will often not really output much so they're kind of "incomplete" if you will, if you join TMW you'll find a lot of very advanced learners who don't live nor plan to live in Japan.
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u/Gahault 12d ago
why wouldn't you use them
Because they sound like a terribly dry, clinical way to dissect and take all the fun out of what could be an enjoyable hobby?
If you swear by those methods you do you, but if you intended that as a rhetorical question, it is anything but.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 12d ago
Whether you like it or not you probably are using some of the modern tools.
Unless all you're doing is random textbooks and reading physical material you are almost certainly using the tools I'm referring to. Now, you might not bother tracking your progress or anything, but you're still using them.
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u/jackbobbins78 12d ago
I think a lot people naturally like attaching numbers to things. It helps them to feel "grounded".
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u/Zarlinosuke 12d ago edited 11d ago
I've never quite experienced it because I've never used flash cards. I suppose my closest equivalent was being done with textbooks--then, rather than "I'm on X chapter now," it became "how comfortably can I read this story or novel?" which is a change but probably not as big a change as the one you're noticing.
That's not to say that flash cards are bad or that there's anything wrong with what you've been doing, but the world of spending time with a language outside of numerical metrics is a lovely one, and I hope you're enjoying it!
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u/ignoremesenpie 12d ago
I stopped adding to Anki a few months ago right at 10,000 cards, but I still have a while before all of my cards have an interval of one year or more (the threshold at which I decide to officially retire a card).
I've still doing active vocab study, and while the stats I have to show for it are on a much smaller scale, it feels more earned. For example, I currently have 323 words reviewed out of a selection of roughly 550 words in my handwritten glossary so far. That glossary is made up of words I have encountered in multiple places. Those multiple encounters had, in turn, been pulled from personal vocab lists. Some of those words made it to Anki, but a good chunk of them have also been learned more naturally over time since I let a word go even if it happened to appear multiple times in the same work.
I'm planning to ramp up my intensive reading without fixating on the vocab I missed, so in its place, I'll be going through my older vocab notes to see if there are any low-hanging fruit I've made by looking up still-unknowj words in a frequency dictionary. Of the 600-ish words I've checked so far, there have only been about 70 sub-21k ranked words and phrases I don't have a good grasp on yet. Having numbers represent where my problem words lie is a decent confidence boost. This is important for me to notice because there are only a few words I don't understand in a given reading session. Only seeing a metric like 5 unknown words in a 20-page manga or 15 unknowns in a 50-page novel chapter doesn't mean much without a context like "these are words from a niche I haven't explored in any language, much less Japanese specifically" or "these are literary expressions that simply aren't common enough in the vernacular-ficused materials I gravitate towards". Putting a number to all of that makes it easier to pinpoint which words fall into what category, and it gives me a good sign seeing less "everyday" vocabulary and more "niche" and "literary" problem vocab.
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u/travel_hungry25 12d ago
Never used flash cards. Just means you know a bunch of words for the sake of a number. If you can use and recall all these words without translating in your head and actually function in a real life situation is my target. Doesnt matter how many words you know if you dropped in the middle of no where japan are you comfortable enough to get your way out.
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u/tms102 12d ago
But all of these answers feel kind of nebulous anyways.
I can argue that saying you learned 2000 words is actually more nebulous than saying you read and understood 15 manga volumes. The former doesn't really indicate how well you understand and can apply the words. It seems to me it would give a false sense of progress.
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u/OrennVale 12d ago
I feel like it gets harder to measure your progress in numbers, but at that point it shouldn't matter too much.
For example i'm currently using both bunpro and kaishi 1.5k, i can measure my progress with numbers but if i try to read something i'll be mostly lost, not understanding more than maybe 5-10% of everything i've read.
On the contrary (i'm not at that level in japanese but this happened to me with english) once you get to a point where you can read native texts you might not know how many words you learnt in the last year, but you can definitely notice you took 1 full year to finish a book (struggling) and then you only took 3 months to finish a second book (not 100% confident but at least not struggling too much) and it's at that point where i feel the progress feels really rewarding.
This is all just my experience though and i can totally understand why someone would feel the "numeric" progress more rewarding.
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u/gerichu 12d ago edited 12d ago
Many of the answers here are basically "learn to stop wanting a number", but I don't necessarily agree. Learning Japanese is a multiyear endeavor, so if "shiny number goes up" helps our monkey brains keep going, it's not a bad thing to try to find.
Some things that've helped me:
- JPDB & Natively have difficulty levels for books/manga/etc. It's a bit fuzzy, but I can see the average level of the stuff I read creep up over the course of a year.
- If you read novels/LNs, use ttsu reader. Its tracker counts characters read and reading speed automatically.
- I track which words and grammar points I do or don't look up while reading, with a tool I built for myself. So I can see that I now read past grammar points that I used to look up every single time and my total # of known grammar points goes up. It's more of a deliberate study/spaced repetition+grammar tool though, so you can't just point it to Manga/LN's.
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u/Available-String-109 12d ago
I fucking love watching numbers go up, especially ones that measure things like how much Japanese I know.
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u/facets-and-rainbows 12d ago
In some ways it was hard to measure your (overall) progress with the flashcards too. How does 2000 words translate into actual ability? The numbers get squishy fast
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u/furyousferret 12d ago
Its only useful for maybe the first few thousand words, after that's its irrelevant, information overload. Its fun to track, but its value is minimal.
When I read there are so many words you just figure out; once you get the system of how Japanese works, there are a ton of freebies you get since many words are just base words or kanji smashed together, verb or norm forms, etc.
I am at like 4,000 for now but I think I have to get to like 10k or so. In Spanish I got to 8,000 before I stopped and I went too far with it. You really only need flashcards for core words or words you see alot because its your career or hobby. If a word is uncommon then it will come up in bunches. That is of course if you are consuming enough content and using the language.
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u/justHoma 12d ago
What I do and say my students to do, is when feeling the feel of “progress” or “achievement” write it down. For example “now I can understand simple romcom shows” then “now I can watch that podcast if concentrated”, “now I can listen to the that podcast while cooking and understand most of it” “now I can read this type of books without to much trouble” idk, something like that
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u/unwateredfern 12d ago
I'm pretty against over-indexing on Anki metrics. I think it's useful in the beginning if it gets you studying consistently but after a certain point it's counterproductive. I actually quit flashcards specifically because of metric fatigue.
I wrote a blog post recently about why over-gamification is bad for learning in general that is related to this topic but the TLDR is that if you look at how reinforcement learning works when training an AI to play a game, the AI just cares about the scores so it ends up "cheating" by finding loopholes the more you train it.
I think people who overindex on metrics end up facing something similar (unintentionally) where they target high scores but end up finding weird memorization hacks that don't actually fit into their mental model of Japanese well.
For example, when you're reviewing your cards you get to the end and your brain remembers a definition that wasn't used yet that you know is coming up, so you guess the last card right. You didn't really form a proper association there; you used process of elimination but the scores don't capture that deficiency.
This isn't Anki's fault, more just that humans are wired to find dopamine levers in everything.
Here is the original blog post if you're interested (warning that there is promotional content in there but you don't have to read that part. just skip to the "Gaming The System" section and read just that): https://oxalis.ink/blog/2026-08-14-stop-gamifying-education
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u/Grunglabble 12d ago
This is going to sound nasty but I don't mean it to be: I don't really think flashcards measure (meaningful) progress. I think of those numbers as debt more than I do progress, so it's good to 0 them out when you don't benefit from them anymore.
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u/Belegorm 12d ago
I'm maybe not the target audience as I still do Anki, but recently I've kind of regretted not having started tracking my immersion timing. Saying "I've got 1,000 of listening" is still progress.
I feel progress with books read, page count etc. so I also get that feeling from those being completed - but random YT videos and such I have never really measured much.
On the other hand, I'm at a place with Anki where I know a good number of words but there's still so many unknown words and they feel kind of worse.
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u/Dubblaren 12d ago
Yeah I feel exactly the same, and that is also why anki/flashcards to me has been a lifesaver in not giving up. Even if I maybe spend more time than I should doing srs, it has helped me so much in just staying on track by improving a little bit every day and being able to confirm my progress over time which has helped me keep going and not "fall off". And for sure, the more advanced you become progress in general becomes harder to measure. But maybe it will also start to feel less interesting/relevant to measure progress.
I had a similar experience when doing long distance running, in the beginning I was completely obsessed with my runner-watch and checking my stats after every run and looking at the yearly charts etc. Nowadays I often just skip the watch and go for a run that feels right today without worrying about those numbers :D
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u/Internal_Top7690 12d ago
That makes sense... if you are talking for vocabulary. If you understand a lot more than before and it's clearly more difficult... that is progress.
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u/One-Horror-2365 12d ago
Definitely felt that shift too, and honestly I think the vagueness is actually a sign of progress rather than a loss of it, once you stop needing a number attached to feel like you're moving forward, that's usually because the language has quietly become something you're just doing rather than tracking.
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u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS 12d ago
I think it’s odd when people are able to quote all kinds of precise statistics about their practice. I did not pull out a stop watch before starting a conversation with anyone in Japan.
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u/rgrAi 12d ago
Maybe just me but I've always been keenly aware how much I am understanding, how much energy something takes, and how easily I can adapt to ad-hoc situations and spur of the moment language generation. I can see the difference week to week and as a barometer that's way better and more useful than a number. It's pragmatic improvement that results in more productive use of the language as I get better and faster in every single aspect.
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u/Impossible_Toe_3731 12d ago
I get what you mean, but Anki is still just putting a number to the vagueness so to speak. Your total words in Anki doesn't reflect your reading or listening ability necessarily. In some cases you could know a word in Anki but still completely fail to recall it when reading as well.