From My Yaruki I've read and seen many ways that people do there reviews for there sentences, people recommend different things like "you only should pass a sentence if you can read everything" and "you should click hard for every review unless you can read it instantly". I've adapted many of the principles and completely thrown some out depending on what I thought suited and worked best for me. Now the way I review goes like this, 1) I first look and see if I can read the main word of the sentence (the part I'm wanting to learn) which I usually bold for emphasis. 2) If I can read the word I go onto trying to read the rest of the sentence and try to understand how the word is used in context. 3) If I can read it quickly without much thought it gets an "easy". 4) If I can only read the word I'm trying to learn and maybe some other bits of the sentence it gets a "Good". 5) If I struggle to read the word but manage it after some thought it gets a "hard". 6) Obviously if I don't understand anything its an "again" Now here is were I may differ to other people, if I can read the sentence and the word but mispronounce or just miss out on the exact reading and go "haha damn I new it was that" I give it a hard. Really doesn't help me to fail every card just because of a little mistake if anything it makes me feel down and have less urge to get more done but meh people might disagree and say we should understand it 100% or we might make future errors when speaking etc. But this is were I disagree again who can speak, read, write there native language 100% without any areas or without picking up bad habbits? So look at it this way if you cant be 100% perfect in your own language how can people expect this from a foreign language? The advantage is even though you may make little mistakes here and there think how easy it will be to correct this when you have the general knowledge of how something is read/spoken, much better than not knowing the word at all or getting so frustrated that you cant learn it perfectly that it effects your learning in general. It will correct itself in time either via somebody pointing out your mistake or your mind working a way in the background clicks when it realizes its wrong and sticks much more easily than repeated 'again, again, again" in an SRS.

Well I finally bit the bullet and downloaded the plugin for smart.fm formally know as iknow.co.jp so that I can easily import sentences and not have to manually enter them which can be time consuming this also has the added bonus of it importing the audio aswell which is a great aid.You can download from the Anki plugins page here once installed you can edit the card model to your liking I personally have mine set to recoginiton only as I do with all my cards then all you need to do is locate the list that you would like to import copy the url and choose to import smart.fm sentences from the menu then sit back and relax.This has already saved me much time especially after a busy day and I just want to get down to learning new things and not have to enter for an hour first which should stop me being as lazy sometimes :)Currently adding sentences from the core 6000 series as after a while of adding grammar sentences I've gone back to adding vocab especially after reading even more about vocab being everything from over at Emilio Wuerges blog On How To Learn JapaneseWill add an Anki stats update shortly.

Well thought its about time I did a stats update seen as its been a while been listening to a good amount of Japanese recently and adding trying to add as many sentences as I could even with such a busy last few weeks.Not many new Kanji recently as have been adding a lot from Understanding Basic Japanese Grammer which lacks many new vocab.Deck created: 3.8 months agoTotal number of cards: 1222Card countsMature cards: 704 (57.61%)Young cards: 498 (40.75%)Unseen cards: 20 (1.64%)Correct answersMature cards: 95.6% (391 of 409)Young cards: 86.0% (8725 of 10143)First-seen cards: 87.7% (1144 of 1304)The 1222 seen cards in this deck contain:767 total unique kanji.Jouyou: 740 of 1945 (38.0%).Jinmeiyou: 5 of 287 (1.7%).22 non-jouyou kanji.Jouyou levels:Grade 1: 70 of 80 (87.5%).Grade 2: 143 of 160 (89.4%).Grade 3: 147 of 200 (73.5%).Grade 4: 112 of 200 (56.0%).Grade 5: 77 of 185 (41.6%).Grade 6: 65 of 181 (35.9%).JuniorHS: 126 of 939 (13.4%).

For the past couple of weeks or so I've been mostly concentrating on learning vocabulary and almost completely ignored actively learning grammar which has involved me mining many +1 materials with new vocab words this has lead to an obvious increase in my vocab knowledge which in turn i can understand more from shows and written works than i could a month or so ago.Now a lot of people may say that oh well you can understand more vocab but do you actually know what it means when used in context well the answer the majority of the time is yes for one all my vocab has been learned in context and without any real effort. I've picked up a load of grammar without actively studying it in a long time for example the other day i had a quick look through Japanese In MangaLand and to my surprise i understood a lot of the grammar it was trying to explain and this was from later in the book that I've never read, more proof that you don't have to actively study the grammar to become fluent but I do agree that it can speed up the process although i wouldn't worry too much about it concentrate more on vocab in context.Then when you have some spare time or fancy a change go find a good source for grammar I highly recommend Japanese in Mangaland for this as its easy to understand and the manga examples help lots especially for someone like me up untill a few months ago didn't even know the difference between an adjective and a verb in my own language :PSo to sum up don't worry too much about not knowing what the conjugation of this and that is or what the gerund form is you'll pick up a lot without even realising and if your thirst for knowledge increases and you want to know more 'then' go find some grammar explanations.Anki stats update note: only issue with manually adding every sentences its taking forever to read 2000 lol really should have just imported all 2000 iknow sentences.Deck created: 3.3 months agoTotal number of cards: 1115Card countsMature cards: 560 (50.22%)Young cards: 540 (48.43%)Unseen cards: 15 (1.35%)Correct answersMature cards: 96.4% (244 of 253)Young cards: 85.4% (7691 of 9005)First-seen cards: 86.7% (1042 of 1202)The 1100 seen cards in this deck contain: 748 total unique kanji.Jouyou: 722 of 1945 (37.1%).Jinmeiyou: 5 of 287 (1.7%).21 non-jouyou kanji. Jouyou levels: Grade 1: 69 of 80 (86.3%).Grade 2: 143 of 160 (89.4%).Grade 3: 146 of 200 (73.0%).Grade 4: 109 of 200 (54.5%).Grade 5: 74 of 185 (40.0%).Grade 6: 62 of 181 (34.3%).JuniorHS: 119 of 939 (12.7%).

Just thought I would post a quick anki stats update 15 sentences a day going strong so far accept yesterday had trouble adding any.Finally over 1000 cards :D I'm currently at the point were i can understand the odd sentences and quite a lot of words in shows also I'm reguraly recognizing words even though I don't know what they mean so i just need to solidify these I can't wait to see my progress after the next 1000.Deck created: 2.9 months agoTotal number of cards: 1001Card countsMature cards: 450 (44.96%)Young cards: 551 (55.04%)Unseen cards: 0 (0.00%)Correct answersMature cards: 95.7% (132 of 138)Young cards: 84.9% (6681 of 7868)First-seen cards: 85.7% (945 of 1103)The 1001 seen cards in this deck contain: 690 total unique kanji.Jouyou: 669 of 1945 (34.4%).Jinmeiyou: 4 of 287 (1.4%).17 non-jouyou kanji. Jouyou levels: Grade 1: 66 of 80 (82.5%).Grade 2: 136 of 160 (85.0%).Grade 3: 137 of 200 (68.5%).Grade 4: 103 of 200 (51.5%).Grade 5: 68 of 185 (36.8%).Grade 6: 55 of 181 (30.4%).JuniorHS: 104 of 939 (11.1%).

As many of you may know Anki (SRS) has recently been updated to include a timeboxing feature which i think is great, for those who don't know timeboxing is basically setting yourself an allocated amount of time i.e. 10 minutes and within this set time you do your reps, when you reach the end of the set time you stop and take a brake.This can work wonders for efficiency and getting alot of reps done in a short amount of time probably the reason being is because you know you hav'nt got long and there's no "oh god this is going to take forever" which causes you to procrastinate and be distracted easily, your mind tends to work more efficiently and you get distracted much less when you brake it into smaller chunks.So now that Anki has timeboxing built in you can set your 10 minutes or what ever you choose and hopefully be more efficient as the problem was before with me anyway is that i would set myself say 15-30 minutes to do reps and completly forget to check the time etc so ended up going way over, which is'nt exactly a bad thing if your in the right frame of mind.So the next time your doing your daily reps try timeboxing to see if it improves your efficiency.Stats Update.The 515 seen cards in this deck contain: 359 total unique kanji.Jouyou: 352 of 1945 (18.1%).Jinmeiyou: 2 of 287 (0.7%).5 non-jouyou kanji.Card countsMature cards: 35 (6.80%)Young cards: 480 (93.20%)Unseen cards: 0 (0.00%)Correct answersMature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)Young cards: 76.0% (2009 of 2643)First-seen cards: 78.6% (485 of 617)

Over the last few days i have been toying with iknow going through the first step of the core 2000 series i've been collecting the sentences while going through the vocab lessons, yes i know the english translation are'nt entirly accurate so i try to break them down myself using the grammer i've learned so far, although aslong as you don't take there english translation too literaly there should'nt be too much problem using these its better than using just vocab cards on there own atleast.Anyway back on topic after almost finishing the first 200 words on iknow i've noticed a common theme that any words i learn via iknow then input an example sentence into my SRS (Anki) stick like glue where as if i just choose an example sentence from a book like UBJG with a perticular word i'm trying to learn it often takes me much longer than ones i've learned while going through iknow this seems to hold true with words i already new before iknow they stick even better now.This works for many obvious reasons your giving yourself more connections to the word through hearing a native speaker and in context via a sentence then with adding it to an SRS the spaced repitition helps it stick for the long term your giving your mind much more to associate with the word than just in context within a sentence, it's the same as if you heard the word spoken in a show that your watching you can pretty much guarantee that word will stick better than one you have only entered as a sentence and never heard anywere this is why the AJATT method works so well it speeds up the long term retention process.So from what i've seen so far iknow is a great way to quickly up your vocab knowledge although not so great for grammer which as always tae kim's site is the place to go but as many people have said not to worry too much about grammer as there is'nt that much to learn in comparison to all the vocab.Over the next few months i'll aim to complete the first series of 2000 words and give an update on how i think its helped.Will give an Anki stats update at the end of the week but as a quick note for myself I'm just about to reach 400 sentences with a few vocab cards thrown in.