Anki-focused update!

I am continuing to work on getting my daily card number down. 299 for tomorrow is at least in the direction I want to go. (It used to be up around or over 500 every day.) Right now my goal is to get the far number, for 30 days out, down to 100. (I figure I can’t control so much what is coming in the short short term, but what I do every day can move the longer short term numbers down, so that is why I am keeping an eye on 30 days out. That said, I haven’t noticed it moving down yet… but I will persevere.)
Another thing I’ve been looking at for motivation is the Answer Buttons graph. For young and mature both, I want to be hitting 3 or 4 more often in order to get longer intervals going and fewer cards a day. Part of this is just that I am often doing cards while doing other things instead of focusing and thinking properly, so I am working to make sure I think about my answer before seeing if I got it right. That young rate of hitting 2, though, has not noticeably gone down, either. However, my correct answers on mature cards percentage has been staying around 90% for a long time, and that’s not something I want to lose in my quest to decrease my cards a bit more (aka if it’s really a 2, I’m not going to push 4).
The big spikes in Added are from syncing my Kindle. It feels like I am constantly encountering new words, but my day-to-day add rates are still going down–this is good! I think I am making real progress in growing my vocabulary. Every time I look at my mature cards (like today: 18,470!) I am filled with happiness. (Note: I am well aware that I have many many words left to learn, however.) A lot of the words I look up are already in anki, so I either review them if I should’ve known them already or bump them up for learning if they were suspended in “is this card worth learning sooner rather than later” limbo. I am really happy with my choice to suspend all my unlearned cards and then purposefully unsuspend ones I know I want to learn. I learn 10 new cards a day, and with each one I know they are things I want to learn at this point in my studying, and all are quality cards that help my understanding.
The real motivation for this post, however, is because I finally, finally, FINALLY caught up on dealing with duplicate cards. When I got started reading seriously on my Kindle, looking up so many new words and adding them all to anki meant I had a ton of duplicate cards. I could’ve deleted them all, and sometimes I did, but way more often I didn’t–I wanted to know what I’d seen more often so I could learn it sooner, and lots of times I also wanted that example sentence for my card. I kept all those not-ready-for-learning kindle cards in their own deck, and duplicates had their own tag, and I’ve been working through them steadily, just a little bit every day without making it a time-consuming thing, for about a year. At the largest point, I had over 5,000 duplicates, including both the kindle ones and the straggling ones I had from when I merged my Core10k deck with my mining deck. It feels like just last month that I still had 2,000 or so, but somehow! Somehow! Today! I finished the last one! I have NO DUPLICATES in my anki right now, and those unseen cards, all 1,002 of them, are cards I’ve seen multiple times in the wild and want to prioritize learning, all with example sentences and Japanese definitions. I still have a lot to do (again, in drips and drabs because I don’t want this to be a big part of my process [even though I’m sure it sounds like it is right now]) with stuff like things I’ve tagged as ‘add’ because they don’t have J-J definitions, and then (oh dear) all the unready kindle cards that weren’t duplicates… (checks) all 6,112 of them (!!), some of which are probably duplicates with different orthography (like I see one already: 一遍, which is in my kindle deck as いっぺん), but honestly I don’t care very much about those. If I need to prioritize them, I will see them out somewhere again and look them up again and find them in my anki and bring them out of the kindle deck and into the light of the main deck, in time. Anyway, yay for no duplicates, at last!
Finally, since I’m looking at all my anki business anyway, a look at some of my tags! When I add a card, I tag it with something letting me know (usually very vaguely) where it came from. For example, I’ve added 4,849 cards from Arashi things, 537 from my six weeks studying abroad, 2,060 from a book of idioms, 9,366 from my Kindle (noting, again, that about 6,000 of those are of dubious usefulness), 602 from pixiv, 1,315 from college, 3,446 from yomichan (often combined with another tag; also my yomichan is still not working and it’s driving me nuts), and 2,496 tagged ‘random,’ which can be a lot of things but is often used when I get words from dramas. Looking at this, I had no idea I added over a thousand words from my college classes. I think a lot of them were not from my main Japanese classes, but from the two reading classes I took. Both of those classes had me reading Japanese written for Japanese people, and as it was super focused close reading and we had to be prepared for every sentence, I looked up EVERYTHING. A lot of those words, I can still remember the context from the stories we were reading–they were all really weird stories, and I loved it.
Today I took the bus somewhere, so I am all caught up on anki (main deck and RTK deck), and even learned ahead some in RTK (I’m at 727). This is doubly nice because it means when I go to bed, instead of pushing to get that last little bit of anki done before reading, I can read first and longer, hooray! I finished Toradora 4 and am now reading 十角館の殺人. I’m only 5% in but already really enjoying it. And, to tie it back to anki, there are lots of interesting-to-me words! For example, instead of 言う this author constantly uses 云う. I’ll add it to anki when I sync, and then the next time I read something where the author does that, I won’t falter in my reading.
In terms of watching, I finished Onzoshi Boys (practically tailor-made for raw drama watching), am still watching Kemono ni Narenai Watashitachi (which I think is pretty bad but I will probably still finish it for various reasons), and started Hakui no Senshi on gaiaslastlaugh’s recommendation–I am enjoying it! It is strangely easy to understand for a drama set in a hospital, which is great. (If I had tried to watch Black Pean without subs, for example, I would have drowned immediately, but this will work, I think.) I am finding the main two characters very charming. <3