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I’m wondering what other people think about “educated guessing” with Anki.
So, for example, I’m struggling with the family names. So I’ll see a word and think, “Well, it’s not mom, dad, grandpa, or older brother. Probably one of the sisters. I’ll say younger sister.”
If I get it right, I usually mark it as correct, but I’m not sure if this is the most effective way to be putting something into my brain, since I’m not actually getting the correct meaning from the word itself.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
As you go on, you’ll regularly find educated guessing will come into play when encountering a new word. That’s one of the joys of kanji – once you’ve got a few under your belt, you can start inferring both the reading and the meaning of words you’ve never seen before. It’s up to you whether you’d mark it as “correct”, though I would, provided it’s not the final test before mastery.
I think it depends on how strict you’d like to be with yourself. I personally would mark it as incorrect because I want the words to come to me easily. When I’m trying to speak with a native speaker and I’m all nervous and fumbling with my vocabulary, I doubt the words I knew through guessing/logic would come through for me. So I would click “incorrect” to make them come back earlier in Anki so I could get more study time with them.
Not from the desk of Eihiko. Eihiko's boss took his desk away from him.@Eihiko: There’s a difference between passive and active vocabulary. Active is when you can actually use the words in a sentence, whereas passive is when you can understand a word when you see/hear it but couldn’t necessarily come up with it off the top of your head. Just because you can’t recall a word easily when speaking with a native doesn’t mean you don’t *know* it. Really, Anki should be getting the words into your passive vocabulary and practice and experience should be shifting it into your active vocabulary. Failing a word because you don’t think you’d be able to come up with it on the spot probably isn’t helping the spaced repetition algorithm work as effectively.
When you think about it, Anki is actually only testing your passive knowledge of the words. It’s giving you the word and asking for the meaning/translation, not asking you to produce the words from memory. Since it’s only training you in this way, you can’t reasonably expect to have a mastery of the words just from answering flash cards in Anki. And now I’m just realising other people have different deck set ups than I do, so it depends how you do your cards.
TL;DR – You’re probably being a bit too strict with your cards because of reasons.
Okay, maybe my example was an example of active memory, but the spirit of my meaning was in the “recall while overwhelmed or flustered” part.
For example, I recently learned the word 花 which means flower. In wanikani, I recognize it fairly well by looking at the flower radical on top and remembering “oh yeah, it’s flower!” But I was reading a text with a mix of english and Japanese terms and when the 花 kanji showed up, surrounded by complicated kanji that I haven’t learned yet, I failed to recognize it. I failed to recognize it because I didn’t look at it and say “now which one was this again?” because it seemed like one of the many kanji I didn’t know. On anki and wanikani, you can assume that all the kanji that pops up is kanji you’ve learned at one point.
Not from the desk of Eihiko. Eihiko's boss took his desk away from him.
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