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The intense research done by a friend resulted in finding Youtuber Matt vs Japan. Although I hadn’t personally watched any of his videos on learning Japanese, I began the 1k Japanese Refold Deck after the recommendation in the hope to widen my vocabulary and better recognise a range of Kanji. Without knowing the intentions of the deck, my first impression was thinking why I hadn’t found this earlier. My research and methods for finding how to learn Japanese has never quite been up to par as I have generally just gone with what seemed the obvious route. But this showed me how much it pays off to do a bit of rifling through the internet to find the best technique from people who really care, have been through the process of learning your chosen language, and who create methods that cater to your particular learning goals.
Refold Deck Intentions
Once I had gotten further into the deck, I watched the video on the Refold channel explaining the intentions of the deck and how it works. The basic premise is for learners to understand the language before getting to speaking it. This means that once you get to speaking you will sound much more natural than the staggered speech that usually comes from having to translate in your head before you speak. The goal is to pair this deck with immersion, watching media in Japanese with Japanese subtitles to make the process of learning more like a hobby than a learning activity. The JP1k deck (as it’s called) contains 1000 commonly used Japanese words and comes in the form of flashcards. You are presented with a word predominantly in Kanji (with the exception of a few vocab in hiragana), and are asked to recall the reading. After one click, that reading appears above the Kanji and you are then asked to recall the meaning. Only depending on the meaning can you say that you’ve got it correct or incorrect. Matt vs Japan explains this as a ‘deliberate practice loop’, meaning that there is a task to improve at, a clear pass or fail and then immediate feedback. You are given a repeat of certain cards based on how many times you’ve got them correct or incorrect, the aim being that you are building an ‘unconscious infrastructure’ of kanji knowledge through these repeats.
Kanji Theory
A common way of learning Kanji is through pure brute force, something Matt explains the Refold process as similar to, but the key difference being that the failure to recall the reading means that you still pass the card if you get the translation/meaning. Although there is a mini consequence to failing to recall the reading before passing on the meaning, this is supposed to make the process much more pleasant as you are still learning words whilst your sense of kanji comprehension is improving subtly. Kanji fluency is something that he describes as when you get to the stage where kanji stops looking like scribbles and more like something, just like recognising a face — you are not looking at the intricacies (radicals) but recognising it through the infrastructure built up in your brain subconsciously. Once reaching this point of kanji fluency, you won’t have to study individual kanji, but words and kanji learning become synonymous. At the point I am at, this still seems a little impossible despite being 100% through the deck…
My experience
I can definitely say that my vocabulary has increased tenfold and the amount of which I recognise in the media I am watching, is vast. Getting to 100% doesn’t mean that I am finished with the deck, only that I’ve seen all of the words that come with it. I got to 100% just the other day, so I am working towards getting to a comfortable level of knowledge with the words that it now gives me before I decide to move onto any other vocabulary decks. I don’t know if you are meant to get to kanji fluency within the space of completing this deck or whether that takes more time, but this is just the method that would hopefully make that achievable. I don’t feel as if I have achieved it in this time but despite that, I feel a lot more confident in the fact that knowing kanji is even possible at all. Going from knowing next to no kanji at the start of this year to 4 months later obtaining at least the recognition of nearly 1000, is unbelievably satisfying to think about. I have continually enjoyed this deck too, bar the odd days where I’ve been particularly tired and the thought of completing 100 odd cards was daunting. But once I did so, it always felt good and felt as if I had learnt something despite how easygoing it was. Occasionally, the repetitiveness of the cards when one or two really don’t seem to want to stick in my head, make it become tedious to complete. But even still, the way this format works means that the words are repeated at the end of the set for the day, meaning that once I had completed the majority, those ‘impossible to remember’ cards are repeated, making it easy to remember what has only just come up as well as it coming up more frequently in the days to come. Because of this, knowing that I would come across these certain words in the near future, I know I don’t have to dedicate time to think I really have to pin down this word that I keep forgetting, right then and there. For a majority of words like this, within the next few days they were the ones I knew by heart.
Without the intention of doing it daily, I took a look at the Japanese Foundation deck at the beginning of this process too. I was curious to see what kind of sentences would crop up and wanted to test myself on how much I could grasp already. It turned out that the initial sentences were relatively easy for me to understand and are what lured me into making this a daily task too. — Although I put a lot less pressure on completing this deck than the other as I don’t think it’s as highly recommended. The deck contains 10,000 short sentences taken from light novels that slowly increase in difficulty the further you get into it. I think this deck has improved my reading in terms of speed and it has also widened my vocabulary and helped my grammar through simply seeing where particles are and getting used to structures. Learning particles was something I was struggling with in terms of which to place where in a sentence, but although I am not perfect now, I think that I can better understand this and hope that pairing this with immersion will subconsciously improve this much more. The foundation deck has the individual kanji along with the english translation and furigana crop up when you click once. These kanji shown underneath the sentence show their individual meaning. I do find this interesting but sometimes I think it causes me further confusion when the sentence already doesn’t particularly align with its English translation. I understand that there is often no direct translation between languages so I think you have to grant yourself some leeway when going through this deck. I often say I was correct on sentences where I have understood the general gist of things and believe that with further context I could understand it in its more specific respect. I’m not sure how useful this is precisely but have read around and believe that some others going through this do the same considering it’s sometimes questionable translations. Words also come up and switch between being written in kanji or hiragana. This sometimes creates more confusion for me personally as I think I would prefer to consistently see it as Kanji in order to get the full benefit of the word and hopefully remember it as Kanji more than hiragana. But other than this, I am seeing benefits, as I said, in my reading speed and am seeing words crop up that aren’t in the 1k deck which means I am constantly adding to my vocabulary — which I’m always happy about. Pairing this with immersion too, just like the other deck, is also helping me see improvements in my comprehension of sentences as well as just noticing more individual vocab.
These decks make me finally feel as if I am doing something to really progress my learning at this stage. I felt quite stunted before beginning these, particularly in terms of knowing how to learn vocabulary and how to find something that I will not get deterred by the site or get bored with. I know I’m lucky enough not to have to put together these decks myself and having these to hand and having them programmed to show me cards when they benefit me based on past cards, is ideal. I wasn’t really doing enough research to find this method and am glad that my friend recommended this to me otherwise I think I might still be stuck where I was back in December, stuck thinking that I had a good amount of grammar and basic knowledge but never being able to apply it through speaking or listening. — And not knowing that this was because of my lack of vocabulary knowledge. This same friend discovered the app drops, which I also plan to speak more about in the future. This app has also been really helpful in upping my vocabulary as it solidifies words I have learnt from the JP1k deck, whilst showing me new words in its super user friendly style. The app is made by the company Kahoot which means it’s almost like playing a game. As I said, I will talk more about the drops app in the future in more detail, but for now I really do recommend it as an easy, fun and free ;) way of picking up new vocabulary. I am looking forward to moving onto another deck that I can source from Anki, called the 2k/6k deck. I know little about it and little about Anki as I have never used it before and have been told that it isn’t the most user friendly. But I will work my way through it and will most likely give a review on that in the future as a progress update. I am hoping that I don’t get deterred if I cannot see my progress through a percentage or feeling as if it is taking much longer to finish. But I will do my research into Anki and the ideal way to address this deck to get the biggest benefit from it and will continue to, and hopefully increase, my time immersing.
Overall I would highly recommend this deck, especially if your aim is to achieve fluency in the language and immersing is the style of learning that suits you. Although, as is intended with this method, without immersion you wouldn’t see the benefits of this deck as much at all. I know that I could majorly up the amount of time I spend immersing and would most likely be seeing positive results quicker. Doing this deck with minimal immersion still has its benefits as I’ve mentioned, I can clearly see that I know more vocabulary through coming across the same words over again. But I know that if I watched more I would be taking in these words in their different contexts and simply taking in the language as a whole, my brain absorbing and getting used to it. I of course hope that I can reach kanji fluency through this method and for the first time ever I don’t think that is unrealistic given the progress this deck has given me. I just hope this next, much larger deck, works for me just as well, but I will find that out fairly soon.
