If you embark on a serious study of Japanese, it is only a matter of time before you hear how important flashcards and flashcard technology—in particular the spaced repetition system or SRS—are to learning Japanese. The most common SRS (and the only one I have used) is called Anki. And if someone hasn’t already preached to you about the wonders of creating Anki flashcards for learning Japanese, just wait.
If you’ve studied other languages, it might seem bizarre that Japanese language learning enthusiasts emphasize Anki so much—after all, I never used Anki flashcards for learning any other language. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of it until I started learning Japanese. Flashcards have been a somewhat common language learning tool, but they are by no means universally used. After all, flashcards take a long time to create and are tedious to study, and I’ve found that the benefits to making flashcards are often small compared to the cost.
That’s because in most cases when you need to learn a new word, you can just pick it up naturally. For instance, if you need to learn a new English word, you will encounter it a few times, maybe look it up once or twice, and then the new word will be yours. That’s great news because there’s no doubt that engaging with a language naturally and picking up new words while you go is far more enjoyable and interesting than resorting to the drudgery of flashcard creation and study.
Let’s be honest—flashcards suck. But as much as they suck, they are ridiculously effective at getting new info into your head in short order. If you’ve used flashcards to study for a test, you will know what I mean. And when it comes to learning a maximum amount of info in record time, Anki is the tool of choice. In fact, that’s why Anki is used by countless medical students each year to memorize an absurd amount of information from human anatomy to cell biology.
Sure, medical students have to study their Anki flashcards for a few hours each day to learn all the info they need, which sounds ridiculously painful. But the sheer power of Anki flashcards is pretty staggering when you consider how much random information these medical students can stuff into their heads in a short period of time. Honestly, it’s probably as close to jacking into the matrix and uploading information into your head as you can get in real life.
But just because Anki can get new info in your head at sci-fi-like speeds doesn’t explain why you need it to learn Japanese. After all, if you are self-studying you don’t have to worry about some test that is going to quiz you on 100 new Japanese words every few weeks. So what’s the deal with flashcards and Japanese?
The deal is that learning Japanese is hard. And by hard I mean there are two specific barriers to entry that make it nearly impossible for you to “wing-it” on day one when learning Japanese like you might have done with Spanish, where you just picked up the words in context as you read or listened to sentences in Spanish.
The first barrier is the written language. Unlike Spanish (or other Romance or Germanic languages), Japanese does not use the Roman alphabet. This means you must learn the Japanese alphabets before you can even begin to engage with the written language.
While an unfamiliar alphabet is a common barrier among “hard” languages such as Hindi (देवनागरी), Korean (한글), and Thai (ภาษาไทย), Japanese is arguably “harder” because you must learn three different alphabets: hiragana (ひらがな), katakana (カタカナ), and kanji (漢字). And while hiragana and katakana have around 40 characters each, Japanese commonly uses thousands of distinct kanji. Compared to Spanish, where you can just pick up a text and start identifying words and grammatical patterns, Japanese will require you to learn hundreds, if not thousands of characters before you can really engage with its written form.
The other major barrier is your lack of built-in associative meanings with Japanese words. As English speakers, we know certain sounds and letters are associated with certain meanings. That is ultimately what a word is—we know that “water” is a word, is spelled w-a-t-e-r, is pronounced “wah-tur,” and it means H2O.
But with the exception of common words like sushi, tofu, and manga, most Japanese words are going to be difficult to remember because the characters and sounds associated with them are going to seem random and arbitrary. Each word you learn will require building an association with sounds and characters to the meaning of that word from scratch. This can be a rough experience if you are used to learning a language like Spanish that shares a root with English. Because whether you recognize it or not, learning a language that has a shared linguistic root bootstraps your ability to learn new words.
For instance, if you come across the Spanish word for “salt”, which is “sal”, the similarity in these words allows you to pick up this new Spanish word almost instantly. That’s the gift of having English and Spanish share an origin for this word with the Latin “sāl”. The reason it’s easy to learn “sal” is because the associative database in your head that connects the sounds and letters s-a-l-t to the concept “salt” does not have to do much work to branch another connection to associate s-a-l to the same concept.
Now compare your time spent learning “sal” to your experience of learning the Japanese word 塩【しお】. Not only do you have to remember the character 塩, but you also have to remember しお is pronounced “she-oh”, forge the connection of 塩 to しお, and then link these sounds and character to the concept “salt”. To do all this, you will likely have to deliberately remind yourself that 塩 is written in hiragana as しお, is pronounced “she-oh”, and means salt multiple times before the association sticks.
This is the rough reality you face because the Japanese characters and sounds for even common words like salt are far removed from any preexisting associations you have to these words. This means you can’t expect your language study to progress like Spanish, where words like “sal” practically jump into you head.
The alphabetic and associative barriers to learning Japanese are significant, but they are not insurmountable. Sure, you can’t just “wing it” like you could with Spanish and pick up Japanese words in context from day one. But if you learn to associate thousands of characters and sounds to concepts from scratch you can get there. While that may seem like a tall order, this task is not as daunting as it seems. Because the most effective way of building a new associative database in your head for Japanese words is—you guessed it—flashcards.
Painful as they may be, flashcards are the great equalizer for the intrepid Japanese student. Because used correctly, flashcards can rapidly build a foothold in Japanese that will allow you to start engaging with native content. So, if you want your Japanese learning to become interesting and fun as quickly as possible, you’ll need to accept a period of decidedly less fun flashcard studying to get there. But if you study flashcards correctly, it won’t even take that long.