How to Make Kanji Flashcards That Actually Work

Here's a flashcard a lot of beginners make. Front: 生. Back: セイ, ショウ, い(きる), う(まれる), は(える), なま, き, followed by life, birth, raw, student, pure.

You flip it, skim the back, think "yeah, roughly", and move on. Nothing was tested, because the card never asked a question with one answer you could get right or wrong.

A flashcard works when it asks one thing and you can check the answer in a second. Most of the advice below follows from that.

What goes on the front and back

If your goal is reading Japanese, the most useful card has a word on the front, written the way you'd meet it on a page, and the reading and meaning on the back with one example sentence.

Before you flip, say the reading and the meaning, out loud or in your head. If either one was wrong, the card is wrong. That feels harsh, but a card you half knew is exactly the card that needs to come back soon.

Keep the front bare. No romaji, no furigana, no picture that gives the answer away. If the reading is printed above the kanji, your eyes go to the kana and you never really look at the character.

On the back, the example sentence is worth the extra line. 電車で行きます (でんしゃでいきます, I'll go by train) shows the word doing its job, and a short sentence is often the thing you end up remembering.

Single kanji or whole words

Both have a case. Single-kanji cards give you building blocks. Know 電 (electricity), 車 (vehicle) and 話 (talk), and 電車 (train) and 電話 (telephone) nearly explain themselves. Vocabulary cards give you something you can actually read and say, with the right reading already attached.

The trap with single-kanji cards is the readings. 生 is the classic bad case. It has more readings than almost any other common kanji, and no rule tells you which one applies. You find out from the word:

• 学生 (がくせい, student)
• 一生 (いっしょう, a lifetime)
• 生きる (いきる, to live)
• 生まれる (うまれる, to be born)
• 生ビール (なまビール, draft beer)

A workable split: single-kanji cards for the meaning only, with one or two example words on the back, and vocabulary cards for the readings. If you only want one deck, make it vocabulary. You'll absorb the individual kanji from seeing them in several different words.

A mnemonic on the back of a single-kanji card helps for the first few reviews. We wrote about what makes a good one separately.

Recognition and production are separate skills

Recognition means you see 電車 and know it's でんしゃ, a train. Production means you see "train" and write 電車 from memory. The first doesn't give you the second. Even native speakers commonly forget how to handwrite kanji they read without trouble, now that most writing is typed and the phone offers the kanji once you enter the reading.

Production cards take several times longer per card. If you want to read, play games in Japanese, or pass the JLPT (which is multiple choice, with no handwriting), do recognition first and don't feel guilty about it. Add writing cards if you plan to write by hand, if your class has written tests, or for look-alikes you keep confusing, like 待 (wait) and 持 (hold). Writing a character a few times forces you to notice the part that differs.

How many new cards a day

New cards are cheap today and expensive later. Each one comes back for review several times in its first month, so your daily review pile ends up as a multiple of your new-card number. A rough rule among people who use spaced repetition apps is that daily reviews settle somewhere around five to ten times the new cards you add each day. Ten new cards a day means 50 to 100 reviews a day once things level off.

For most people with a job or classes, 5 to 10 new kanji a day, or 10 to 20 new words, is about what stays manageable. The arithmetic is kinder than it sounds. Five kanji a day is roughly 1,800 in a year, which is most of the 2,136 joyo kanji.

When reviews start taking longer than the time you have, stop adding new cards for a few days and only review. Don't delete the backlog, and don't try to clear it in one sitting either.

Mistakes that waste the most time

• Too much on one card. Every reading, every meaning, three sentences. You can't grade yourself on a card like that, so split it into several cards or cut it down to one word.
• No example word. A bare kanji with an English keyword is easy to "know" on the card and then fail to recognize inside a sentence.
• Cramming. Going through the same card five times in one evening feels productive, and most of it is gone within the week. Seeing it once today, again in a few days, and again in two weeks takes less time and lasts longer. That's the whole idea behind spaced repetition.
• Grading yourself generously. "I sort of knew it" counts as wrong. Marking it right only pushes the card further away at the moment you need to see it more.
• Only using other people's words. A ready-made list is fine for the basics. Past that, words you've already met in a textbook chapter, a show or a manga are easier to keep, because you remember where you saw them. Add those as you go.
• Building instead of reviewing. Choosing fonts, colors and card layouts is pleasant and teaches you nothing. If making cards takes longer than reviewing them, use a deck someone else built.

Paper or app

Paper cards have one real advantage. You write each kanji while making the card, and that helps it stick. They also keep you off your phone. The weakness is scheduling. With a stack of paper cards you tend to review everything equally, which wastes time on the cards you know and shortchanges the ones you don't.

The classic fix is a Leitner box. Use five compartments. New cards start in the first. Get a card right and it moves up one compartment. Get it wrong and it goes back to the first. Review the first compartment every day and each later one less often, for example every other day, weekly, every two weeks and monthly. It's spaced repetition done by hand, and it works well up to a few hundred cards. Beyond that the shuffling gets tedious.

Apps do the scheduling for you and can track thousands of cards. Anki lets you build every card yourself, which is powerful and also a good way to lose a weekend to card templates. Other apps come with the decks built in. We compare several in our roundup of Anki alternatives.

A mix is reasonable too: an app for the daily reviews, and a notebook where you write out the kanji you got wrong.

Common questions