Hi, so I have been relearning Japanese with renshuu for a little while, doing my daily reviews and exploring the app. The more I do this the more options I find to optimize my learning, but now I am finding it a bit overwhelming.
I started with the recommended JLPT decks, merching them whenever I run out of new cards. That way I am now almost through N3 for Kanji and in the middle of N4 for vocab. Vocab going way slower because of number of terms as well as learning vectors. I also added a small mining deck where I add intresting words I come across elsewhere.
I opted for a meaning only approach to learning kanji until now, but after reading a few forum posts I am not sure if that is an efficient way to go about it. Additionally I am getting a bit frustrated with vocab term I have already learned in hiragana, resetting whenever I learn related kanji. (at least I think this is what is happening?) I know why that is and it makes perfect sense since obviously I need to now learn the new spelling, but it is annoying since I am trying to bring the number of daily reviews down before adding new vocab and it just feels like shoveling water out of a leaking boat, if that makes sense.
I saw people recommending kanji helper decks for this issue, but I am not entirely sure how to go about this.
If I create a kanji helper deck out of my merched vocab N5N4 deck would that include all kanji appearing in the deck even those I have already learned through the N5 kanji deck? If yes it should be fine to delete the standard N5 kanji deck without 'abandoning' any kanji to the void, right?
Also, if I merch again with the N3 vocab in the future, would the kanji helper deck update accordingly or would I have to create a new deck again?
I'm telling you what I did because I faced the same problems as you.
A couple months ago I created a single vocabulary deck with every word from N5 to N1 Renshuu's schedules. Then, a single kanji helper deck. Every day I learn 20 new terms and their corresponding kanji (only their meaning). I should have learned all the 9000~ words in a year and less than a half.
This way I have always only two decks and nothing else, ever. Besides, now I don't have to study grammar to learn new words. For me it's good because I use other sources for learning grammar.
I have a 56 days streak now so the number is still increasing, I believe. For now I have a little more than 100 reviews a day. Once it becomes too much I might stop learning new words for a week or two.
I saw people recommending kanji helper decks for this issue, but I am not entirely sure how to go about this.
If I create a kanji helper deck out of my merched vocab N5N4 deck would that include all kanji appearing in the deck even those I have already learned through the N5 kanji deck? If yes it should be fine to delete the standard N5 kanji deck without 'abandoning' any kanji to the void, right?
Also, if I merch again with the N3 vocab in the future, would the kanji helper deck update accordingly or would I have to create a new deck again?
my understanding is that renshuu keeps track of your progress on items even when they appear in multiple schedules. if you learn a kanji in one schedule, and it also appears in a different schedule, renshuu knows that you’ve already learned that. the same goes for vocab.
and the kanji helper deck gets updated automatically when i add new words to the vocab list that it’s generated from.
but i don’t know how it works if you merge the helper schedule with a normal kanji schedule.
