Kotoba Kards lets you set your own pace for learning Japanese. You get to decide how many new vocabulary or grammar words you learn a week. But how many should you learn a week? What do you pick?
Table of Contents
Short Answer - What You Can Comfortably Handle
What you should pick will vary depending on your goals for learning Japanese, how quickly you want to get there, and how much time you want to spend each day practicing.
Remember: the more words and grammar points that you learn per day means the more items that come up for review each day.
When you first learn a new vocabulary word, it comes up for review quite often (brand new words come up for review every couple of hours!). The more you answer those review questions correctly, the less frequently it will come up for review. However, you’ll have to answer the review question correctly a handful of times before it stops showing up every day.
Hypothetically speaking, if you learn 10 new words a day for the next three days, on day four you’ll likely have 30 words due for review!
For some people, reviewing 30 words is nothing. For others, that can be very overwhelming, so keep this in mind when decided how many new vocabulary words or grammar points you want to learn at a time.
You can adjust how many vocabulary words are shown during each review ("Test Knowledge") session in your settings, so even if you have a lot of words for review, you don't necessarily have to review them all at once.
The default is 10 new words and 1 new grammar point a day, but feel free to adjust this to what you find is manageable. Remember, a little bit of studying is better than none at all! We recommend starting small in the beginning and then upping the pace as you develop a habit of studying often.
Ensuring You Retain What You Learn
What’s the point of learning something new just to forget it in a few hours?
Kotoba Kards has intentionally been designed so that ambitious learners are not limited by how much they can learn at a time so long as they are consistently reviewing and correctly remembering what they've already learned.
For vocabulary, there is no limit on the number of new words you can learn per day. However, it will cap the number of words you can have at Level 1. The maximum number of vocabulary words you can have at level 1 is 14 x the number of new words per day.
So, if your learning preferences are set to 5 new words a day, you can have a maximum of 70 words at level 1 (5 words per day x 14 = 70 words max). If you’ve reached the maximum number of words at level 1, you’ll have to correctly answer review questions to get some of these words to level 2 before Kotoba Kards will allow you to continue learning new words.
For grammar, you can learn a maximum of 3 grammar lessons a day, with a maximum of 21 grammar lessons at level 1.
Long Answer - What Is Needed To Achieve Your Goal
Goal Setting: Levels of Fluency
There are a million reasons why somebody might choose to learn Japanese, so everybody’s goals are likely a little different. For simplicity, we’ve boiled these various goals into five levels of fluency:
| Fluency Level | # Words Known | # Grammar Points Known |
|---|---|---|
| Functional Beginner | 250 - 500 | ~80 |
| Conversational | 1,000 - 3,000 | ~200 |
| Advanced | 4,000 - 10,000 | ~400 |
| Fluent | 10,000 - 18,000 | ~600 |
| Native | 18,000+ | 850 |
Approximate Time Per Day Spent Doing Review
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, consistency is key to mastering Japanese! Words and grammar points you’ve learned will consistently come up for review to ensure you’re retaining what you’re learning. But how much time does it take to actually complete that review session?
Obviously everybody is different, but we found the following averages for our users:
| # New Words Learned Per Day | Average Time Spent Reviewing Already Learned Words |
|---|---|
| 5 words / day | 10 minutes / day |
| 10 words / day | 20 minutes / day |
| 20 words / day | 35 minutes / day |
| 50 words / day | 1.5 hours / day |
How Long Until I Reach My Goal?
If we combine our two handy-dandy charts from above, we can get an idea of how long it will take to reach a certain level of fluency based on how much you content you learn a day. You can use this to give you an idea of how many words you’d have to learn a day if you want to reach a particular fluency level in a certain amount of time.
Disclaimer: Please only use this chart as a guide for picking good values to input into your learning preferences settings.This chart assumes you are using brute force memorization to learn the language, but true fluency often comes from truly immersing yourself in a language (and also allows you to learn and retain much more content at a much faster pace).
| Goal Fluency Level | # New Words Learned / Day | Amount of Time to Reach This Level |
|---|---|---|
| Functional Beginner | 5 Words / Day | 50 - 100 days (2 - 3 months) |
| 10 Words / Day | 25 - 50 days (1 - 2 months) | |
| 20 Words / Day | 12 - 25 days (2 - 3 weeks) | |
| 50 Words / Day | 5 - 10 days (1 - 2 weeks) | |
| Conversational | 5 Words / Day | 200 - 600 days (1 - 2 years) |
| 10 Words / Day | 100 - 300 days (6 months - 1 year) | |
| 20 Words / Day | 50 - 150 days (2 - 5 months) | |
| 50 Words / Day | 20 - 60 days (1 - 2 months) | |
| Advanced | 5 Words / Day | 800 - 2,000 days (2 - 5 years) |
| 10 Words / Day | 400 - 1,000 days (1 - 3 years) | |
| 20 Words / Day | 200 - 500 days (1 - 1.5 years) | |
| 50 Words / Day | 80 - 200 days (3 - 7 months) | |
| Fluent | 5 Words / Day | 2,000 - 3,600 days (5 - 10 years) |
| 10 Words / Day | 1,000 - 1,800 days (3 - 5 years) | |
| 20 Words / Day | 500 - 900 days (1.5 - 3 years) | |
| 50 Words / Day | 200 - 360 days (7 - 12 months) |