Using Computer Science and Anki to Learn More Vocabulary With Less Memorization

I’m still a beginner in Japanese, and I’ve always been amazed watching more advanced learners guess the reading and meaning of words they’ve never seen before.

So I got curious and tried to actually measure how often that’s possible, by breaking words into the pieces they’re built from and checking whether those pieces give the word away. That led me down a rabbit hole of greedy algorithms and graph theory.

The idea is that if you study the right building blocks first, a lot of new words become guessable without having to memorize them individually.

Optimizing Your Deck

The result is an Anki add-on that optimizes the order of your deck so that you can guess the correct meaning and pronunciation of a card on your first attempt.

You can find the add-on here, GuessWithAnki. To get the story you can watch the video or check out the full technical write up on here.

Any feedback on the process and analysis is appreciated.