I forget kanji readings in sentences. Should I use furigana?

If you add furigana on the front of your cards, you're not going to learn the readings. One of the points of using the SRS is to learn kanji readings, so you're defeating the point. To learn something with the SRS, the answer should be hidden until you reveal it. First you try to recall it, then you see if your guess was correct.

What I always did is I followed Wozniak's recommendations and memorized different representations of a particular kanji. So, I would take the kanji I have trouble remembering and look it up on Jisho.org like this. Then I would deliberately find example sentences with the words that use the character and make Anki cards.

Let's say you can't remember how to read 悠長. You make targeted sentence cards with the following sentences.

• 悠々とビールを一杯飲んだ
• そんな悠長なこと言ってる場合じゃない
• 我々は悠久の時を生きるわけではない

Three sentences, three different words that use the same kanji. The kanji is read ゆう in all three examples.

Tags: faq