Weekend
🔗 Subscribe on YouTube for livestreams & VODs
The weekend is for rest.
All week you mined and learned new words every morning. Saturday and Sunday are when you ease off: no mining and no new cards, just clear your reviews and enjoy your time off. Think of the weekend as the glue that holds the week together. It gives the words you learned time to settle before Monday. Rest is part of the method, not a break from it.
🌅 Morning (~30 min): Reviews Only
- Open Anki and clear your reviews.
- No new cards on the weekend. On Friday night (or Saturday morning), set new cards per day to 0 and keep it there through Sunday.
- That is it. The rest of each day is yours.
Keeping reviews going means nothing piles up, while skipping new cards lets your brain consolidate everything from the week.
🌙 Optional: Watch Something Raw
If you feel like it, put on some raw Japanese for fun: an episode, a drama, a YouTuber, anything you enjoy. No pausing and no lookups; treat it as entertainment, not study. Rewatching something you mined earlier in the week is especially satisfying: you will notice words you studied starting to pop out, a clear sign of progress. And if you would rather take the weekend completely off from Japanese, that is fine too.
🧠 Why Rest Matters
- Consolidation: Time away from new material is when what you learned settles into long-term memory.
- Confidence: Stepping back shows you how much has actually stuck.
- Sustainability: A routine you can keep for years beats one that burns you out in months.
- Real life: Weekends fill up with other things. Building rest into the plan means life does not derail your progress.
- Momentum: You start Monday recharged instead of worn down.
🔁 Getting Ready for Monday
Before Monday morning, set new cards per day back to about 10. Then you are ready to mine and learn again, fresh for a new week of mining and reviews.
➡️ Next up: Why 10,000 Words = Fluency