🌈 How to study using post-its 🌈

A simple method and color-code suggestion to speed up your reviews!

Many of you have asked me on Instagram about the meaning of the different colors of the countless post-its I stick on my textbooks. Therefore, I thought I should share with you what they mean and how I use them to study 😉

In this guide, I included some extra practical examples that I could not add on my Instagram post to make this method easier to understand 😊

🚦 Color code 🚦

In the past, I used to give each type of exercise a specific color, but this led to some colors running out too frequently. For this reason, I switched to a different color code that is composed of only 3 categories:

💡 “Tough” mistakes (whose answer I didn't understand): I always use red 🔴 so that it is easy to spot. For these questions I try to ask someone for help so that I can end up understanding them.

💡 Normal mistakes (whose answer I understood): I usually use “bold” colors like blue 🔵, green 🟢, and orange 🟠. This is the “main” color you will see when you finish a textbook, so it is important to use a max of two main colors per book so you can easily recognize them.

💡 Hesitations (questions I wasn’t sure about): I employ “light” colors like pink 💗, purple 🟣, and yellow 🟡. Out of the three categories, this one varies the most across a single textbook.

🗒 Note 🗒

I tend to prefer giving grammar green 🟢, vocabulary blue 🔵 , and kanji orange 🟠, however this depends on the availability of these colors. When I am running out of these and do not feel like getting a new post-its holder, I tweak the colors a bit.

Now… you might be wondering how I manage to remember these changes 😳 The truth is that I do not memorize what color code I used for each textbook. I can just tell by looking at it what each color means, since I can easily see a trend that shows what color was used for normal mistakes 😉

⚙️ The method ⚙️

The way I use these is that, after finishing and correcting a drill, I will place the post-its on top of the exercises that fit into each category, leaving the rest blank. Then, when I redo that textbook, I remove the post-its that I got right/in which I didn't hesitate as much anymore and I put them at the back of my current post-it holder to be able to reuse them.

👍 Advantages 👍

✅ Review time is considerably reduced, since time is no longer wasted on questions you already know how to solve.

✅ Hard questions are much easily spotted.

✅ Progress can be tracked by checking the number of post-its left on a textbook.

🔎 Practical examples 🔎

For the first book, 新完全マスターN1文法:

• Normal mistakes: light and dark green 🟢.

• Hesitations: yellow 🟡 and light blue 🔵.

• Not well understood mistakes: red 🔴 (this is always the case, so I will be omitting it in the following examples).

Next, we have 新完全マスターN1語彙:

• Normal mistakes: purple 🟣 (I had a lot of these so I decided to use them as the main color).

• Hesitations: dark blue 🔵 and yellow 🟡.

By the time I arrive to drill books like 日本語パワードリルN1文法, I usually have run out of many colors, so they kind of end up looking like the rainbow 🌈:

• Normal mistakes: orange 🟠, and dark green 🟢.

• Hesitations: the rest of the colors (except red 🔴).

With 日本語パワードリルN1文字・語彙, I had a similar problem and the color code ended up like this:

• Normal mistakes: pink 💗, orange 🟠, and yellow 🟡.

• Hesitations: purple 🟣, blue 🔵, and light green 🟢.

Finally, for 新にほんご５００問N1 I try to stick to a specific color code depending on the type of question because it ends up looking very aesthetically pleasing:

• Kanji: orange 🟠.

• Vocabulary: dark blue 🔵.

• Grammar: dark green 🟢.

• Hesitations: light green 🟢 (usually for grammar), yellow 🟡 (usually for kanji) light blue 🔵 (usually for vocabulary), and purple 🟣 .

🎁 Bonus 🎁

Here is a picture showing the post-it pack that I use. I got it from amazon.co.jp:

Personally I think that investing in one of these boxes is a great idea since they are cheaper than buying smaller sets. In my case, I bought this box when I began studying for the N2 and it still has 3 entire post-it holders left after having gone through all my N2 and 80% of my N1 books.

🤔 In what ways do you guys use post-its to study? Let me know in the comments below! 🙏

See you soon with more valuable content,

~𝙽𝚊𝚝𝚑𝚊