Recognize to Memorize

Introduction

Card recognition is one of the first things karuta players learn, but it doesn’t stop at simply being able to tell what poem is on what card—the quicker you can tell what a card is and tell it apart from other cards, the easier it can be to memorize and reconfirm cards when playing in a match.

Of course, there’s also a matter of accuracy as well—many poems have second half poems that you can’t distinguish until the 3rd character or later, and it’s a relatively common mistake for newer players to confuse poems that look similar at a glance. For instance, tachi [matsuto] and tare [matsumo] both start with “matsu” in the second half, and even both start with “ta” in the first half, so one might easily confuse them in the heat of a fast-paced match.

How To Test Your Card Recognition

After a while it should be easy to recognize cards without mistakes, and you likely won’t have to “read” the characters on them anymore, but there’s still room for improvement if you so wish.

For that, I first recommend testing your current recognition through a common practice drill where you shuffle all 100 cards, then use a stopwatch (e.g. on your phone or online) to time how long it takes to say the kimariji for each card out loud. (Note that for long cards, you can shorten them a bit for convenience, e.g. for “yononakayo” just say “yonoyo”.) Once you flip through all 100, note how long it took so you can compare it to next time.

Of course, while the goal is to be fast, being accurate is also important, so I recommend not going so fast that you accidentally build a habit of mixing up cards.

Also, the Online Competitive Karuta app (see Other Resources) has a built-in “mini-game” that lets you do this digitally, making it a great way to quickly practice even when you don’t have your cards around!

End-Goal on Card Recognition

Here are some general goals/milestones that might help you as you try to improve your card recognition:

• Read off the 100 cards (ala the aforementioned drill) in under 5 minutes — a good 1st goal, e.g. for if you just finished memorizing the poems
• Read off the 100 cards in under 2.5 minutes —a potential 2nd goal, indicates a decent grasp of all the cards
• Read off the 100 cards in under 100 seconds —a strong 3rd goal, in my opinion you should be fairly set if you can do this
• Recognize poems when they’re upside down almost as quickly as when they are upright. (Note that the Online Karuta app automatically tests you on this in its mini-game.)
• Quickly tell apart cards with similar halves without making mistakes. (This is to help prevent easily-avoidable fouls while playing!)

There are also various methods/”tricks” to help recognize cards better besides just practicing them straightforwardly, which I hope to talk about in the future.