Sudden drop in retention of all Anki cards

[fleet jetty]

I somehow hit a roadblock with my Anki atm. I am 600 cards into the Core 2.3k deck. Somehow a lot of Kanji just look the same to me and also sometimes I look at a Kanji I just saw, or saw for the last couple days because it always gets into my repetition again, and I can't remember the meaning or the pronunciation. That is really frustrating for me, because like that doing Anki cards is no fun at all for me recently.
Also my retention rate over all cards just dropped by about 3%.
That could be, because a lot of the Kanji in new cards were also in the words I already knew. That is especially frustrating, because on the other hand in immersion I don't hear a lot of garbage + a few words, but I am able to hear and slowly start to process whole sentences in my brain, so I am begin to be able to follow conversations.
In my head remembering Kanji should increase with progress and exposure in the language. But for me at least for the last 2 weeks seems the other way around.
The only other thing I can think about is that I have more difficulty remembering the Kanji, because I watch a lot of anime on crunchyroll and therefor without jp-subs, so even I learn the Kanjis, my brain is more prompted to recognise the sound, then the written Kanji.
I am unclear if I should just brute-force me through this time, or if I should revise my Anki settings, if I should add sound to the front, or if I should start reading occasionally to get a better connection to the written Kanji even if I am in stage 1.
As additional information: I tried micro stepping before, but I found it really frustrating and didn't help my retention at all. It only increased my Anki backlog.

[wooden umbra]

So this is one of the reasons why the JP1K is designed to not test you on reading untill after you have 1k words but rather just have you attempt to rememer the reading, but grade on meaing. Now, this problem of getting a lot of kanji confused is pretty much an unavoidable problem, it's part of the process, but i beleive the JP1K method helps minimize it.

This might be a contributing factor, here is an issue I ran into when trying to get better at reading. Might be worth a watch.

https://youtu.be/ShfWP_VjDE0?t=967

with that being said, I would recomend maybe grading yourself based on meaning for a while. Do the JP1K method with your own deck where you attempt to recall the reading, but then play the sound if you cant remember the reading and grade yourself based on meaning. This will allow you to continue to get familiar with Kanji while not slowing down yoru essential vocabulary foundation that you need to start making your immersion more enjoyable, which IMO is a vastly more important milestone to hit

Keep this in mind, I know people who never worried about kanji readings and immersed with furigana and only focused on learning to read till after they where at a HIGH level of comprehension and output skill

and because they got so much exposure to Kanji through furigana, the process was much more enjoyable for them. So if this is messing with your motivation, I would put reading kanji to the side for a while and focus on pure comrpeehension. Use audio and furigana and then try again later to remove that crutch slowly as you get motivated to try again.

Don't let kanji be the frustration that makes you quite. it's not that essential at this stage

On the other hand, if you are rock-solid willpower and can power through it and WANT to power through it, just know that this type of kanji frustration is very normal. I go into detail above about one of the reasons this apparent drop in kanji retention can happen.

[glossy lichen]

You could use Migaku Kanji god extension to help differentiate between similar looking Kanji.
There are videos about how it works on the YouTube channel.
If you choose to do this and watch the videos I would recommend adding 50 of the Kanji Frequency cards first, and then add kanji from the Core 2.3k deck as you go.

[fleet jetty]

Thanks to both of you. I will definitely check out your recommendations. Also good to know that it is kind of normal to get into that problem. 😅
I am far away from quiting, since my immersion improved so much in the last 2 months since I started refold / immersion learning. So maybe I will try to brute force it for the time being. But when my frustration does not go away I will add some crutches to help me stay on track. 😁
Being able to communicate the frustration and getting feedback also helped a lot since I don't feel alone with the problem anymore. 🙂

[fleet jetty]

As a little follow-up. My retention recovered and is now back to the normal, but still low retention of 72,5% in mature cards.
BUT I enjoy doing Ankis now again and it is much more less afford then before, and I am back to get 10 new Cards a day from previously only maximum 5 with the time spend on Anki is getting strangely enough less the last couple of days.
I did some changes to my Anki and my freeflow immersion:

1. I changed the Lapses new Interval from 25 to 50%.

2. I removed the rewards values, since I had the impression that this was also messing with the Anki Algorithm for my retention.

3. I added furigana to the front of my cards

4. I started to include one anime show with Japanese subtitles a day

5. helped me to not get into the trap I've seen someone else mentioned here somewhere, that if you see stuff to often in the same context. I intentionally choose good for some cards, cause I thought that this was the problem with some cards. And also this made going through the Ankis less painfull, because I didn't had so much to go through anyway

6. I had the impression that the rewards was messing with the algorithm, so I got cards in the wrong timing for my brain to get card shown in the right time.

7. This is a crutch that I use when I am A either not able to recognise the Kanji from the Kanji itself, or B to help me differentiate for me similar looking Kanji.

8. This is something I didn't do before, because it was really distracting see all the unknown Kanji, and also listen to stuff that I also didn't know at the same time. Now with more and more cards getting mature and more time in active immersion I can "read"/look at the Kanji while listening for key sounds representing those Kanji more easily.