When to drop the SRS?

13 comments

1. ASAP. You should easily be able to find stuff your level you can read.

2. If you don’t want to do it, then drop it. I’m personally planning to get to 20k first, but I don’t think you should force yourself.

3. If you’re at the point where you can watch native media then absolutely be doing more of that and less flashcards.

   But if you find SRS helpful maybe get rid of the backlog and then put back in only words you stumble on during your media consumption. You shouldn’t need every word you’ve ever learnt in there.

4. Reading wise, can you finish a book (and not a graded reader) or 6-8 volumes of manga in a month? That’s the first check I would go with. More is better though.

   After my experience with the JLPT, I’d consider Anki just for grammar. E.g. if you read fiction, you’ll see plenty of N1/N2 grammar — but you might not see a bunch of the points very often. Plus, you tend to notice grammar points (and not whitenoise) after some study.

5. SRS is very inefficient at this point. At 6000 words, you’ll only see most new words once or twice in any show if the word appears at all.

   If you want to continue using Anki, you’re probably better off suspending all but the top 1000-1500 and make sure those sticks.

6. do whatever is comfortable. if people are yelling at you or downvoting you, they’re assholes. block the ones commenting negatively and go back to enjoying yourself and your japanese.

7. U can start sentence mining instead of doing the premade deck, helps alot with word retention instead of just googleing the definition and moving on

8. It’s always strange to me that SRS is presented as “do or don’t do,” because there’s plenty of intermediate ground. I did 30-50 new cards per day when I was doing Core6k, but when I swapped to mining I reduced it to about 15-20 cards and I’m generally more generous on how I grade my cards. For example, instead of passing a card when you can remember meaning and reading, maybe pass it if you can just remember the reading or if you can remember the meaning in context.

   tl;dr: you don’t have to just “quit,” you can slowly wean yourself off it.

   That being said, I find that it’s still useful when I see certain words that are rare enough that it’ll take me a long time to remember them from reading alone but common enough that I find it useful to SRS them, especially if the reading is not easily guessable

9. There are 2 schools of thought and some people are proactively at odds with the opposite approach. People who think that learning should be done exclusively via content, potentially from the 1st day of learning, and people who think that different tools like Anki or grammar are useful.

   Disagreement mostly comes from the fact that vocabulary isn’t only about knowing a word-meaning pair. Words also can be used in set expressions, have a lot of related information and practical abilities. One of the simplest examples is that we know that 魚 is 食べる, but 水 is 飲む. Each word has tens of relations and each situation has tens of related words. Like if we talk about a book, then we can read and write, maybe learn or illustrate, maybe even throw or drop, but not so likely to cook or to fly. And when we use Japanese, we learn all of that in Japanese terms, that’s why practice is important. We don’t want to use English and convert that into Japanese every time we talk or read something. And if you look at SRS, then we mostly learn only word-meaning combination without all these context threads. For this reason many people who orient on content approach think that SRS is either supplementary or not needed at all.

   My personal view is that it’s rather about preference. If you don’t like SRS, then what’s the point to force yourself when there are different ways to learn? It has it’s advantages, but also disadvantages. And generally it’s only important to understand how we learn. It was proven by many researches that any bit of information we memorize stays in our memory for a very long time (maybe even for the whole life). But if we can recall that freely or not mostly depends on intensity and how many times we saw that. SRS orients on reviews, because 5-7 repetitions is enough to be able to recall for a very long time. And it doesn’t matter much if you will do it in a schedule, or maybe you will do 3-4 reviews at one point and 3-4 reviews at another. As I said before, that affects only if we can recall that, and it doesn’t affect if we have that in a deep memory (because we do). So your efforts do not go to waste just because you take a break or stop to do something, and actually for a lot of people it’s quite beneficial to change setup once in a while. Personally I’ve noticed that when I see some word only 2-3 times, but in completely different situations, that’s often enough. For example, if I see unknown word in a book and then accidentally stumble on it in youtube video.

10. If you don’t think it’s helping you, then drop it. There’s all sorts of language learning methods and different things work for different people, and for different goals. I personally love SRS, but I’m a translator and I do actually need to connect the Japanese to the English, which is harder to do if I learn it only from observing it “in the wild”. I’ve also had enough experiences of encountering a word I studied in SRS and being able to understand it/use it in work because I had studied it before. SRS has proven its usefulness for my personal language goals because it’s like a half hour a day of focused learning on new vocab that I can do on the bus, while watching a show wouldn’t be so focused on new vocab. But if it’s not helping you reach your language goals, or doesn’t fit your life, then best to focus your time on something more effective.

    And don’t worry about people downvoting you or whatever. People get super up in arms sometimes about their learning method being the best, but there are so many options out there and they don’t all fit everyone. I love anki and recommend it to everyone, but unlike some people I don’t get upset if someone says they don’t like it.

11. I’m at 7k cards now and don’t plan to quit anytime soon, but I do often just not add any new cards for a while if I don’t feel like it. I still struggle with ‘hard literature’, for almost anything else vocab isn’t the bottleneck anymore.

12. SRS is not for learning.

    It is for testing whether you can recall what you have learned.

13. [I decided to keep going indefinitely.](https://i.postimg.cc/3w4dD9Fk/1.png)

    I had an experience that made me think that dropping SRS will hurt no matter how far you get. A couple of months ago I set new cards to 0 for a few weeks in order to reduce daily reviews. I kept adding new words as I encountered them, but postponed learning them. And I felt the effect of that – I didn’t retain those words well by just encountering them, and I looked them up again and again like an idiot. It made me realize that I remember words not because I have such awesome memory, but because anki is such an awesome tool.

    Anyway, I got used to it. Today is a good day – less that a thousand!