Is it necessary to use SRS/Anki?

13 comments

1. Short answer: No.

   There are A LOT of other language learning tools to use if Anki isn’t your thing.

2. SRS is for making sure those things you learned stick in your memory even after some time has passed.

   If you’re saying you can remember everything you read without going over it again later, then you don’t need SRS.

3. If flashcards aren’t your thing and you’re making progress doing what you’re doing, I don’t see the problem with it.

   Some learning styles just aren’t the right ones for certain people, y’know? What works for one person isn’t going to work for another.

4. SRS is just a tool that improves over learning words from a long list of words by reading it over and over again. It’s a good way to get a foundation because it’s a very efficient way to learn huge amounts of vocabulary by filtering out those words that easily stick very quickly. But it’s not the only way to learn vocabulary.

   You can absolutely learn words from reading and listening too, and we do that all the time in our native languages. With a foreign language the biggest problem with that is just that initially, throughput is very low. For example, I can read a novel in 1-3 hours in my native language or in English, but in Japanese it still takes basically all my free time on a day where I don’t have work. And when I started reading novels in Japanese, it took me months to get through a single one. At that pace, reading is not efficient at all for learning vocabulary. You don’t necessarily find fewer new words, but you don’t get any reinforcement for previously seen vocabulary because you don’t get enough exposure in total if reading is very slow.

   In those early stages, SRS is a very good option to quickly build up vocabulary and improve your reading and listening ability faster. Reading and listening both need a lot of practice too, so you definitely need to read and listen a lot whether you use SRS or not, but SRS basically gives you a way to front-load large amounts of knowledge from the start.

   And even when reading and listening skills are good enough, SRS is still a solid way to make sure you won’t forget words you don’t encounter often. Whether you need that or not is a different story. If you want to take tests within a limited time frame, I think SRS is pretty much a must because those tests tend to cover more fields than most people are interested in at the same time, so there’ll always be some vocabulary that you’ll not encounter much outside of your SRS.

5. Yes. It’s impossible to learn Japanese without SRS. Even natives use anki.

6. I kinda get it, I use Anki and Genki and I feel like after Ive done all the exercises for a chapter where you use the words a lot, they become super easy, and before that they’re super hard.

   So no you dont need SRS, you just need to be exposed to a word every now and then and you won’t forget it. That can be reading, watching things, etc

   Anki is best for beginners, when immersion isn’t a good option yet.

7. Yes, you can. But you lose out on clout points of how many cards you’ve done/have in your deck so far.

8. I find SRS invaluable at intermediate level where I have a solid grasp of the basics but still encounter a lot of new vocab in every new book or anime. It lets me learn in a more focused and efficient way. I don’t use Anki, though, I use jpdb.io. I find it vastly superior if you don’t want to invest a lot of time into creating your own cards and curating your own decks.

9. The purpose of SRS is as a rote memorisation tool. This is literally what ‘Anki’ refers to; it’s the Japanese word for ‘memorisation by rote’.

   Anki does it’s job for those who use it, but if you’re able to do without it, it is by no means necessary. After all, If you’re constantly exposing yourself to media (books, etc) you’re already performing a form of SRS without trying. Learning without dedicated SRS tools like Anki is absolutely viable.

10. Obviously it’s not *necessary*, but what’s your strategy for retaining thousands and thousands of words over the next several years? You need to memorise things at scale (unless you plan on progressing extremely slowly). Yeah, you can learn from listening and reading, but you’re probably not going to learn and retain (say) 20 words per day by doing it.

    If you don’t care about speed/efficiency, or have some other plan in mind for achieving that – sure, do whatever you like.

11. Anki is not really the key. It’s repetition. If you are doing that using some other tool, then it works the same way. I really like Anki because of efficiency but I also get sick of having way too many cards. I start removing decks once I get to a certain point where I know I’ll never forget it. For example, I don’t need my top 1000 french and spanish words. I already know them by heart so I dropped those decks. To not forget those, I consume content on those languages. Those words keep showing up everywhere anyways.

    Edit: What I mean with other tool is any other method. Like watching tv with subtitles, dictionary, duolingo, anything that would repeat the words

12. You don’t, but the point of anki and SRS to is to keep yourself exposed to words you’ve seen that you otherwise may not continue to be exposed to on a regular basis. They’re may be a word that you come across that you don’t see too often; therefore, it will be harder to retain memory as opposed to having it in anki. It will be scheduled in Anki on a set schedule, whereas, you could go several months before you even see that word again otherwise. Anki is just more efficient in this regard. You may enjoy anki more by having a deck that you make yourself curated from all the content you’ve been exposed to, comprised of sentences that you’ve encountered with a word you saw that you just didn’t know. They’re are ways to make this an automatic process where you can just click a button and have a card made for you, and templates that even have pictures, sound, and nice colors all taken from the content you’re watching, reading, or listening to. This can at least make it look like you’re looking at a piece of content rather than a boring flashcard.

13. no