TL;DR Anki tedious. If I do less Anki to focus on immersion, new cards build up + immersion is less regimented. Despite obvious progress, I still feel like I am in a negative feedback loop.
From the beginning, I've compared myself to the legends. The people who are Anki gods (50 new cards a day), get N1 in no time, read incredible amounts of material each day, the people who are confident enough to start a whole YouTube channel around how to learn Japanese as a non-Japanese, etc. And maybe if I just didn't make this comparison, this entire post would be unnecessary. But I'm hoping that through this post, I can get some suggestions on how to spend my study time/make a study plan (and misery loves company, maybe some of you relate).
Part 1. Anki
I'm not sure If I would learn vocab quicker with a non-Anki method, but I learn vocab on Anki slowly. I started Anki a little over three years ago, and since then I've put in 650 total Anki hours (time for reviews only, card creation and editing not included), and I've "learned" something like 5000-12000 words (yeah, I know that is a big range). Bear in mind that this is just recall, not production, so when speaking, most of these words aren't accessible at all. I have pre-FSRS stories and post-FSRS stories, but I'll focus on the present, so post-FSRS stories.
Basically, FSRS figured out I'm a bumbling oaf. I have two Anki decks I'm using right now (one just for words I learn in novels, the other deck for everything else) and for every one new card I learn per day I get 13-15 reviews (for everything else deck) or 16-19 reviews (for novel deck). This means each new card I learn per day, my reviews increase substantially. It takes me 9.2 seconds per review. Some have suggested I spend 5 seconds per review instead, but having tried to go through my reviews faster, I really don't think that is something I can do.
Additionally, because I have such a ridiculous amount of total hours on Anki number (650), I try to do FSRS's suggested minimum retention rate, which it often calculates for me as around .75 for these two decks. So although I have lots of reviews and lots of total Anki time, my recall rate on these cards is really nothing spectacular at all. Low retention rate by itself doesn't demotivate me, but obviously I do have to do more relearning because of it. So for the last 3 months I have been learning about 7-8 new words a day and spending about 35 minutes a day on that (which, if I'm doing my math right, means I'm learning about 13 new words per hour of Anki. Pretty underwhelming).
Part 2. Immersion
So I've been trying to pull back my Anki time so I could spend more time on immersion. Some of my time in immersion involves mining new cards for Anki and card creation. It doesn't take long before I've got many more new words than I could learn in day, and so far, I've just been letting those words build up (my current backlog is about 5000 cards). Since my Anki learn rate is so slow, whenever I find a very high frequency word, or I encountered a word (card) I have already created but yet to learn, I update the card's "due" value to New #0 so I can learn the most relevant words immediately.
Immersion is a little harder for me to stick to than Anki, because it is easy for me to force myself to do the Anki reps (which are tedious), but more difficult for me to force myself to watch and mine from DBZ (example). I believe the reason for this is that when a previously fun show like DBZ becomes a chore to understand and mine, it's really hard to justify doing it. (Yes, you're going to recommend no-look-up free flow immersion, I know about it and do it). It's not that I have a problem tolerating ambiguity, but the more interested I am in something, usually the more look ups I want to do to understand it (and card creation usually follows), and the process drags on big time. Even a relatively simple anime can go from 22 minutes to a 40 minute process once look ups, card creation, and rewinds get involved. Yes, I want to watch it, yes I want to learn from it, no I don't want it to take forever to do.
Same goes for reading; the look ups (and general misunderstandings) really make the process slow. I was never really the guy that could read for hours each day in English, but at least in English I can finish books. Most Japanese books I don't finish at all.
As far as grammar goes, many say "'just immerse" and you'll pick it up. I was attracted to this idea in the beginning, and while immersing I do basically understand the grammar of all sentences, but output is a totally different story. My sentence creation ability is trash. I feel like I have very little carry over from input grammar to output grammar. I'm just not seeing my input abilities transfer over to output at all (vocab OR grammar).
To combat too much Anki, I've tried to do immersion first in the day and finish with Anki. I've also kind of developed an idea that if I don't do both read immersion and listening immersion today, then decrease new Anki cards to learn tomorrow by 1 (and if you do do both immersion activities today then increase new cards to learn tomorrow by 1 until you find a balance).
I'm just tired. It's so much Anki. I clearly don't have talent for learning new words. My immersion input clearly doesn't carry over to output. Immersion in what was initially my goal (consuming Japanese content) has become a chore. There are so many words to look up. And despite all of this I still occasionally think to myself "if I could just learn more words in Anki, then everything else would fall into place around that".
by not_a_nazi_actually