The age old discussion on either premade or self made decks

Alright alright I know this has been brought up many a times but I really do want to know more.
As of rn my vocab is around 1.9k words which I’ve picked up by using the core2k/6k deck. I got a little busy and after 6 months of consistent daily practice I had to stop cause I was just too busy fast forward to a week later and I’m ready to get back at it and I have thousands of reviews and what I discovered truly shocked me. I was trying to do them but it was almost like I was learning everything all over again, no really even words I’d reviewed over and over have been feeling new and so I started wondering should I just make my own deck.

I watch a lot of anime, I love it and alot of vocab I have actually picked from anime so even when I encounter them it’s usually just the knaji I’m unfamiliar with but already know the vocab that said should I just continue building my vocab by making my own deck from words I encounter while watching anime and reading random stuff on the internet and delete my core deck or?.

What is you advice on this from your own experience I’m very much interested to know

3 comments
  1. Your premade deck has served its purpose, I would just delete it if I were you.

    Since you watch a lot of anime, you should grab Japanese subtitles from kitsunekko and start mining everything you watch.

  2. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter much. You get more experience with self-made decks, because you get more context. If you don’t create absurd amount of new cards daily, very often you will remember where and when exactly you have seen it, who said it, in what situation and so on. But it comes with a price of spending more time. Both for card creation (this actually can be made very fast) and content usage. It’s quite obvious that if you do 1 hour of content with 15-20 minutes of SRS, you would get better results than doing only 15-20 minutes of SRS.

    It’s also fine to forget. To be honest, we don’t even forget it completely, we just can’t recall. There was an experiment, that showed people spend significantly less time to learn something they have memorized before that they can’t remember. Potentially, it might be even something like spending 15-17% less time after 1 year, simply because we have memorized it once. There is also a formula for average chance to recall something. After 1 day, it’s around 95-96%. After 1 week it’s around 74%, but after 1 month it’s only 26%. The more reviews you do, especially spaced reviews, the better it becomes, so we are able to recall even years later. It’s how our memory works.

  3. Self-made, not even close. You’ll remember most of them by the time you’re done making the decks anyway.

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