Even with a large backlog, a living deck is a healthy deck. A deck that experiences turnover is a healthy deck.
Deletion is the best kind of turnover.
Doing reps is the second best.
Deleting while you do reps gives you the best of both worlds. 一石二鳥 (one stone, two bird), if you will.
An SRS deck that doesn’t get cards deleted is like a house that doesn’t get the trash taken out. It doesn’t matter how nice the furniture is — how nice the stuff you add is. Sooner or later, if you don’t take out the trash, the trash takes over. And then it’s all trash. When trash is not removed, everything becomes trash.
A clean house is one where there is a frequent motion of trash in the general direction of out.
No matter how good the food you’re eating is (or isn’t), there have to be waste products that leave your body. You can’t hold that…stuff…in. It’s not good for you. Waste products — bad cards — are a natural results of the “metabolic” process of SRSing.
Delete. For happiness, for hygiene, for the smell, for sanity, for fun. Declutter. Delete.
Yes. Kanji, too. Delete.
I still find it hard to delete anything, even the words that I just never get and always end up frustrated on… blah.
Maybe the proverb applies here that “There are plenty of other fish in the sea.” In the time I spend trying to get a particular word or kanji in my head, I could have learned 3 or 4 others that are just as useful. My progress gets sidetracked by the need to conquer a stubborn item, but of course, it will still be there 3, 6 or 12 months from now, and maybe it will stick then.
If you are building a puzzle, don’t waste all your time on a stubborn piece. Move on. As the whole picture comes together, that missing piece will find its place. Anyway, that’s what I’m going to tell myself moving forward. ;}
I can’t delete anything either, but I can suspend the hell of out stuff. What I love about suspend is:
1) The card goes away and stops bothering me and hinders my progress.
2) I don’t get that awful feeling like I burned a book.
that is brilliant! thanks for the suggestion, i’ve suspended a bunch of stuff now that i know i can do that. (rtfm, i suppose? のヮの)
But if I delete any Kanji I won’t ever know all the JOYO kanji…
Can’t you “suspend” the card? In the Anki mobile iphone app, you can suspend cards and reactivate them later.
Remember, 100 million people in Japan manage just fine in a Japanese-speaking country without having SRS’d all the joyo kanji. SRS is a tool, not a requirement.
If it’s a common character, you’ll see it all the time anyway. If it’s rare, you won’t really miss it. Regardless, if you know most of the rest, you’ll be able to figure it out from context, anyway.
You shouldn’t worry about deleting. Seriously, if it’s important enough to know, it *will* come up later again. You really only need to be familiar with your kanji to the extent that it’s useful to you right now. The same goes for sentences. Worrying about all of the kanji and all of the words and all of the pronunciation is just going to slow you wayyy down. Only focus on what’s immediately in front of you. Eventually, after some time, you’ll find that you know *more* than the general use kanji.. a lot more. And remember, you don’t actually need an SRS to be successful, it’s just there to make things easier. So, don’t make it harder on yourself by not deleting.
Weekly Jumps are my SRS ^^;
I always worry about deleting hanzi/kanji when using RTH/RTK, because if you miss a character that is a component of another character, that next character will be harder, and you might unnecessarily delete it, even it it’s very easy to recall the story and the other components.
With sentences though, I just delete whatever I don’t like. I also delete sentences that have become unbearably easy.
Often with RTK, though, I find that later characters can help reconstruct a weak story that I had with one of the components. So, for example, if your story sucks for 侯 and you get bored with the card, just delete it. Because later on when you hit 喉, you can sort of work your way backwards to a better relationship with 侯 ;).
Exactly! It’s almost, like…”subtractive” learning 😀
上杉隆 – Wikipedia bit.ly/eANtms
woh i think this is a good idea.
im not only an Anki user,i’m also ndsrs user (DSi)
good if im not on the perimeters of our house
still on RTK
i have a deck on ndsrs that consists of 3000+ kanji cards,coz i put alternates,meaning a mix of front and back
and coz i’m not seeing new cards,i tried adding lesson-wise kanji like L45-53 deck so that i will see those new and what kanjis i should be seeing.
Ever since i got FFXIII Japanese (last tuesday) I think my srs time has considerably dropped, but playing FFXIII is studying, right? 😀
I mean, Since there are J-Subs, i write it on a piece of paper then add it to my SRS, but i’ve noticed a drop in SRS time 🙁
But whatever, I’m feeling quite great because now i am starting to understand phrases 😀
But what surprises me is the use of Kanji in FFXIII. Cero says 12+, and i read on wikipedia a while ago that a 7th grader in japan would only know slightly over 1k Kanji. I know all the Jouyou kanji and i am seeing quite frequently some obscure ones.
Don’t believe the myth of Joyo kanji. It doesn’t mean a student in year 7 knows around 1000 kanji, it means that is how many he has supposedly be taught. He may know less, but probably way more. Kanji are everywhere, Japanese kids learn them as they go. Seeing kanji in games like FF is a way they learn them.
Luckily the games industry (particularly SE) does not bother with wondering which kanji are okay to use, which have to be given furigana and all that junk. Newspapers should be like that.
Agreed, but I’ve found that you can actually let it accumulate up to a couple thousand words, at least (maybe even up to 4000 or 5000), before you really have to delete some of them. It shouldn’t be happening too often, honestly.
Cheers,
Andrew
Just a quick question. How come things like 少ない Ａｎｄ 語らない Mean Few and Talks(atleast this is what my dictionary tells me) Wouldn’t they mean the opposite?
少ない i would assume means not few and 語らない i would assume is not talks because of the nai ending?
The ない in 少ない is not a negator, it is a homophone but has no grammatical meaning. It means ‘few’, the negative form is 少なくない.
「な」 adjective
Fortunately,, my decks are having sever diarrhea not responding to treatment 🙂 …
nice post,,, Actually the reason behind this frequent bowel motion is simply
your “Critical Frequency (theory 🙂 ) “…
I love U man,,, I love U bro <<< stop getting so effen emotional …
Schade! this is my first comment,, after hardcore reading phase of reading
your super fantastic(x100) post about different aspects of language
and our pathetic human psyche …
I declare it : Proudly AGATTer (German)
Khatzu, help! I’ve been doing so much in Japanese I’m starting to have trouble with English words. Both “apprication” and “application” sound equally correct to me. Is this normal?
Totally.
Because i have not switched to monolingual yet (coming soon!) i do not know what is better for me.
A)Get Sentence, Get readings and meanings of words, make meaning of sentence with my knowledge and or past similar sentences
B)Get sentence, take word(s) i do not know, enter in Jisho.org, get sentences with those words, hope the sentence was error free.
Don’t bother translating it. Just define the new words in the answer section. Use a translation if you have one available (the Yahoo dictionary is a reliable source for sentences w/ translations) but otherwise don’t worry about it. If you’re at least passingly familiar with the grammar, that’s all you’ll need. If it doesn’t make sense to you with all of the words defined… skip it and move on. And it’s a good way to transition to monolingual cards. (Just swap out the English definitions for Japanese.)
Running into a small problem…
I’ve done some major cleaning in one of my decks and I find myself often marking cards as failed just so I can them more. I do this for almost every card in this deck because they are so awesome. Gets really tough with 100s of reviews every day though.
I think I have issues 😀
How many sentences do y’all have in your SRS? Is there such a thing as too many? How many do you have Khatz?
I got around 3000+ in my deck and I still think it’s not enough. I’ve decided to go monolingual now
I don’t think there is a “too many” more of, is it useful. Just my personal opinion
16,000 or so for me. I don’t think that there is a total “too many”, put personally there is a daily limit for reps. My daily reps are 150-200 so its not a problem for me.
If you have a feeling there is too much, there probably is. Delete liberally, leave only ones that you can give yourself a good reason not to delete.
Remember that Katz recommends 10,000 sentences, and I would definitely agree that is a good target to have. If you are like me and don’t have a problem with a big deck (that sounds funny) go nuts.
Thanks! though Khatz says you need to have learnt 10000 sentences, but he doesn’t say you should have that many in your srs all at once. Not that he doesn’t say the opposite either.
For some reason, even though i have gone monolingual, i still think of a sentence meaning in english..
Example:
Front
この作品
Back
この作品「さくひん」
作品（作ったもの）
Even though i learned it with a japanese definition, i still manage to think “made thing” when i see it.
Another question, should I bother to learn the readings of definitions?
Such as:
水没（水中に忱んで見えなくなること）
Something to do with In water becomes cannot see, right? I already feel the meaning, but should bother to learn readings of kanji in the definition and should i try to understand everything in it even if i get a feel for it?
I think that this post only really applies after your first 5000 sentences.
Something very odd is going on I,ve tried getting into SURUSU and it won’t let me in i,ve resetted my password maybe 3-5 times now and when I re-put the new password it still says it is incorrect -__-. I recently started using SURUSU maybe 3-4 weeks ago mostly for sentences and everyday I miss adding sentences really brings me down since I know things will start making sense once I keep SRSing those sentences. could the site be going through an update? Is anyone else having this issue as of late (this week mostly)?