About the whole “let it go” thing, theorically it seems a great idea, but it’s unattractive at first sight. In any case, there is this guy (huliganov.tv/goldlist-eu/) which has his own language learning method where he also uses it (the “let it go” thing). I like his explanation about the benefits of doing it more than khatzumoto’s (even while his writing style is less dynamic than khatzumoto’s).

If you want profits (language acquisition excellence), then each individual entry needs to give you more than it takes away (your precious time). I think it takes making a few (translator’s note: few means a lot of) mistakes to comprehend this, as well as seeing that, yes, you will see that word again in a much better sentence. Sometimes, the entries can be fixed; sometimes, if the shoes look like feet, you must delete! … well, kick that rascal to SRS purgatory, anyway.

So, what I’m basically saying is that from an economics standpoint, this advice is pretty sound.

After a few iterations of this, I felt like all the time spent gathering and making these cards was disproportionate to the amount that I was learning, because I was wiping the slate almost, if not completely clean, too frequently.

I leave the analysis to you, fine ladies and gentlemen of the internet.

1. They don’t have enough faith to let a word go. Seriously, if it matters, you’ll see it again, and you can make another card then. And if you never see it again, why would you put it in your SRS?

2. They spent a lot of time and effort making cards, and hate to throw them out.

I understand (2). I’ve got some French sentence cards that I typed in by hand, and I hate to delete them. Even worse are my Egyptian hieroglyphic cards. You ever tried to typeset hieroglyphics? It’s hours and hours of staring at 14 identical bird symbols, trying to guess which alphanumeric code to use, and messing with LaTeX. I have over 500 these cards, and they all look something like this if I select “Edit Card”:

m-a:k sw-w Hr:1 i-p-Y1\R270 mn:n-mn:n:t-E1:Z2 I1:t-Z3

There’s no way I’m going to start deleting those cards. If that makes me a hoarder, so be it.

I didn’t learn to delete enthusiastically until I started using subs2srs. I took my favorite movies, ripped them, and turned them into Anki cards. This gave me about 1,000 cards per movie (with sound!). But most of those cards were garbage. So I learned to delete. I’d set goals like “delete 50% of all cards on the first review, and another 50% during the next two reviews.” I learned to delete bad cards, boring cards, hard cards, easy cards, and anything that wasn’t completely awesome. And sure enough, after a few review cycles, I had almost nothing but awesome cards left. Then some of them became boring, and I deleted those, too.

To really learn how to delete, you need to learn how to make 1,000 cards in a few hours. Start with awesome materials, and boil them down mercilessly via successive waves of deletion. By the time this is done, you’ll believe in the power of deletion.

You’re never going be able to manage a basic conversation if you don’t know a few hundred words. You’re never going to be conversational unless you know a few thousands words. And maybe you need to know 10,000 words to be ‘fluent’ (whatever that means). Basically, you have lots of learning to do.

I prefer to use Anki & SRS – I’ve tried so many ways, and this is by far the best. If you’re not using SRS, if you think it’s a chore, then what are you using? If you’re reading books, or studying textbooks, and learning lots of vocab that way – awesome, then maybe you don’t need SRS. But if your vocab isn’t constantly growing, then you’re not learning enough – maybe ALL learning feels like chore to some?