Supermemo doesn’t have separate “decks” or databases, just one big pile of flashcards that are fed to you at random. You can calculate how many cards you have for a particular category (Japanese = xxxx, Chinese = xxxx), but I don’t really keep track of it. Just shovel information into Supermemo, it spits it back out when I need it.

Are you using a solid state drive? When switching between my desktop (regular hard drive) and laptop (SSD) there is a significant slowdown. I’ve had a deck with over 2200 cards and tons of pictures without any noticeable slowdown on my desktop.

You sound like me, I tend to add a lot of cards and therefore each of my decks are pretty huge(expect production). Pretty high numbers, close to yours and some even higher. So I’ve also become an SRS Addict, can’t stop using it. Never missed a day(while just 2 but does that really count? lol)

P.S.
Finally I know I have gotten far when 常用漢字 have been almost all learned (pretty much 90% percent of it)　and now I want to learn a lot of 人名用漢字, maybe all of it if possible(wait that isn’t possible, i think)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiy%C5%8D_kanji

I questioned myself if I could really understand/read japanese(in the beginning), and at 11months I basically could understand/read sooooo much japanese without ever looking at an English translation!

If I doubted myself for reading/understanding, the same will happen with speaking/writing. But if I just keep going/improving those, then it will be the same as before. I doubted what I could do, but eventually I succeeded. So fluency is doable, just keep going and keep looking forward!

Once I become fluent in japanese, mandarin is the next language I will strive to learn.

It’s actually still important for me to hear that, it’s hard to believe that I’ll be truly fluent some day, but it’s not like I’m going to stop anytime soon. It’s kind of ridiculous, not believing though. Comments from Japanese people have gone from “You’re very good” (上手ですね, which actually is a polite way of saying, “good effort there lil’ buddy!” aka. “wow, you suck but it’s cute that the foreigner thinks he can learn our amazing impossibly mystical language!”) to “you’re normal” to “wtf?!? hold on, hold on, hold on, you weren’t this good two months ago, wtf happened?!”

So I guess at some stage you just reach boiling point (you could see it as a linguistic version of the technological singularity) and actually can’t improve that much more.

@SRS Addict

I’m psyched for the next post. I don’t think anyone would mind if you split from purely SRSing and intelligence, and just wrote about anything you thought was interesting. I mean, what is it 40,000+ cards by now? you must have a come to a ton of crazy ideas and conclusions by now.

For me I can understand the majority of japanese now(things like anime,manga,news,dramas,movies,sons,ett), obviously if you gave me a history novel about pre-war kanji. Then I’d have difficulties, but I aim to know a lot of kanji so it shouldn’t be too bad if i just keep going

I think your policy of only writing pertinent information is the best way to go. What I meant to say in my comment was “infrequently updated but awesome blog”

I don’t update my blog frequently because I don’t want to get in the habit of posting stuff for the sheer sake of posting stuff. My policy is: “When I feel that I have something important to say, I’ll say it. Until then, I won’t waste other people’s time.”

The next post will be about the iPod/iPhone Application/Game “Epic Win,” a to-do list that has a reward system similar to an RPG.

I remember this post too. If anyones interested, the author has a blog here: supermemoadventures.blogspot.com/ which gets updated very infrequently. I’d suggest checking it out if you liked this post.

@ アメド

That’s awesome for you man. I quit Heisig and deleted my deck, and then went on to sentences. It’s been a year and a half and I’d say I’m only at 80% comprehension or so. It’s usually enough to get by in any conversation, but i’m definitely not fluent yet.

OL2L: www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%81%93%E3%81%A1%E3%82%89%E8%91%9B%E9%A3%BE%E5%8C%BA%E4%BA%80%E6%9C%89%E5%85%AC%E5%9C%92%E5%89%8D%E6%B4%BE%E5%87%BA%E6%89%80-DVD-BOX-%E9%A6%99%E5%8F%96%E6%85%8E%E5%90%BE/dp/B002G9T5HM/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1282629697&sr=1-1

It’s sort of funny the way everyone goes about learning language, because they’re trying all kinds of methods but the one they themselves used to learn their mother tongue; the one everyone uses to learn their mother tongue! It’s really a “…d’oh” moment when someone like Khatz points it out to you, because it’s like, been right there in front of you the entire time… I dunno.

That’s why immersion is really important and probably why Khatz always suggests talking to native speakers – aside from the obvious fact that talking to someone Japanese will benefit your Japanese, it also forces you to need to speak Japanese. Necessary things -> become more important -> more rep/practice -> remember things better.

For whatever reason, the brain’s ability to retain even information we’d desperately like to hold onto forever naturally degrades. It’s just a fact we have to accept if we’re going to move forward, at least until bioengineering reaches a state of applicable maturity. The SRS is honestly one of the best ways you can use a computer because it’s almost organically multiplying our mental capabilities by a massive, exponential degree, despite being a deceptively simple idea.

お早う皆様。名前はアメド[亜眼努]です
When I first found this site a while back, I was happy that there was someone out there who had success in learning a language. I’ve tried in the past with other languages but to no avail. My past experience with learning Japanese was only from anime(subtitled in English), music and a few books(you know these books, all written in romaji) and 1 class I took a year and half ago. When I took a level 1 Japanese course, I started questioning myself. Will this honestly get my fluent? After careful thinking and going through the entire class from start to finish, it hit me. This wouldn’t get me to a good level, let alone fluency. After my semester finished, I started researching people who have gotten fluent in languages or at least to a good level. A good majority of them said they had to take a lot of classes and even after all those classes they still felt they were lacking in the understanding department of Japanese. As I kept searching for different methods and how did some people get fluent. I eventually found the AJATT site. At first I was in denial, did this guy actually get fluent in the 18months as he said? And if so, how did he actually do it?
I honestly read your blog from beginning to end; I wanted to see what type of things you did to get fluent. Although very long, it did prove to be very useful. When I read up on the srs, I immediately was interested and after using the software (anki is my choice) I never stopped using it.

I first got Remembering the Kanji Volume 1 and 3. It took me around 2-3 months to finish. This provided the ability to recognize and write a handful of kanji with ease. Doing the RTK books helped me so much once I reached the monolingual stage of learning Japanese. After finishing RTK, I started on the immersion. At first I didn’t feel any huge improvement. After doing immersion for a while and with the addition of the srs, I started noticing that I can pick out words and then it went to sentences and eventually pretty much the whole thing. When I went onto the monolingual phase, at first I got to admit I wasn’t used to it. But after a while I loved it, it enabled me to understand J-J sentences without any translations. It also enables one to basically understand J-J stuff in general on its own, without ever seeing an English translation!

I’m not too sure why, but after doing immersion, I eventually started improving with ease. It wasn’t hard, but I did do it daily. I understand why khatz says it should be fun. If it’s fun it will make you do loads of immersion, reading, etc but in Japanese. And you won’t want to stop. But if it becomes work, you’re going to put it down.

So to put it short, I learned kana, did RTK volume 1 and 3 and then straight onto sentences and vocabulary. Where am I now in Japanese? I’d say not fluent but I’m confident to say that I can pretty much read/understand/listen 90%+ of what I hear now in Japanese (Officially have reached the 1 year mark of learning). I finally understand, you learn by having fun not by “working”. Fun get’s done, work is usual put aside. I’m confident now that fluency is achievable; it’s not hard folks, just keep doing something in Japanese.

P.S.(90% isn’t as huge, as the language itself contains so much info. It’s impossible to know everything but it’s possible to know a lot)

I plan to apply the srs to my studies this year, In confident now that the srs if capable of so much things.