That’s the only time of the day you should EVER add sentences to your SRS. No if ands or buts. A sentence that can make it past you in that state of mind is genuinely worth adding.

Everything else can go.

Maybe I’ll write about it when I relaunch my blog.

(too busy reviewing to write at the moment – badoom tscccchhh!)

So.. Full time student and part-time employee, and I still managed to fly through RTK in 2.5 months, but jumping into sentences just.. has not been as easy or going as I expected. I am not sure if this is because there is no set goal (like 2042 kanji) or if I do not care about Japanese as much as I thought (I doubt this, I love my environment). Am I doing something wrong though, if I .. I see. I have been forcing myself to do pre-made grammar decks because I wanted to go over the rules again, but I do not need that. It has bored me to death. I am going to start jumping into transcribing anime, my original love and original goal in taking japanese 4 years ago. Thank you khatz 🙂

@Kendo
My srs deck said i’ve been doing this for around 6.5 months. That isn’t included the 3 months i did for kanji. If you add those two together it’s around there 9.5 months. But i don’t count the 3 months. Because it wasn’t “real” Japanese in the sense. But none the less it has helped me out a lot. In the beginning i wasn’t improving as i wanted to. I mean sure understanding a bit more, reading a bit more. But when will i get to a ability to at least understand everything in general. I’m not fluent just yet. But my improvement has been vast. For some reason some songs are easy to understand, while other it’s more of not knowing the kanji+word particular that makes my understanding go down abit. But that will be fixed with more srsing and immersion in the long run. One advice i recommend is do you’re srsing everyday. It works best that way. And create a large immersion environment if possible.
It will help you out so much. But now i understand why khatz says it has to be fun. If it isn’t, you will dread the language itself overtime. And once that happens you’ll eventually start doing less, and less until you don’t do it at all. So make it fun, do japanese things as much as possible, immersion alot, srs everyday (works best that way) and always keep everything enjoyable. Before you know it you will be fluent. I still have some things to get done. (Like being able to read all joyo kanji+extras. I don’t know all of the readings yet, but i can guess ones i don’t even know now.)

I handmade about 5500 little flashcards in the 3 years I lived in Japan before I found out about the awesomeness of the SRS. I’ve been trying to force all the old cards, mostly taken from films and manga, into the new SRS and it has been a bit of a headache at times so your articles have been really useful in gaining some perspective on the process.

I must admit to getting sidetracked by the drive to know everything, to race to 10,000 and to ‘fluency’ which makes it hard to delete things and to ever feel like I’ve finished putting stuff in. But deleting stuff actually feels really good. I’ve come to realise that chasing 10,000, ‘fluency’ and forcing the SRS process misses the point of learning a language, which is to have fun. It’s far too easy to allow language learning to feel like a job – overcoming that engrained ‘no pain no gain’ idea fostered in school is difficult. Native speakers don’t learn a language in order to become fluent, they learn a language because they want friends, want to find out cool new bands, comics, books, films, experiences and fluency is just a by-product of that pursuit of fun and awesomeness. Now, whenever I find a sentence that whiffs of textbook/grammar examples I blow it out of the water. If I think the sentence is bad but the word is a cool one I would like to know I usually cut and paste it into Yahoo questions and search for a quirky or interesting sentence. That has actually helped really refresh a lot of my sentences.

And if the stuff you delete is that important it will come back to you. I remember learning an obscure piece of grammar for JLPT 1 that I had never seen or heard before so I never bothered to SRS it. But when I heard it during the Japanese dub of the Hulk film it was suddenly meaningful, relevant and I knew it had to go in.

With SRS you can review, add, or delete. Which part do you feel like doing? Do that one. How does it feel?

I find often a lot of pleasure in adding. At first I would add sentences harder than what my body/mind was up to. Later, I found I felt better deleting many of those. But nowadays, I hardly delete anything. Stuff I know gets put further and further out so I really don’t see it. And stuff I don’t know so well I pick up pretty fast, maybe a handful of times it comes back. Sure there’s lots to learn but it seems like all the work is really done unconsciously. I just kinda show up and *poof* hey I know what this means now. I didn’t ‘do’ that something else did. It’s not like putting butter on toast. I do that. But looking at a sentence and having comprehension of it’s meaning in the moment of seeing it… No, that was prepared for me and I just showed up. So to keep the game going, I just keep showing up. I even cheat and put the game in places I can’t help but see every day, I never lose. Seems like dumb luck when I write it out here and now…but then do you have to be even reasonably smart to learn a language. No. Hel… you can be deaf, dumb and blind and still learn frickin’ hard ole’ English…man it’s like an epiphany up in here. The hello was all this fuss about. Gah, haha.

I don’t really rep with it either. Maybe one day a month I’ll do a whole day’s review. But everyday I glance at it, maybe I even hit the button a few times, oo and ah at what I do and don’t know yet. Haha, lots of times it’s inspired me to go look up something more basic and add that to my cards.

It’s just contact. It’s not that you got it right or wrong. Though I know everyone is bummed when they get one wrong. But it’s not about that. If you want to learn/grow and benefit doing so. Just do enough to enjoy it. No amount is too small beyond taking it out of your personal environment.

The only thing that really has to happen is contact. SRS is just a convenience for that. Simply being consciously in the presence once day of your target is enough to never loose touch and continue to grow. Despite any level of anxiety. I find. Though I didn’t kill myself over it (though I wouldn’t be here if I did), so…all the results aren’t in(but in a sense they are since I’m not croaking) , but I’m gonna wing it and continue to grow however I feel.

Another thing i find is putting stuff I pretty much already know. Or stuff I ‘should already’ know in the SRS, makes me happy. I didn’t expect it would but it does. And interestingly those little happiness’es add up and I wind up learning new things. I guess because I feel good about it. It feels natural. lol, explaining what’s natural, that seems weird.

But then…as I read what I wrote, I realized. I’m talking about levity. Feeling good, that’s levity. Contact…levity…and then I realized water! Water normally sloshes around under gravity but you put something in contact with it’s surface and it’ll go against gravity, the surface tension, forces, whatever. The water rises up. That’s levity. Hang a paper towel in just touching water and the water will climb up it. Good ole’ nature. It does the work, just contact. Well, I feel less weird now.

Hmmm, this would also explain this site, it’s not the method, it’s the contact. All the articles, all the tweets, all the comments. There are so many avenues for contact to allow people to get value. Man, what a brilliant design. Good on you Khatzumoto!

By changing the environment to make it more fun, the entire process becomes a painless breeze that I WANT to participate in. I started learning the Chinese characters found in Korean. Instead of blazing through (hare) I am taking it slow and getting however many done in a day I feel like (tortoise). My pace is steady and enjoyment is high. It is a great feeling and is probably necessary unless I am willing to subject myself to years of ASM.

Removing bad cards is essential. There is an article from awhile ago where you said something to the effect of if there is a split second thought of if a card may be deleted, delete it. This is amazing advice and correct. Sometimes it feels like “Oh, but this word! It is so important!” There are an infinite number of sentences that word appears in, it will come up again. Will all be alright.

Otherwise, nice summary of good SRSing practice! I don’t add new cards unless I really feel like it, so can’t argue with that. Like the new site banner by the way 😉

But the *real* reason I’m commenting is to say, “Hey, did you get Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator? Your “violence” banner still has the cool sketched out charm, but looks more professional and vector-ish. I like this trend!! If all your graphics could shift in this direction, I think the site would be much more aesthetically pleasing.

I also still liked the bar on the right side… and the inclusion of lots of cool links in the bar.

😀

Here’s to constant improvement! 乾杯!

I’m still reeling from a 1300-card deck culling. If anyone’s played any of the Civilization games, my Japanese Learning Civ hit a golden age. I don’t think anything has been better for my learning than pure love for the process.

We’ll see how this goes…