Lmao I knew people would disagree with that part which is why I figured it would be unpopular. I mean, a few things of note are that I am coming from the perspective of wanting to be as good at reading japanese as I am at reading english if not better. Crazy goal? Maybe. But regardless, that has made me try to minmax my studies. Secondly, that ratio is from personal experience. This ain’t stuff Im pullin outta my ass. I have read lots of things without and with srs. The results really aren’t even close and they only felt comparable once I was had less than 100 unknown words in 300+ page books. That includes words I could have guessed from context, since to me, needing to guess something from context is still a failure and means I didn’t know it.
I don’t really expect anyone to feel the same way about this as me, though. I mean, there certainly are people who do, but this really all just is my opinion and personal experience when it boils down to it. There’s really no reason to take what I said over what anyone else said, but I just saw that I had a way of looking at it that seemingly no one in this thread had and figured id share.
I think you hit the main consideration in your previous post with:
Personally I’d love to get to the point where I only don’t know 50 words per 300 pages. That would seriously be amazing. But I also don’t have the time or patience to study that hard. For me, I tend burn out when something becomes too much work. I’ve managed to avoid burning out with Japanese over 5+ years of learning by slowing down and taking things easy as needed. It does mean that another person who has spent 5 years on the language could be much further along than me. I’m okay with that though, since the alternative for me would be burning out and learning less.
It’s great for anyone that has the time and energy to learn that much that quickly though. Hopefully I’ll catch up to you in another 5 years.
I mean, at your rate you will get there eventually, no? And I mean it also depends pretty greatly on the book. Like I’m 16 books into oreshura or something and I learn every single word in the book, but since authors and series stick to similar words, the 17th book (when it comes out) will probably have a super low unknown wordcount compared to other books of a similar level.
But yeah not burning out is most important. For some people that means going slower. For some people that means ditching srs and having fun. Even I ditch srs every now and then and just chill with come content.
One thing I will say though, is that once I got to the point where I had like a total of 200 words I didn’t know/couldn’t recall within a book, I started learning every word in a book (primarily before even reading) with koohi. That made a HUGE difference. Once you get to that point, it really feels like your progress starts stagnating because you can read more and read a lot faster, but it always feels like theres just a word or handful of words every few pages that you just don’t know and don’t see enough to remember. Prelearning every word realllllly helped me overcome that wall and I realized just how many “rare” words actually came in handy in the next few books I read. Like what took me 4 months feels like it would have taken over a year without srs.
Why not both? I don’t see it as an either/or thing. Once I get up to a higher level, I’ll being incorporating grammar studies, while continuing with SRS, then once I’m used to that, I’ll start properly focusing on immersion…while continuing with SRS.
In the few months since I’ve incorporated SRS into my daily routine, my reading ability and vocab have increased substantially more than when I was just consuming Japanese content over the last 10 years.
I didn’t always like anki, but I have come to enjoy it quite a bit. It is such an advantage to my study–it shores everything up for me. Personally, I’d rather learn words in anki and cement the nuances via immersion. It makes my reading, especially, flow better both from the front (I know a ton of words going in and that makes reading smoother) and the back (I know that I’ll be seeing any word I’m reading again later in a flashcard, thus I don’t have to bother pinning down everything about it in my brain right then unless I want to). Now that I’m used to the former, I’ve been especially noticing that the latter helps me read a lot faster.
I don’t necessarily recommend my way to anyone who doesn’t like SRS, but it works for me.
For a teacher friend of mine who did this he said he would watch X show (with subs) and then if he heard some word 3 or more times he would pause it or write it down then look it up later (because in his opinion if you hear it 3 or more times in 1 episode of a show, it’s probably pretty common, if not specific to that show)
My only real issue I’m encountering with SRS is with WK. I don’t wanna wait 14 hours to review my radicals that I already know just cause I pressed (example) sliode instead of slide (usually it catches this which i thought was really cool btw technology is interesting) but in this case it’s like dang it I messed up x and now I have to wait 12 hours to prove it was a typo.
Will this get better with time? I ended up starting over the other day and it’s WAY less “off-kilter” now but I just know if I mess up it’s going to throw it off again. (I do realize this is 1. fixable by not being a dum dum and double checking, as well as 2. probably is only so drastic because the system doesn’t “know me” I just get into a “flow” and forget to triple check that I didn’t accidentally press l or something before enter)
Anyways tl;dr just wondering if there’s a way to go at my own pace, I really dig the SRS but now I regret starting over because it’s going to take a long long time to get back to where I was.
The fundamental system behind wanikani never changes, but workload increases as you have higher level reviews coming in later down the road. So technically you can work at your own pace so long as your own pace is 7 days per level or more and you do your reviews at the right time. For typos I always used the ignore script, but some people apparently can’t help but abuse it so I would ask yourself if you’ll be able to strictly use it for typos.
my main immersion is reading. as i started learning japanese i realised that there is a vast literary culture which i had never paid attention to. and now i want to read it all.
first attempts at reading were brutal failures, because i wasn’t even good enough to know how to look up kanji. then i heard “read just above your level”, and tried out graded readers, and よつばと, and it kind of worked, but was boring. so i stopped. then someone suggested a book-club for a manga i actually wanted to read! it’s way above my level. sometimes it’s excruciatingly slow as i look up half a dozen kanji in a single sentence. but it’s something i want to read, and which i enjoy reading. so i stick with it. and without even intending to (i make no wordlists or anything) i’m learning tons (and sometimes get the stuff i learned in WK a little later ).
i sometimes also watch anime with japanese subtitles, but mostly i watch anime when i’m rather sleepy, and it’s still too much work to just chill.
i think of WK as a springboard towards immersion and fluency. the japanese writing system is a major obstacle to achieving literacy, and WK is a method to overcome that obstacle. i’m thinking about supplementing WK with some kind of core 10’000 deck on a different SRS platform to add non-kanji words.
i hope that i won’t need SRS beyond that. i hope that immersion learning will be enough. but that’s something i’ll have to find out in a year or so
but my main point is still: read (or watch, or whatever) something you want to watch. the learning is a side-effect
Thanks everyone for all your responses so far, they’ve been very enlightening. I think what I’m going to do for reading at least is continue using SRS but try to do so more sparingly, and only do words that are common, which I usually determine by the Innocent Corpus dictionary for Yomichan. For listening I think I’ll try not to do SRS as much especially since it’s much harder, at least in the way I like to do my SRS cards. I like to provide context sentences and my listening ability is still not great and often parts of sentences will just be a jumble to me even if other parts I can recognize an unknown word I may want to SRS. Maybe later once I’m much better at comprehension I’ll be able to do SRS for listening more. I do a lot of reading so I’m sure I’ll be able to fill my decks pretty fast even without much listening content being added.
Personally, I wouldn’t do listening SRS at all, period, full stop. Having a sound file linked to your vocabulary like Wanikani or some of the 10k decks have is nice (if a pain to build yourself), but making a specific deck for listening seems like massive overkill when you could just be listening to things.
Unless you’re EXTREMELY worried about pitch
I’m all up for continuing to SRS. If SRS worked so well with learning on Wanikani, why wouldn’t it work well with expanding vocab?
I have 20k+ words SRS’d and I still see new stuff all the time.
I think what’s important is to find the right amount of words you can SRS without it affecting immersion. SRSing without immersion will just doom you to forget the things you’ve studied and spent time on. Immersing without SRS will make you lose time re-searching for words you’ve already searched for before, while if you had SRS’d them, the reading would be smoother.
I’ve tried both ways while reading something: SRSing half the words and not SRSing the other half. The SRSed words were perfectly memorized the next time I got to see them later in that reading. The non-SRSed ones I would never remember and would have to re-check the dictionary. Once I’d see the meaning again, I was like “oh I’ve searched for this word before!”.
To sum up, the important thing here is to find a balance between both immersion and SRS. Too much of one thing will not be that good. A balance of both does wonders in my opinion. SRSing can be bothersome for a lot of people because it’s not fun. If that’s the case, try adding some gamification to it. Even some sort of symbolism like “oh I learned 300 extra words just by reading this book!” or “I’ve learned x words so far just from reading!” will help making SRS more fun.
One last thing worth mentioning is that reading requires a much bigger vocabulary pool compared to your day-to-day interactions with natives (through writing/speaking). What I mean by this is that one could technically reach a higher level of speaking/writing before reaching a higher level of reading. For those also wanting to practice speaking/writing skills, you don’t need to wait to reach a very good level of reading skills before starting to interact with natives.
In your mother tongue? I mean I guess literacy in your own native language can vary quite a bit person to person along with how many words you’re ok with not knowing while you read. Maybe I just have less tolerance for coming across unknown words.
I don’t really have a lot to add beside that I agree with pretty much everything @Vanilla@valkow@jprspereira said.
During the past year I’ve added about 4k words to my anki vocab deck, and I don’t think I would have learned as much vocab without it. I make sure to treat it as a supplementary activity for immersion so that it doesn’t cut out reading and listening time. It’s definitely worth it for me for the small time investment. Today Anki tells me I reviewed 102 cards in 15 min. I aim to learn the words on the surface in SRS and then the nuances in immersion. I modified the intervals a bit to have less reviews, but they seem to stick adequately still. It’s just some extra exposure with added benefits.
I read through a LN first volume recently and added about 150 new words, and still feel like it’s effective to add them. So the proposed 50w/300p seems reasonable.
Also I’ve had a surprising amount of fun with my writing deck.
That seems a bit surprising. Although my mother tongue does have a pretty small vocab (compared to English or Japanese), I expect to see hardly any unknown words in modern lit.
I didn’t always like anki, but I have come to enjoy it quite a bit. It is such an advantage to my study–it shores everything up for me. Personally, I’d rather learn words in anki and cement the nuances via immersion. It makes my reading, especially, flow better both from the front (I know a ton of words going in and that makes reading smoother) and the back (I know that I’ll be seeing any word I’m reading again later in a flashcard, thus I don’t have to bother pinning down everything about it in my brain right then unless I want to). Now that I’m used to the former, I’ve been especially noticing that the latter helps me read a lot faster.
).