Hey, WK. My question is, “when do you retire an SRS course?” I know that WaniKani and Bunpro are kind enough to “Burn” items after a certain point, but services like Memrise go on indefinitely.
Until recently, I was still doing even my Genki I and II vocabulary on Memrise, even though I had finished those courses years ago. It was only because of time constraints that I finally said, “I need to move on.” I still had “Difficult Words” in both courses, but they accounted for about 10% or less of the total.
So, when is the right time to move on from an indefinite SRS course?
I stopped Bunpro sometime during N3 grammar because there were too many synonyms, and figuring out which exact grammar point it was asking for became too much of a hassle, and there were better uses of my time. Same with Kamesame: too many synonyms in my active review pile. In Anki, I nuke a deck once every card becomes mature. This can take quite a while: I’m still reviewing my Genki grammar deck, a year and a half after finishing Genki. I stopped using JPDB simply because it wasn’t effective for me.
By the time I abandon an srs program, I feel like it’s served it’s purpose well enough: I can write pretty easily now, I don’t need Kamesame anymore. I can absorb grammar through reading, I don’t need Bunpro anymore.
I tend to keep anki decks around because the combination of autosuspending leeches plus the intervals just extending indefinitely means they’re very low overhead. For instance the core10k deck I started a decade ago is currently averaging 6 reviews a day, and a jrtk deck I’ve had around for years is 2 reviews a day. I certainly could drop both of them but it doesn’t feel very important to do so. I drop decks that I don’t think are serving a purpose for me any more (e.g. I dropped French vocab decks when I decided not to actively study French further, and I used to have some anime2srs decks that I decided weren’t worth the pain of having all the associated media files to sync around).
Yeah I do the same. As long as it’s in Anki it really doesn’t make too much sense to me to retire decks. Then again, I’ve never kept one for English, so maybe someday 5 years from now if my Japanese is way better.