(I initially wanted to post this in the thread below, but since it had been locked, I’m making a new one.)
This was one of my firsts posts here 2.5+ years ago – and maybe the most controversial one.
It lead to some interesting discussions and I still occasionally get notifications that users liked my post – I think quite a few people who shared my feelings randomly found it via Google (it’s #3 if you search “srs japanese useful”, for example).
HOWEVER, 2,5 years later I’m now using SRS/Anki quite actively. Did I change my mind? Did my circumstances change? Well, it’s a bit of both.
My biggest misgiving about SRS was that it takes time and energy you could otherwise spend on actually reading Japanese material. That it is very important in the beginning, but may in fact be detrimental in intermediate stages of learning if it defines you learning routine too much. That there’s a certain temptation to focus on the “mindless” part of learning Japanese and put everything else on the back burner. And that repetition of “facts” don’t really help to get a feeling for these words.
I still stand by what I said and think the path I took was good for myself at that stage of learning, e.g. transitioning from upper intermediate to advanced – a stage where constant exposure is a great way to internalize knowledge without feeling pressured to retain it at all costs (which may dampen your enthusiasm).
However, when I started reading a lot in May this year, I did this with the intention to fill the gaps in my vocabulary and fill them fast. And most of all, I wanted to be able to quanity my progress.
In the past, I wasn’t really able to reconcile the “being fast” part with SRS because the repetition still took way more time for me – my overall vocabulary just wasn’t that developed. Progressing fast would mean getting overwhelmed by repetitions far too quickly. That was rather frustrating.
However, now I’m in at a stage where I can retain words more easily because I’ve encountered them before or know similar words – or am at least familiar with the reading of the kanji. This allows me to go through 30+ new words a day everyday without having reviews pile up. In fact, only a small percentage of the words I add are words I’ve never seen before. Retention rate is between 80 and 90 %. Since I’m using Yomichan for the adding process, there’s zero overhead involved (physical books excluded) and I do my ~120 reviews + 30 new words in 10-15 minutes of my downtime everyday. It works quite well.
In the past 5-6 months, I’ve added and “learned” about 5500 words in total (maybe 30/day on average), a couple of hundred per book. It’s a wild, unstructured mixture of things I encounter, but all words (phrases, idioms, facts, names) that I think will be useful in the future.
While I by no means consider SRS a necessity now, it’s quite satisfying to see my progress in numbers, and it helps me consolidate the knowledge I already have in a painless manner.
So in a way, the time I spent engaging in Japanese material without using SRS for years paved the road for my using SRS now. That probably doesn’t sound intuitive because you’d usually think it’s the other way round. But for me this approach makes a lot of sense right now. I’m not saying that this symbiotic relationship wouldn’t have been possible in earlier stages – it just didn’t align with my personal goals and expectations (fast and painless progress).
I’m quite happy to finally have reached this stage of painless, rapid progress that allows me to do this, and I think I will keep going that route for the foreseeable future.
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