I think people's choice of decks to SRS should depend on their individual goals. For instance, my goal is listening comprehension, because I want to quickly get to a stage where learning Japanese becomes effortless to the point that I can do it while relaxing. The only way to do that is to learn by listening to music, watching youtube videos, and listening to radio while exercising or playing video games. Everything else requires more time and energy than I have available, in the long term.
But to achieve that kind of listening comprehension (I set aside three months of my time to achieve this goal, after that I have to get back to other projects, and the only things I'll still be able to do in Japanese is what I listed above), I have to do some very, very different things than I would do to achieve reading comprehension for instance. For listening comprehension, I don't need a huge vocab, but I need to internalize the words and expressions I know far more thoroughly, and I need to focus on audio. So, what I'm doing is audio sentences that contain SOMETHING new. Basically, anything I'm likely to have trouble with when hearing it in live conversation, I keep around. Anything I don't think I'll have any trouble with, I deem too easy, and delete.
At the same, I try not to go past about 5000 words, in vocab acquisition...simply because you don't really need them, for listening comprehension. People don't regularly use more than the most frequent 5K words in casual conversation. I'm not saying they NEVER use them, by the way, just that it doesn't happen often enough to hinder your listening comprehension. In fact it's good that people occasionally drop fancy words into their conversations, because they allow me to progress without effort.
Using this principle, I went through Nayr's sentence deck in about six weeks, and kept about 80% of it (only got rid of stuff that was either too easy or contained words that I obviously don't need, for listening to the stuff I'm interested in...for instance, I'm not interested in Japanese politics, so I really don't care what their various bureaucratic titles and government agencies are called), and am now going through an optimized Core 10K sentence deck, but this time, I'm far more discriminating, since I already hit my goal of 5K vocab. I know 4K from Nayr, and I'm confident I know at least another 1000 from elsewhere. So, in general, unless it's a very obviously useful new word, or a really easy compound that you can pretty much guess just by hearing it, I no longer keep sentences with new vocab in them. Instead, I focus on finding sentences that use the words I've encountered before, in different contexts. Because, for listening comprehension, it's very important to not just know your core 5K words, but to know them well, in many different contexts...basically, you want to know various expressions a word is used in, not just the word itself. So you need to focus on sentence volume, not vocab volume.
For reading comprehension, on the other hand, you want to focus a lot more on Kanji vocab volume, and you need to worry less about being thorough. Also, I'm not convinced that doing huge volumes of pre-made decks is the best way to go., for a couple of reasons:
1. the quality of the decks (the quality of the sentences and translations, but, more importantly, the quality of the word and collocation selections) goes down, the bigger they are. In other words, you're liable to learn a bunch of antiquated words and ways of saying things, and even some stuff that's just plain wrong.
2. there's a great alternative: with modern technology, you can create frequency lists based on the specific materials you wish to read. So, instead of SRS-ing through Core10K (or worse, another 15K vocab after that...I imagine at that point, half of what you'd be learning is junk), you might want to create a reading list, of gradually increasing difficulty, for yourself with stuff that's available in electronic form, and SRS through the most frequent 4-5000 words in it. (the reason why you want stuff of increasing difficulty, is because you want to start reading as soon as you've added all your words in Anki, you don't want to wait until everything is reviewed thoroughly enough so that you're able to jump right into the hardest level). And then, after that, keep adding the most frequent words in stuff you plan on reading next, a month or two before you start reading it.
Of course, you can (and should) still use the sentences in the Nayr and Core decks. Reviewing bare vocab is a bad idea. But you should only review the sentences with YOUR words in them, not everything. On the rare occasion that the example sentence contains a bunch of useless vocab, then, and only then, should you fall back on SRS-ing the bare word (and even then, if you feel like copy/paste-ing, you can manually change the example sentence...Core 10K has a bunch of example sentences, so you can pick one out of those).
But to achieve that kind of listening comprehension (I set aside three months of my time to achieve this goal, after that I have to get back to other projects, and the only things I'll still be able to do in Japanese is what I listed above), I have to do some very, very different things than I would do to achieve reading comprehension for instance. For listening comprehension, I don't need a huge vocab, but I need to internalize the words and expressions I know far more thoroughly, and I need to focus on audio. So, what I'm doing is audio sentences that contain SOMETHING new. Basically, anything I'm likely to have trouble with when hearing it in live conversation, I keep around. Anything I don't think I'll have any trouble with, I deem too easy, and delete.
At the same, I try not to go past about 5000 words, in vocab acquisition...simply because you don't really need them, for listening comprehension. People don't regularly use more than the most frequent 5K words in casual conversation. I'm not saying they NEVER use them, by the way, just that it doesn't happen often enough to hinder your listening comprehension. In fact it's good that people occasionally drop fancy words into their conversations, because they allow me to progress without effort.
Using this principle, I went through Nayr's sentence deck in about six weeks, and kept about 80% of it (only got rid of stuff that was either too easy or contained words that I obviously don't need, for listening to the stuff I'm interested in...for instance, I'm not interested in Japanese politics, so I really don't care what their various bureaucratic titles and government agencies are called), and am now going through an optimized Core 10K sentence deck, but this time, I'm far more discriminating, since I already hit my goal of 5K vocab. I know 4K from Nayr, and I'm confident I know at least another 1000 from elsewhere. So, in general, unless it's a very obviously useful new word, or a really easy compound that you can pretty much guess just by hearing it, I no longer keep sentences with new vocab in them. Instead, I focus on finding sentences that use the words I've encountered before, in different contexts. Because, for listening comprehension, it's very important to not just know your core 5K words, but to know them well, in many different contexts...basically, you want to know various expressions a word is used in, not just the word itself. So you need to focus on sentence volume, not vocab volume.
For reading comprehension, on the other hand, you want to focus a lot more on Kanji vocab volume, and you need to worry less about being thorough. Also, I'm not convinced that doing huge volumes of pre-made decks is the best way to go., for a couple of reasons:
1. the quality of the decks (the quality of the sentences and translations, but, more importantly, the quality of the word and collocation selections) goes down, the bigger they are. In other words, you're liable to learn a bunch of antiquated words and ways of saying things, and even some stuff that's just plain wrong.
2. there's a great alternative: with modern technology, you can create frequency lists based on the specific materials you wish to read. So, instead of SRS-ing through Core10K (or worse, another 15K vocab after that...I imagine at that point, half of what you'd be learning is junk), you might want to create a reading list, of gradually increasing difficulty, for yourself with stuff that's available in electronic form, and SRS through the most frequent 4-5000 words in it. (the reason why you want stuff of increasing difficulty, is because you want to start reading as soon as you've added all your words in Anki, you don't want to wait until everything is reviewed thoroughly enough so that you're able to jump right into the hardest level). And then, after that, keep adding the most frequent words in stuff you plan on reading next, a month or two before you start reading it.
Of course, you can (and should) still use the sentences in the Nayr and Core decks. Reviewing bare vocab is a bad idea. But you should only review the sentences with YOUR words in them, not everything. On the rare occasion that the example sentence contains a bunch of useless vocab, then, and only then, should you fall back on SRS-ing the bare word (and even then, if you feel like copy/paste-ing, you can manually change the example sentence...Core 10K has a bunch of example sentences, so you can pick one out of those).
Edited: 2016-05-03, 11:10 am