So, first, a little background:

August 2008 - Lightly start learning Japanese
September 2008 - Begin Japanese classes in college
November 2008 - Friend introduces me with AJATT, which introduced me to RtK and this site.
Spring 2009 - Got through RtK using this site
September 2009 - Started using Anki with sentences
October 2010 - Came to Japan to study
March 2011 - Forced to return to America by university due to radiation fears
July 2012 - Return to Japanese for a teaching job
December 2012 - Took the JLPT for the first time (N1) and passed

So, I've been studying Japanese for 4-5ish years and I've always followed the AJATT philosophy. I've been SRSing since September 2009 (almost 4 years).

My Japanese is decent. I can understand almost any situation I am thrown into (banking, taxes, medical, etc.), though I sometimes can't respond in a natural way. I have achieved my original goal in that I can enjoy Japanese movies and TV shows and manga without translations.

Now, the issue:

I am so sick of SRSing. I have done it almost every day since 2009 and I'm just tired of it. I know it is amazing and I credit Anki with all the high-level vocabulary that I have managed to stuff into my brain. At this point, though, I am seriously thinking about "graduating" from the SRS.

I've tried, as Khatzumoto from AJATT suggests, deleting cards. It's not a matter of the card content this time, though. The process itself just feels so tired and worn-out to me.

From this point on, I am thinking of just continuing to enjoy media, like I do in English and try to absorb from now on. I feel like, if I can take the energy I was using to SRS and push it into pure media consumption, I will better be able to keep my motivation and progress.

Part of the reason I've gotten sick of this is, I think, connected to an overall drop in motivation. Since coming to teach English in Japan, I have few opportunities to use Japanese. Sure, I order at restaurants and in the back office I speak with my co-workers a bit... but honestly, I don't care to speak to most of my co-workers and the ones I'd like to talk to insist on speaking English. I talk to my girlfriend in Japanese quite a bit, but aside from talking about 就活, we rarely breach topics that challenge my abilities.

The reason I'm making this post isn't to whine or shoot down the value of the SRS or anything like that. I'm just curious: is there anyone out there who has had a similar experience? How have you proceeded? In my personal life, I know very few foreigners more skilled in Japanese than I am. On TV or in media, I look up to people like Robert Campbell (who is, without a doubt, the most native-like speaker of Japanese among anyone who started learning Japanese after reaching adulthood). I would like some advice from any 先輩 who might be out there.

よろしくお願いします。

I think it might be fine to just take a break and stop. If you ever want to get back to it your cards with massive piles of reviews will be there waiting for you, but so what?

I'm close to the same point with my Japanese deck and plan to stop adding cards at some point. I still plan to do reviews every day anyway, because they will get lower and lower to a very manageable amount very quickly. I did this before when I started learning Chinese, and my Japanese deck was only showing 50 cards a day or something after a few months, and my deck has 24000 cards and is years old too.

[Zgarbas]

^^ Remember that SRS is just a means to an end, not the goal itself. If you don't want to do it anymore, then don't. It's a very liberating feel to see all your decks deleted.
(though you might want to save a backup; just in case)

If the deck's very mature I don't think deleting it would be a big deal. Can always make a new one later.

I'm about the same level as you, and I had a similar experience with SRS at one point. The thing is that the reasons for doing SRS change a lot as your level becomes higher. If understanding written and spoken material is usually not much of a problem then those decks where you're just practicing understanding become a chore. The cards I was failing were ones with super rare archaic words or just a dumb things like mixing up the pronunciation of words that use 大. It felt like I was spinning my wheels.

At that point, I started studying for Kanji Kentei with an almost singular focus on production. They're the standard Kanji Kentei writing problems where a bit of the sentence is written in katakana, and you have to write the kanji. I even flipped all the usual reading questions so that they were production instead of simple understanding/pronunciation.

Studying suddenly felt gratifying and interesting again. I've been going strong on that for a little more than a year, and doing that kind of practice has improved my off-the-cuff kanji ability AND my listening by quite a lot. I still fail cards if I can't understand them or I botch the pronunciation in another part of the sentence, but adding that extra layer to my studying has helped me maintain interest.

So I think that instead of just quitting SRS you should pick new goals that SRS might be able to help you achieve. How's your keigo? Maybe SRS'ing that would improve your skills in that area, and be interesting again? How's your ability to read names? As a teacher you probably have access to class lists you might be able to SRS first and last names from.

It's tough to know what to do after you've reached goals you've spent years working toward. You have to set new goals in order to continue getting better, and I think SRS can help you reach them.

I'm less advanced than you and quit SRSing when I was much worse then I am now. Thing is, I still don't regret my decision.
There is hard proof my vocabulary recognition skills got worse (went from A to B in vocab on N2) but its not a significant drop and its probably more because of my general lack of dedication to serious study.

What I'm trying to say is: do it!! SRS is a good tool to jump-start your study when you begin with nothing, but if you can immerse yourself in language with decent comprehension it loses all its appeal.

Quitting is bad. Not objectively speaking (objectively, quitting can be good or bad, it all depends on context), but psychologically. And psychology is what drives us. For instance, you are not quitting because you've objectively established that it's a good idea, you're quitting because you're sick of SRS-ing (you're quitting for psychological reasons).

Instead of quitting, you should address the problem: change your study methods; replace SRS-ing with something more interesting. I don't think just "absorbing media" is an adequate replacement for SRS-ing. You should consider adding something more (be it reading; writing!!! -like keeping a regular blog; practicing pronunciation). And, this time, don't make it open ended, set a goal. That way, when you reach that goal, you will have finished the job, not quit.

"Don't quit, change" sounds a little like spin (an empty slogan), but it isn't. Human psychology is a real thing. Motivations are real things. They should be taken into consideration. In general, it's important to make one's life and work always move forward, in a linear progression, rather than a roller coaster ride of constant starts and surrenders.

sethg Wrote:I am so sick of SRSing.

It probably really is an issue of content. Put everything you currently have somewhere else and see if you can create new cards from content that you want to rep. If not then just ignore it for a while. I've gone through phases where I never touch my SRS and find that gives me more time for media and friends and my Japanese soars to a new level. Then that gets a little stale as well and I use more traditional study methods, either with or without the SRS reenforcement and start a new cycle.

There are two types of decks I never get too sick of though: subs2srs decks and my pseudo incremental reading deck. They feel a lot closer to actually consuming media than studying. (I don't grade my incremental reading deck. I base my scheduling choice on how soon I want to see that material again and not how well I actually know it.)

Zgarbas Wrote:^^ Remember that SRS is just a means to an end, not the goal itself. If you don't want to do it anymore, then don't. It's a very liberating feel to see all your decks deleted.
(though you might want to save a backup; just in case)

exactly. if you have lots of stuff you want to do in japanese and srs is taking your time away from that and you don't want to do it... then you should stop.

I've seen srsing around the same amount as you but i lost my deck 2 times (I started over and then lost it again ! AHH lol) so i started from scratch lol (my current deck's been alive for probably 2 year right about now? ) so maybe that's why i'm not as burdened as you ?? There's definitely sentences i added in the beginning i would want to delete at this point if i still had them b.c. it's so ingrained from encounters in immersion.

I sorta want to suggest looking into other formats you can do with anki like MCD. I think mcd is easy and really useful for people who are higher up in their japanese ability. But if you really don't want to srs regardless of the deck format, that's fine too.

my post on MCD's
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid163397

I plan on srsing for as far as I can see into my future... at least 10 more years (been doing it for 3+ at the moment).

Totally understand the feeling that you don't need it any longer and want to stop.

My personal issue with this is that I hate the feeling of not knowing something that I know I once knew. It's like atrophy. I feel my mind getting weaker and it sends shivers down my spine like I'm watching my own slow death.

I really don't follow Jlevelup but that guy did say one thing that's stuck with me as a strategy for this situation... He said that he just stopped adding. Sure for the first year you're still doing reviews almost like normal... or like 1/2 normal. But after a year he was doing maybe 15 reviews a day. less than 5 minutes. He could skip a day or two no problem and mash out a 15-minute review session to catch up ;D

That seems like a very manageable and healthy solution to get more of your time back, feel better, and not lose progress...

You've worked very hard to get your skills where they are. I know it's easy to take them for granted as inevitable or not a big deal, but it would really suck to start sucking at your second language. right?