I wrote recently about how Mnemosyne was starting to give me too much to review. It made me realize I've been spending too much time studying, so now I'm revising how I'll SRS.

From now on, I'm gonna do a fixed number of cards per day, regardless of how the SRS schedules them. Like, 100 cards a day.

At first, this will mean my "review due" pile is gonna inflate up like a chick eating cake. But, mathematically, that's really just a temporary thing. Let me explain. At any given time, 90% or more of the cards scheduled for review are recently added cards. While the review pile is huge, I just won't add new cards. Because of the spacing, as long as new cards aren't added, the number of new reviews-due slows its growth. For example, right now Mnemosyne throws about 150 new cards to my "review due" pile per day. As time goes on without new cards added, that number will slowly go down. EVENTUALLY, it'll be below 100 per day, at which point my 100-per-day will start shrinking the review-due pile again. Eventually, there'll be nothing left in the review-due pile and new cards will finally start getting added again, but still at only 100 a day. When new cards are added, the new-cards-to-review-per-day will go back up, but the system will converge towards equilibrium.

----- IMPROVING MY JAPANESE

Switching to a 100-card-a-day schedule will clear up an extra hour or two a day. There's two things I can do with that time. For one thing, I can study Japanese in other ways like watching funny animes or playing games I enjoy. This sounds kind of pathetic and just illustrates the silliness I was in before, but: I've been wanting to play through FFIV and FFV on GBA in Japanese, but I've been putting it off because "my SRS won't accomodate that many new sentences right now". I've been putting off USING Japanese so that I could STUDY Japanese! What a silly thing to do! So, I'll just go ahead and play those games I wanna play, and not mine them.

I can also use that time improving myself overall. An extra hour a day socializing, or reading books, or working out, or anything else, makes a big difference. Part of being a successful communicator is being an interesting person to communicate with. Having word-perfect Japanese would be pretty pointless if I went to Japan and started talking to people there about SRS's. Conversely, skilled communicators can have a blast in a foreign culture with only the rudiments of the language, and be the life of the party.

Part of being fluent is being confident. In a certain sense, assuming you have some very basics down, you're fluent when you declare yourself fluent. I'm certainly fluent in English, but I'm far from knowing every English word, much less have I studied each English word in context. Maybe I will use my upcoming (Wednsday!) trip to Japan to work on this. If, by the end of the trip, I can go to a bar/club environment and just start chatting and having fun with strangers, I will declare myself fluent. As someone else, with 30k cards in their SRS, pointed out, you can study forever and ever and you'll never learn all the words.

The great sensei, Khatzumoto himself, says: to become fluent in Japanese, you have to think of yourself as a fluent person in Japanese.

----
Another benefit of switching to a flat card rate: during my Japan trip, I'm not gonna be doing SRS reviews. When I get back, I'll probably have around 5000 cards scheduled for review. No way am I gonna wanna devote a whole week to clearing that away!!

Good for you, man! Rock on. I totally get what you mean about that general "I can't do something in Japanese because I don't have the time/will to STUDY right now." I've managed to kick that to curb just recently, and suddenly I'm enjoying myself more and learning more than ever.

Have a great time in Japan.

Awesome post!

I was probably going to post something like this soon, because I noticed too many people are taking this study thing way to seriously, and it's actually impeding them!

But good for you. You illustrated the point very well and I'm glad to see another with the same mentality I've taken.

Enjoy your trip to Japan! You'll have a blast!

For what it's worth, the SRS I use fundamentally operates on this approach: at a given score a card will not be available for review (except for force-review) until it hasn't been reviewed for some number of days, but cards don't "expire"--they simply become available for review again.

~J

i get about 30-40 cards a day for review so far using the basic RTKrev app here. Im sitting at 486 kanji.

How much will this rise to by the time i hit the 1000's or 2k?

Meh, it's about the same, because the old ones are scheduled at longer intervals at the same rate as the new ones are added. At least, that's how it's been with me.

liosama Wrote:i get about 30-40 cards a day for review so far using the basic RTKrev app here. Im sitting at 486 kanji.

How much will this rise to by the time i hit the 1000's or 2k?

Much of it depends on how quickly you go and how high a pass rate you maintain. Since I'm pretty sure the scheduler rounds off the timing randomization for box 2, if you add 100 cards in a day, in three days you're going to have 100 cards plus whatever else you had further on expiring on you. If, say, you added precisely one card per day and never failed any of them, you'd weight much more heavily towards the longer-review-period sections, and have a correspondingly small amount of expirations per day.

~J

I recently finished RTK, finishing quite quick at about 50 kanji a day. Initially I had about 150 to review each day, but now it is down to about 120.

Do some people here really have 30k sentences in their SRS?

Whoa!

I don't know about 30k sentences, but if I start applying SRS techniques to other subjects, I'd imagine that I could end up with 30k SRS items over a pretty small number of years, particularly if I'm able to draw on the work of others in some subjects.

~J

"This sounds kind of pathetic and just illustrates the silliness I was in before, but: I've been wanting to play through FFIV and FFV on GBA in Japanese, but I've been putting it off because "my SRS won't accomodate that many new sentences right now". "

So I'm not the only one

I'm still reading things where I want to add every new word, which is fine but you can't possibly do that for *everything* you read.
Same with games, I got a huge number of useful words out of semi-dating-sim (... it was more just a 'play through half a year of high school and maybe get a girlfriend if you're lucky during that time - game)... But I'm playing Tales of the Abyss now and... I leave my DS dictionary upstairs most of the time (play downstairs ). Because I mean... Hey, I want to play that game! I spend enough time studying and sometimes actually enjoying is fine too...

It's part of the reason why I'm even learning this language... If you get rid of all the fun things... what's left?

If I come across some very interesting words/expressions though... I do write those down and look them up later

And I suppose, when you're playing/reading/watching something because you *want to * play/read/watch it.. you'll be more motivated to actually try to understand it... If that makes sense. (Yes, I've been reading things 'just because it's in Japanese'... but that's another story I suppose).

Anyway, good luck

Well considering that I already suck at making conversation in English (my native language) the idea that I'm going to be able to make casual conversation in Japanese isn't very likely. That's why I like to focus on listening, reading and writing; because speaking is a skill that depends greatly upon your personality.

(not practicing speaking at all will only worsen that, tbh)

Why bump a thread which is almost a year old?

"because speaking is a skill that depends greatly upon your personality."
That depends. If by speaking you mean for example convincing /arguing with one or a number of people about soemthing then the outcome of it might depend on your personality. But if you mean speaking in a daily funcionality, ex. asking sy about sg, or chatting about general topics, then you only need 2 things: common interest, and fluency. I think a totally introvert guy can also be very fluent, without any extra effort. For me, I just think about everything in german / english if I want to practice my speaking. Of course this is not too efficient, since nobody will correct you if you make mistakes, but I think this can be compensated with listening to a fairly good amount of media, and checking out things you would like to "say" (think) but unsure of the actual word usage.

Raschaverak Wrote:"because speaking is a skill that depends greatly upon your personality."
That depends. If by speaking you mean for example convincing /arguing with one or a number of people about soemthing then the outcome of it might depend on your personality......

I can think about things in both English and Japanese at a fast pace, I just can't carry that over into conversation (majorly introverted). The gap between thinking and speaking is pretty large in my opinion. That being said, it also depends on the personality of the person I'm speaking with; perhaps if it's a topic I'm extremely interested in, the conversation might flow more easily. That's why I can't really 'practice' speaking to a great extent, because it's a personality problem more than a fluency problem. In other words, day to day conversation isn't difficult to understand or participate in, it's just difficult if you're an introvert.

Yes, I'm aware this thread is nearly 2 years old, but I could barely see the point in making a whole new thread.

BTW: I'm also changing the way I SRS thanks to this thread, I've been bogged down with 2, 700 reviews recently which I've been having a hard time clearing.

Tobberoth Wrote:Why bump a thread which is almost a year old?

"Because we're worth it too!"