So I have three anki decks outside of my RtK deck and lately I haven't been doing any reviews at all, which has let to my RtK deck ballooning out to a terrible 1455 outstanding reviews and my other decks all hovering between 100-200 cards. Luckily, all the decks beside the RtK deck are primarily recognition and thus can be reviewed in a timely fashion, but I'm not really sure what the best way to go about reviewing is because of the way I'm aggregating new material.

Basically, I've gotten kind of bored of mining my grammar dictionaries for sentences and then reviewing those, because memorizing sentences seems like a chore without a clear end in sight. Meanwhile, I read a nominal amount of Japanese everyday, (bits and pieces of an old novel that might be considered young fiction or teenage) and a newspaper for elementary school students. From these sources I'm picking up a lot of interesting vocab that I'd like to put into anki and learn, but I want to slim my backlog down to 2 decks and most and I'm not really sure what I should do at this point.

The three decks I need to somehow reconcile are the following: one deck consisting of some work I did starting (and stopping) RtK2 along with a few random vocabulary items, a second deck for a project I started (and stopped) based on Trinity and homonym groups to learn kanji with the same readings all at once, and a third deck full of sentences mined from Makino and Tsutsui's excellent grammar dictionaries.

I sort of dread mixing these up because there's a lot of really useless vocabulary in the RtK2 deck and I really liked the approach to Trinity I was working on, but I just couldn't stick with it because while it was useful and I was learning readings and it seemed to be a logical way to study them, I was overcome by boredom. I hesitate to mix this deck up with the others because it too has a lot of odd vocabulary written down specifically to learn readings that I might not otherwise see very often. I also feel like it deserves its own time because at one point it was a valid approach. Meanwhile, my ability to produce complex grammar at will remains weak, so I feel like I need a grammar deck as well.

The real problem is that all the new vocabulary that I'm writing down while I'm reading isn't going anywhere and I really should be putting it into an SRS and working on it because a lot of it is either useful or neat enough that I don't think I'll get bored.

Any suggestions on what I should do? Which decks should I toss and what should I do with the rest? Too many decks makes studying overwhelming rather than fun, but I don't know what to do.

I think you've answered your own question: delete the stuff that is boring you to death. If it's important, you'll encounter the material again, and in a fashion where you deem it necessary to learn, thus won't find it boring. Unless you're cramming for an exam, you don't need it.

If your 1500 reviews are just recognition, spend a few days just concentrating on getting caught up with those. It should't take long, but if you find yourself overcome with boredom going over these sentences, start chucking them out. It will make your review time shorter and keep you interested in the material.

And definitely stick to using one deck. Besides studying multiple subjects/languages simultaneously, there is no reason to keep your Japanese decks separate.

Just my couple yen.

Based on what you're saying, what you're doing now isn't working, because you're not keeping up. So trying to catch up with your 3 decks + RTK doesn't sound like a viable option.

If it were me, I would go through all 3 decks, remove all of the deadwood, combine them all into one deck, and just try to get caught up for the next 3-4 weeks or so, and not worry about learning anything new for that time. I had to spend the last month or so doing a lot of reviews to get caught up (I let it get to ~550-600 cards in the pile a few times due to work), so it's possible.

For the finer points, I would get in touch with Damien/Resolve and find out if there's a way to combine Anki decks without losing card progress. That would be the ideal solution. (But steel yourself for the probability that it's not possible.)

For RTK, try to do 100 a day for the next 2-3 weeks until you catch up. You did it before, you can do it again. Remember why you're doing all of this in the first place, and find that motivation. (Since you're in Japan, you can probably find motivation by just opening the door. )

If you're having trouble getting into the project, the subject matter of the sentences could also be part of the problem. For sentence sources, some people can tolerate dull sentences, others need more stimulation. "Try to find more interesting sentences" is kind of useless advice without any guide, but maybe someone here has some suggestions for sentence sources that you can use that are more interesting than grammar books. Or at least grammar books that don't suck the joy out of living.

"Basically, I've gotten kind of bored of mining my grammar dictionaries for sentences" and "The real problem is that all the new vocabulary that I'm writing down while I'm reading isn't going anywhere and I really should be putting it into an SRS and working on it because a lot of it is either useful or neat enough that I don't think I'll get bored" strike me.

I'd say, don't let yourself get bogged down in the could-have-beens. It seems like you're holding on to a lot of stuff that could have been nice, or might be nice later. I'd either completely scrap it, or dump it completely on the backburner and forget it about entirely for the present. Just focus on what's enjoyable.

I actually found myself in essentially the same situations for quite awhile. I'd been doing both recognition and production cards for a long time, but found the production cards took an incredibly long time and I just absolutely hated doing them, to the point where I actively dreaded it. That kept me from putting new entries into my SRS. That, in turn, lead to a backlog of sentences 'waiting' to go into an SRS (I kept the SRS up though). That lead to me not wanting to do much in Japanese, since I'd just end up adding to my backlog.

Obviously, bad mindset to be in. While I feel like I'll miss the skilled production I was developing later, I decided to ditch all of my production cards. Completely stopped them. Things are quite a lot better now. I'm doing more, so I'm encountering more, and I'm learning more. And it's more fun. In the end, the production has little bearing on my ability to intake Japanese, which is the most important for me right now. There's all the time in the world to focus on what kanji make up what word after I'm already fully competent with the language. Anything that cuts down so much on your quantity of exposure to the language should be thrown away.

rich_f Wrote:For the finer points, I would get in touch with Damien/Resolve and find out if there's a way to combine Anki decks without losing card progress. That would be the ideal solution. (But steel yourself for the probability that it's not possible.)

You keep your card progress when you import a deck.

QuackingShoe Wrote:I actually found myself in essentially the same situations for quite awhile. I'd been doing both recognition and production cards for a long time, but found the production cards took an incredibly long time and I just absolutely hated doing them, to the point where I actively dreaded it.

If his question wasn't already sufficiently answered I would't hijack the thread

Did you find gapfills unhelpful? Have you tried them? Or after so many passive reviews do the words start to stick? I'm pretty new to using an SRS, so I'm still experimenting with which way is the most efficent while still being able to recall and retain vocabulary.

Quote:There's all the time in the world to focus on what kanji make up what word

More than that, I find it completely unnecessary in the first place. Why go through Heisig, remember the shapes, and learn how to write each character only to double your work and practice writing what you are already (should be) reviewing here? I noticed if I see a word enough times, I can recall the kanji easily enough because of doing Heisig.

I don't know, man. I did a mistake close to yours. Sometime ago, I added a bunch of sentences that weren't that great and it was boring as hell to crawl trought them. Some I deleted, but mostly, I sucked it up. As you review, they won't show up as much anymore and you'll be able to focus on fun material.

I'd love to dismiss the SRS too, but it has been very effective in my experience, so I won't be doing it soon.

I haven't tried gapfills. I can understand why people would use them, but it's just not something I want to do. It's too much like the drilling I hate in textbooks. And I don't actually think it'd be that beneficial, at least for me.. it's definitely not something I'd do now, as I already know all the extra effort to make them and then the extra time to do them would hurt.

About the word make-up, it depends, you know? It's true it's really not necessary to even know them if all you want to do is read or write on a computer, but I feel that there's merit in actually being able to write a word. And I've had a lot of experiences of seeing words constantly and not learning how to write them - it was actually only moderately recently that I SRSed and learned how to write 勉強. It's a word I was so familiar with from before I even knew kanji that I'd never actually learned to write it.

But, I'm putting a little extra effort into thinking about the word construction when I review recognitions. I'm hoping that this might be enough on it's own. But if not... well, priorities. I'll learn to spell later.

Quote:..as I already know all the extra effort to make them..

This is one reason that prevented me from making them before. But wrightak came up with a very efficient method of making gapfills, which I've been giving a try.

Quote:...extra time to do them would hurt.

That's what I'm debating with myself =). Is it worth spending a bit more time on a word to really drill it into your head, or would your time be better off being spent studying more words, but not know them as well? The world may never know!

Right now I'm only doing gapfills with words that I really "like", or I think I would be likely to use in a future conversation.

Quote:But, I'm putting a little extra effort into thinking about the word construction when I review recognitions. I'm hoping that this might be enough on it's own.

It is for me, to an extent. As long as I can clearly relate the kanji compounds to the kanji I've studied in Heisig, enough repeitions will let me be able to write that word. The only downside is that writing the word isn't instantaneous; it takes a little time to dig down into my memory and pull out the correct kanji. However, a little effort concentrating on just writing the word would definitely increase the speed at which you could write them.

I moved SRS completely. I just felt like Anki wasn't fulfilling something.

I moved to jMemorize, I still don't know what that "something" is, but I know jMemorize has satisfied it. Now if only I could import my anki deck