It dawned on me that I don't wanna waste my time in the university (or wherever) having to cram and forget all the stuff I learned just like that.

So I decided that I wanna remember the important parts of the knowledge that I receive years afterwards too, even if the price of that is that I have to spend 2 times more time on that information as compared to just cramming and forgetting it all. Afterall, learning is 100% useless if you can't remember and use that information afterwards. Gotta use time wisely, right?

Plus, the more you already know, the easier it is to learn new information, because the brain works with connections.

This brought me to a conclusion that I should try making a small number of the best anki cards that I can produce and review them. Of course, I have to learn how to use anki for making cards time-efficiently and effectively for that. But anyway that skill will come in the process of experimenting and making cards.

How about you?

Wrong. You will learn so many different things in the years to come, that you will reach the point where you are spending more time to decide what to keep, instead of learning or applying the knowledge. If you are deciding to look for everything that seems to be important and make flashcards out of the junks of knowledge.

Of course it is important that you spend enough time with the material you have to learn. Or material you want to learn on your own. But you can't look into the future. What is important right now, mustn't necessarily be important in 5 years, or 10. Experience your studies, listen to the Profs holding lectures, take notes, work with partners, and change your methods in the way you study from time to time.

If you really have to memorize something, for instance for a test, use Anki. You will not forget things you see, hear, or read so easily. Look at all the people who have studied before tools like Anki or Mnemosyne were inventend. Have they forgotten what they learned? Maybe some things, but not everything.

Trust the best tools that you have: your brain, your memory, and your senses. You are capable of way more then you think. And you don't need Anki to help you all the time.

I cannot agree on the opinion that 'at some point you stop using srs/anki' just for the reason you are so to speak fluent already. The following question comes up in my mind then: What's the definition of fluency? Even in your mother tongue you never stop learning new things, but as you are supposed to be surrounded by it all the time since you live in that country (in most cases), you keep hearing these words. Even if you are a student at university, I at least would feel like that I would lose all the progress and hard work I did with Anki and beyond it using all the skills I gained through it. On top of that, I would add even more words when I would be in Japan I hear often and I'm curious about their meanings! This means a constant srs-cycling.

I'm not talking about adding daily 20 new words just to sustain regularity and consistency when you already have a broad vocabulary of the most common 10k words or something like that, no! It's about 'keeping it going' at some low level (at least do the reviews, keep them low and add things you encounter while reading fun stuff etc.).

I guess I'm the type of learner which will never get rid of Anki. I will just keep it going and add and review; right now my reviews piled up again to 1110 cards as I was on vacation, but I will work through them and finish core6k hopefully in the next week. After that, I will just start reading my first novel more seriously, although I think a deeper understanding and revision of grammar would be useful. Concerning grammar, I do have also a srs deck, but at some point I have the feeling it is a bit useless, as I'm proficient in JLPT3 grammar points enough by now, I think :) I keep them though for revision.

Conclusion: jettyke, it's up to you and how you feel how much you progressed already in Japanese and how much you think anki would help you now more/boost your skills even more. try it out at least, I'd say :) Good luck!

I made like 1000 cards during lectures so far, haven't even reviewed them yet, and I realized that they are too messy, useless and difficult. So now I'm deleting and cleaning up cards for the time being.

It's definitely important to have the right stuff in your anki deck.

Nagareboshi Wrote:Wrong. You will learn so many different things in the years to come, that you will reach the point where you are spending more time to decide what to keep, instead of learning or applying the knowledge. If you are deciding to look for everything that seems to be important and make flashcards out of the junks of knowledge.

No I didn't mean that.
lol, I don't wanna learn junk.
Only stuff that's really important and interesting for me.

I also plan on adding stuff for tests at first, learn it, and then delete more and more as the time goes by, so that I have the most useful sets of cards that are possible by deleting and modifying.

All in all srs is just a tool, not a master, as Khatz said on his blog.
So the magic is not srsing everything but experimenting with srs, and all in all using the best tools for everything that you wanna learn.

It's definitely no use learning everything. And sometimes information becomes outdated and unimportant too.

http://calnewport.com/blog/
http://scotthyoung.com/blog/