read more, review less

The brain includes contextual/environmental information in memories. So, if you see the word 質問 in the kind of sentence you've seen before, while in your room, in anki, in your "flashcardin' mood," your odds are high - because that's how you're used to encountering it. If you see it in an off-the-wall sentence, or by itself, out in the middle of the street, on a sign, while thinking about groceries, your odds are a lot lower - because all of that's an unfamiliar environment as far as the word 質問 is concerned. That's just how memory works.

You'll also find yourself easily able to read, for example, some absurd fonts as long as they're being used in contexts you're otherwise completely familiar with. Works both ways.

So, yeah. Read more.

Last edited by QuackingShoe (2009 September 24, 1:42 am)

I think... you could also try putting in more sentences with that/those words into your SRS.  I can't remember where I saw this statistic cited, but I think you need to see any given word 20 times (in 20 different contexts?) before mastering it.  I'd say you could also increase your ability to read such words in out of context scenarios simply by having practiced more scenarios in the first place.

Short answer - getting picking those sentences!

To clarify: picking sentences for use in an SRS necessarily involves reading widely - therefore, it's not the SRS which is the problem (as that is how patterns of language are most efficiently internalized, almost by definition).  It's the exclusive use of the SRS that's not working - it works just fine, and you'll find it difficult without making some use of it.

From my experience, even though it's little, I found that if you encounter a word that you learned "in the wild" and didn't recognize or read it, your comprehension for that word will be boosted after you check it!
So more exposure to real contexts is the solution.

I totally agree with Nukemarine. Keep SRSing, but really put the majority of your effort into real-world reading/listening. The SRS isn't there to help you learn, it's there to help you remember what you learned. Learn it in the real world.

No method will give you better results than constant exposure to native media.

At the beginning this happened to me all the time and it began to disappear as I read more outside of the SRS.  I think there's a simple explanation to such a phenomenon - while SRSing you know that all the material there is familiar and that you shouldn't have a problem recognizing it.  But when you're reading sentences that you know have a good chance of being unfamiliar to you, those odds are taken into mind and even words you know can be seen as a possibly unfamiliar word.  I realized it was time to break out of the comfort of the SRS and read more than review, as someone posted above.

Edit: Quackingshoe pretty much beat me to it by a long run :B

Last edited by Nuriko (2009 September 25, 8:07 pm)

sup3rbon wrote:

After reading through all of these posts, I realized I'm going about this whole thing totally wrong, as I'm depending too much on the SRS.  I definitely need to start reading more rather than just going through lists and lists of sentences I don't really even care about.

Just to clarify for the side-debate of this thread, this is what I meant by "review less."

EDIT: best of luck on your journey, sup3rbon.

Last edited by mafried (2009 September 26, 2:49 am)

Nii87 wrote:

The only way to review less is to not add so many cards. But delaying reviews that are already due is not a very good thing in my opinion.

Or, you know, delete those sentences you don't care about.

~J