thank you for sharing your knowledge and views with everyone, it´s really encouraging

i found a pretty usefull SRS app for the iPhone/iPodTouch, which i´d like to recommend to everbody:
It´s called “Karatasi” and should be available in german and english (i got it from the UK-iTunes store).

It´s a simple Flashcard app, that uses the Leitner Algorithm and lets you create your own decks etc..
What i really like about it is the fact that it lets you format the cards by editing the html code

check it out ^^

greetings from germany

~Linda

keep the fun alive…

-sm

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/output/motivatora884a0c715b1ba9db3b48f06b918e817d45cf0c3.jpg

Been reading raw manga and watching tons of raw anime thanks to you. I wont add more because you no understand English.

I feel the same way as you. I’ve already broken the 10k sentence mark and 3000 kanji mark, and I find that I usually have about 300-400 sentences a day to review. If I took a break for a few days, it would go up to 700-800. I also want to learn every new word I don’t know.

I also have a separate SRS for law school which I get up to about 4-5k cards a semester. In addition to the Japanese, I do about 200 reps a day for that SRS.

I remember reading your success news story article, and I think you might be stuck at the same phase as me which makes you feel like you are held captive by the SRS. It’s going from the fluent phase to the native level japanese phase that I feel the SRS is vital.

I’ve been studying Japanese history lately and any Japanese person knows what 旧石器時代、縄文時代、古墳、卑弥呼、 are but I was clueless on it. I can read a newspaper perfectly fine, but encountered tons of words I didn’t know in the field of history (as well as different sciences). I was shocked to find out I didn’t know what 鰭 (ひれ） was the other day, when it’s such a common word.

I want the full knowledge level of a Japanese person my age, and that requires an SRS. (http://www.nhk.or.jp/kokokoza/library/index.html <– This site suggested by Khatz has been amazing for accomplishing this goal)

What I usually do to keep myself from being overwhelmed by 300-400 sentences a day, is do only reviews for about a week with no new inputs. In the mean time, every time I find words I don’t know, I highlight them/copy them (depending on what source I’m using). After not entering for a week, my sentence reviews usually come to about 225-250 a day. Once that happens I take all the words that I’ve been building up from reading materials, start entering them in as sentences for a few days, until my reviews get back up to 300-400, then repeat the process. It keeps everything fresh.

And last, I consider SRS like an invaluable game. Remember why you are using it. Why give up the most valuable weapon available to you. I think any dragging down that a large SRS brings, is immediately cancelled out by the feeling when you see words/sentences in the sources you are reading/watching/hearing. Just because you are a pro baseball player, who loves the sport, doesn’t mean you enjoy practicing 1000 swings a day. (You love the results which makes the practice worthwhile)

Regardless of what many other people are saying, I think giving up the SRS would be giving up your most valuable asset. Instead of worrying about being enslaved by it, learn to love it. Learn to consider it your ally. Don’t let it drag you down, let it be by your side.

And Good Luck!

Here are a couple of my suggestions:

Let the SRS go. Chuck it for awhile and keep reading. If you keep reading, the words you need to know will keep appearing. Each time you’ll be seeing them in new context and their meanings will be even clearer than if you repeated the same sentence 5-10 times in an SRS. I did this and I’ve never regretted it. Khatz might not agree to get rid of the SRS completely, but even he states above that constant exposure to new interesting material is better than SRSing. So if you keep reading and listening then you really can’t go wrong. My advice is to give it a try. The SRS will always be there if you change your mind.

A different approach that you might consider is rather than throwing away the SRS entirely, throw away the deck that is bogging you down. Start from scratch again. That might sound crazy but I think it would be very liberating and motivational. Remember how pumped you were when you finished RTK and started putting sentences in for the first time?

Are you putting in just words, or sentences? Cause’ if it’s just words, no wonder you have a ton of reps.

Everyday I have about 300 reviews. I add new words at a quick pace. But the problem is if I don’t do my SRS reps for a while(even 9 hours or so) or say only do a 100 one day, I know they are just adding and adding and will be waiting for me. So I try to keep doing them as they come….Opening up my SRS and see 400-500 due is not a motivating or fun sight. I guess maybe my solution is less new words right…. but..

The problem is, when I am immersing myself, reading, watching tv, etc. and I see a word I dont know, I want that word to be in my SRS NOW!! I mean I want to know everyword eventually right? It’s a real struggle to read a book and NOT stop when I see a word I don’t know. Like I’m scared of NOT knowing that word. Recently I’ve gotten better but still. I’m stuck in self imposed knowledge slavery.

I know Katz somewhere I read you were the kind of person that wanted to know EVERYTHING. I’m like that myself.

How do you guys keep your SRS reps down and read for enjoyment rather then hunting for new words??

I agree about the immersion being more important than the SRS. I love my SRS- but I see it mainly as something that supports the “real Japanese” side of things. One use for it that is often overlooked is as a scheduling mechanism. For instance you can read something in Japanese, look up and learn all the words you don’t know in it, and then just throw a reference (whether a url, or a page number in a printed book, or something else) to it into the SRS. Then, when that card comes up you go back and reread it. Best used, in my experience, with fairly short passages. Otherwise it can be a bit hard to face the cards.

I’ve not really done much sentence mining- I find it hard to relate to sentences on their own. Instead I’ve just read certain things so many times that I practically have them memorized- in some cases I do have parts of them memorized. I think this serves much the same purpose as sentence mining, and I find it a lot less tedious. The use of the SRS as a scheduler ensures that you return to them at reasonable intervals.

Also, chopping up media can be really useful, and can be used in conjunction with SRS as scheduler. I have some files I’ve made by chopping all the uninteresting bits out of dramas and just concatenating interesting monologues and dialogs into one file (with appropriate fade-in/out and other editing to keep the transitions from being to painfully abrupt). I haven’t actually used the SRS to schedule viewings of these, but it might not be a bad idea.

Something I am just starting to do is collect very short audio clips for “shadowing”. They have a beat of silence on each side so you can catch the rhythm, and then just shadow the clip for 20 or so repetitions- since the clips are very short this only takes a few minutes. One thing about this is that you _really_ wind up burning the usage into your head. The ostensible point is to improve your accent, but if you always make some characteristic mistake doing this with a few correct sentences involving the point in question is as good a way as I’ve found to cure that.

I hadn’t really been paying attention, so I only recently noticed you started this site in “late 2006″.

That’s about the time I started reverse engineering vidja games, and now I consider myself one hell of a CS student.

Would have been really cool to study Japanese over that period of time. Not sure why the idea didn’t occur to me considering I was already watching Japanese things and listening to Japanese music over their English counterparts shortly after…

Anyway, Feed Me Japanese looks REALLY cool. I have to wonder how long it took to get together the people it must have taken to plan that sort of thing.

えーと…みんな！知り合いの個人開発的なサイトがあるなら、僕に教えてください！
（スパムボットか、笑）

@jack
complex calculations are all done on graphics calculators because writing it out by hand is a waste of the students time. The student still needs to remember and understand the equation itself.
As far as deleting SRS items, its not really for when you “know the item”, because we know that human memory is quite failable. You still need your SRS to “remind” you even if you dont see the card for years at a time. Deletion of annoying SRS items that you keep forgetting or are uninterested in was more the point. I tend to encounter this alot with my sentences (about 1 in 4 cards). I would never delete a card because I knew it too well, I would simply give it a 5 and move on.

> On deleting items: It takes a long time to get from adding an item to “I know this so well I don’t need to study it anymore.” You wouldn’t add a fact like “Rising water vapor condenses and forms clouds” to your SRS – you know this fact too well to need to study it ever again. It wasn’t that way when you first learned it though.

I’m sure that the deletion doesn’t apply to those items that you know well, at least, not exclusively. I’m pretty sure Khatz is talking about duds. Those sentences that just don’t set right with you. For those, you just delete those out as soon as you can, or never let them in.