It was a lot of cards but the results really showed. I had tons of hypos, cases(facts/holdings), emanuel outlines facts, black letter law, important points made in class, etc.

The best part about using ANKI is that it stays with you. While most of the other students are already rapidly forgetting things as the next semester roles on, the stuff stays strong with me. While I’ve stopped using the deck from the first semester (due to lack of time and using the new deck), I may come back to it when the bar exam comes around. Anyway, good luck!

QUESTION
Al fondo de la obra se puede ver el monte Fuji, cuyo pico está cubierto por la nieve.

ANSWER
fondo = m. Parte inferior de una cosa.
-inferior: Que está debajo de otra cosa o más bajo que ella.

pico = Parte puntiaguda que sobresale de algunas cosas.

Sometimes they get bigger, with more info etc, but simply giving the definitions is enough. At times, I re-write the sentence after an explanation and put the easier to understand sentence in the answer field.

But, 2600 cards for two courses? That is just crazy, I only did about 200 for my 1 law subject. AdShap, you have motivated me to write even more cards for my law courses this semester!

I’m an engineering student as well and I’ve been using Anki to learn Japanese. I’ve also been thinking about how I can use an SRS with course work. Please let us know how it goes.

Thanks for posting the SRS sample; that answered all of my questions. I had thought about doing something similar with my physics/engineering classes (big word problems with short qualitative answers as the answer), but never tried it because I thought it’d be too cumbersome to work. Your experience certainly shows otherwise! It’s motivated me to start putting together an Anki deck for the upper division quantum physics class I’m taking this quarter. I’ll let you all know how it goes!

Also, I know that AJATT has been attacked because of the crowd that thinks his method is about getting 10,000 sentences in their SRS and then reviewing them every day over and over again and then becoming fluent and who think that a short-cut is to download a pre-compiled list of sentences and get to work on them. They took what Khatz was saying totally out of context when they set out to do this. I doubt that any of the success had 10,000 sentences in their SRS at anyone time, because that would be a monster to review, but it’s probably true that at least some of them had 10,000 sentences or so grace their SRS over the course of their learning.

Again, too, Khatzumoto has spoken on the topic of _memorizing_ sentences, and Khatz is not talking about memorizing sentences so that you can recite them later; the purpose of the SRS is to artifically increase your input of sentence structures that seem interesting to you in a way, and which you had just come to understand, so that you can get a quicker handle on the sentence’s grammatical/phrase structure and words/kanji.

It might also help to write out the sentences as you review them, or at least their kanji, so that you can get more used to writing kanji.

I’m not sure how close to the mark this will be (my major is *shudder* physics ), but your post reminded me of this article:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_3_defense_memorization.html

Long story short, he suggests that memorizing poetry and prose (something an SRS is pretty well suited to) is a great way to improve one’s command of the language. I myself have been using Mnemosyne to learn some of Shakespeare’s sonnets recently, and it’s actually kind of fun. I don’t know how much this would relate to your major (depending on your focus: creative writing? Lit crit? Journalism?), but it seems to be one way an SRS might help. In fact, it would pretty much parallel the AJATT method: immerse yourself in good (if dated) English, and your English writing will improve (or become dated).

Also, insofar as some English classes involve remembering grammar terms (gerund, participle, infinitive, etc.) or names and birthdates of important authors, another use for an SRS becomes apparent.

The objective of SRS Khatz method is not to memorize all sentences, the objetive is to be forced to read japanese all day, a lot of sentences with japanese that is easy for you because you studied it before. And, when you’re picking sentences, you’re using japanese, you add 10.000 sentences but in this process you need do read more than 100.000 to collect sentences for SRS.

And, SRS is not all, it’s a tool, a very efficient tool, but it’s not all. You can’t learn japanese or any language using SRS only.

I am assuming you attend law school too?

And, what’s more, is you can kill two birds with one stone if you think you have the time. For example:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets

And, when you have that pressure to learn something for school hanging over you, it gives you that motivational shove you might need. Plus, it kind of forces you to understand the information. And, I think Khatzumoto has mentioned before that in order to learn how to do adult things, like study for college exams, in Japanese, you have to do just that, in Japanese. If I can find a Japanese help file for Dreamweaver CS4 I’ll be making thorough use of it. x)

I have long been interested in started an SRS for a European language, but I am always tripped up by how to enter the questions and still keep it monolingual.
In Japanese I did the normal thing and entered the reading for the sentences in kana like a children’s video game in the answer field, and included definitions for words I thought I might forget.
But if the language was Spanish, I wouldn’t know what to do. I have tried putting the sentences translated into Japanese in the answer field, but it’s really not what I want.
Have you been able to keep your Spanish SRS monolingual, and if so how did you manage it?

It’s a bit (a lot) like how google’s good machine translators work (e.g. the Arabic one). However people are better at picking up on small things and making tiny adjustments to make things sound better overall than computers.

Example: last semester I was really busy and didn’t have time to prepare myself for my Spanish exams. But I already entered quite some stuff from the textbooks into Anki and learned that along the other sentences I already had. At the day of the test everyone was stressed out and cramming until the last minute… I had one of the highest scores without even trying! The part you couldn’t prepare for was the part I was the best at, simply because I knew how to write a letter (while I never had written one in Spanish). This shows how strong an SRS really is.

I’ve been thinking a lot about SRS and school lately, though. I have a very young son, but in a few years (well, five, but I like to plan ahead!) he’ll be facing the rigors of the Chinese school system, which places very, very high premiums on memorization. Using SRS to help him succeed is the clear choice, but getting a 5-year old to do it seems like an uphill battle. It will be interesting to see in him how it works.