While it pains me a bit, I think part of the challenge will be no longer including Anki at the start of my posts! At least until I can figure some more things out. Instead, here’s a bit about a book I just started reading.
I stopped reading ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖 volume 3 almost a year ago due to being a bit uninterested. It’s quite possible it’s because I was tired of reading about books and bookstores and just wanted a different mood. So I’m tentatively picking this one back up again! So far it’s not too bad! I have a hunch the rest of the series won’t be my cup of tea still, but the mood has carried me here currently.
I have, for a long time, been someone who enjoys SRS. It hasn’t always been Anki either! I used the old smart.fm website, Memrise, Supermemo, JPDB. I’ve used some crappy Anki knock-offs on my phone without knowing any better. My super early days had me making me own paper flashcards! Basically, I’ve always sought out some sort of flashcard system while learning Japanese. Anki and JPDB have been the two I’ve stuck with the most.
I think it’s safe to say it’s not my SRS streak that continues to drive my SRS usage at this point, but my identity as “Someone who enjoys spaced repetition in order to solidify information”. I’d like to shoutout Atomic Habits for teaching me how to re-evaluate my goals and identity so I can figure out what I really want to be focusing on! It’s so wild to me how many little things I can accidentally form an identity around.
One thing that “helped” solidify this identity was having other people wonder why I still SRS’d vocabulary after passing the N1. Every time I would give my answers, I felt like I was getting deeper and deeper into the “I love SRS, and I still find value in it” identity. They’d ask me why I wouldn’t just learn naturally, because I read so much anyway. I’d argue that I could do both. And I had been! I had plenty of time to do both, so it was not really a big deal for me. I did genuinely still feel the gains, however small they may have been. I also figured that so many people were only doing SRS because they felt like they had to, whereas I've always enjoyed doing it. So there just seemed to be a fundamental difference in how we approached it.
Maybe it’s because I’m at over 200 books now, but the more I read the more I realize I’m learning words quicker than usual. I may make a card for a word I see at the start of the book, but by the end of the book I’ve already got the word memorized without having repped it in Anki yet! So when I do see it in Anki, it’s almost annoying seeing it. I usually always want to have a vague recollection of seeing and looking up the word prior, because I’m a firm believer in using SRS to solidify knowledge, not learn entirely new things, but it’s different when I straight up know it already. The more that happens, the more I realize I’m wasting my time just a bit.
So, this brings me to wanting to challenge that identity. Do I still need to SRS vocabulary as much as I’m still currently doing? If I was completely alone, no outside influence, would I still want to continue to mine new cards and review them?
As of right now, that answer is no. I love how I have my cards set up! I love the content in them! I love being reminded of words I’ve learned during immersion, and specifically those pieces of immersion. I love having Anki as part of my daily routine. Waking up and doing cards is almost easier than everything else I do in a day.
But I can accomplish that last one by looking through my notes in Obsidian. I can still look up words while immersing to learn them, and the natural repetition will help remind me of what something is instead of Anki. In fact, before I even solidified my plan to challenge my SRS identity, I was naturally wanting to mine less from Slayers. I binged the series this month, and was coming across the same “new” vocabulary often enough that I just didn’t feel like mining at all. And in the process of that binge, I was seeing words that I just got to as a new card in Anki, which then made them easier in Anki. So it all felt a little extra.
Anki, and SRS in general, was important for me to solidify new words so I could read more and more books and video games. Each new word brought me closer to an easier time immersing. That’s part of what drove my challenge to hit 10,000 mined Anki cards. It would have been proof of my immersion and part of the journey to unlock more and more immersion material.
But the thing is, 10,000 mined cards was a goal that younger Manda had. I only had a fraction of my current knowledge the first time I seriously strove for 10k cards. I think there was a small part of me that wanted to treat this goal like the JLPT. Past me couldn’t do it, but current me can, see? Like weirdly trying to help out a version of me that doesn’t exist. I need to live for the me that’s here, not the ghost of a person I can’t even relate to anymore.
So that will probably stay on my spreadsheet for now and just become a ghost itself. One day I may redo my spreadsheet and transfer all the relevant data over, but for now it’ll just sit there no longer being a burden on my soul.
I haven’t mined a card since the start of the month, I believe. In fact, to get all the new cards out of my system, I went through my entire backlog. It was several hundred cards! I think that was also a sign. I was mining things I was not really seeing too often, or things I was seeing often, and then only doing a few new cards a day. I wasn’t even feeling the need to keep up a steadier pace with the new cards. They could have just as easily not been made.
I think that realization felt the worst. Like, nothing would have changed. I’d still be able to read the same way without making those cards. They’re just mementos now. Things I like to look at, but not things I need to be interacting with frequently. So yeah, this realization just made Obsidian seem more important to me. If I want to relive one of the books I’ve read, I just go back to the note page. And I can always add to it if I continue to have more thoughts on them.
So yes, I have not really missed mining cards at all. I have a cool sentence bank full of all the media I could ever want to make cards from, and now I don’t even want to make those cards! At least not the sentence cards for learning vocabulary like I used to.
I still think Anki has a place in my life. There are production cards I want to start getting into to make some of my passive vocabulary become a bit more active. I still want to learn how to write all the kanji. So those pre-made decks I’ve mentioned previously will be my go-to after my huge Final Fantasy XIV binge in July. The goal will be to try to figure out how to make my own cards though, which I’ve already begun to dabble with a bit.
I can still use my Sentence Bank to create writing cards! I can also use it to make cloze cards. The possibilities are kind of endless, I just need to make sure I’m checking in with myself and doing what I actually want to be doing. I think the most important thing for me going forward with Anki though, is that I no longer need it to learn new words.
That conclusion was very important for me to come up with on my own, too. I said above how I already had people telling me to stop, or wondering why I was still going. The thing is, I’m stubborn as hell. If it’s not my idea, then it’s not an idea I want to do, if it relates to my own life. But hey, I always do the things that feel necessary and helpful at the time. That’s all I can really ask of myself.
So I’m currently doing a ton of custom reviews in Anki to try to get my review count lower for July, since I’ll be in FFXIV mode. I also just want my daily review count to get lower, faster, in general. I did a few things to make this easier.
First thing’s first, I started suspending or completely resetting any card outside of my mining deck that I failed. This was great for awhile, but then I realized I just wanted to re-do my entire kanji writing cards anyway. I’d rather do cards I make on my own, and then use the pre-made stuff to fill in any gaps. Ideally, I’d like to continue to make cards in the future to fill in those gaps myself. This lessened the amount of cards I had to do immensely.
Secondly, I finally downloaded the Pass/Fail addon again to give it another shot. I first tried out the two button system when I was fresh out of JPDB last year. I think I’ve been a bit too attached to the multiple buttons grading system because for awhile I enjoyed the different feel of all of them. I sometimes even wished that Anki had 5 buttons just like JPDB, to give more nuance to the failed cards. I have now reached a zen-mode where I only care if I got something right or wrong, not about the details of how right or how wrong I was. This has sped up my reviews way more than I thought it would.
Thirdly, I decided to not do any new cards until August. I’d like to focus on production and kanji cards SoonTM but not immediately. I want a really low daily review count before I make that a reality. When I start doing new non-vocab cards again, I’d like to also make sure I keep a more steady pace. I tend to get into “all or nothing” moods where I want to do 1000 cards one day and then nothing but reviews for awhile, but that’s something I’d like to challenge too. As things in my life change, I want to make sure I’ve got a more manageable daily workload in Anki. Then again, I can always reset or just not do reviews until I have the time. As long as I’m in control of my SRS, I think I’ll be okay no matter what happens.
I guess one fourth thing I’ve done is reevaluate what can be an Obsidian thing vs what can be done in Anki. I had an FFXIV terms deck I was making in Anki that I decided I’d rather just have as notes in Obsidian. These are things I’d really just need to cross-reference when relevant, and not necessarily things I needed to memorize in advance. Sometimes when reading I’ll still want to mine a sentence, but instead of putting it into Anki, I just save it in my Obsidian note page. This way if I ever want to go back and learn the word properly, I can. But it’s mostly just a way to fix the urge more than anything. That urge has been happening less and less though.
Checking in with myself and my goals has been really essential to my progress the past few years. It’s gotten a lot easier lately too! If I could give one piece of advice to anyone, it would definitely just be to make sure whatever you’re doing is actually helping you. Doing things out of habit is easy to continue doing, especially if they don’t feel like a burden. Doing things that you feel like you need to be doing, but you don’t really like, is also something you could reevaluate. I firmly believe there’s a way forward for everyone that’s unique to them.
I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on SRS as they navigate their own language learning journey! I know there have been tons of people who swear by it, and others who never touched it at all and still learned just fine. I find those stories to be super interesting.
Next time we meet, I’ll be giving a June round-up and talking about my July goals. I’ll also probably be deep in FFXIV by then!
See you then!
It’s really important to have the right tools for the job! I feel the same that using obsidian has helped me free up Anki from things that I was using it for imperfectly. Both are really powerful but they have their own places. I really liked how you described that SRS isn’t an all-or-nothing thing, although the idea of the streak can make it feel that way— it’s fine to take breaks and come back and reevaluate! We are always evolving!