Post-Tadoku SRSing has been off to a fantastic start! I’m not entirely sure when I’ll slow down completely, probably when the reviews start feeling less and less tolerable, but I’m having a great time. I still have to do more new cards today, but I’ll get to it shortly.
Looks like 6 days ago was my most outrageous day. As you can see by the red, my retention has definitely been dropping a bit but I’ve come to terms with that. I’m currently sitting at:
So all things considered, not too bad. I think I’ll start worrying if I dip too close to 70%.
Now, if I had seen these charts even a year and a half ago, I’d think I was on a one-way ticket to Burnoutville. Of course, I can’t do 100-200+ cards a day forever. Two weeks is about my limit. And then I go back to immersing more and more and more.
But I think I’ve finally come up with a workflow with SRS that feels manageable to me after all these years. Let’s take a look at the decks I’m working through.
The two on top are just chunked decks of “Top 30k All”, in 12-15k range and 15-20k range. Having a smaller deck with smaller number makes it easier for my brain to process. But essentially, it’s still just parts of the Top 30k All deck.
When I thought about which frequency decks would matter the most to me besides from the general All one, I realized I really only cared about Novels, Live action (love me some good j-dramas), and the News. From there, I like to learn words from media decks I’m actively consuming. In this case, I’m reading Ascendance of a Bookworm and Mushoku Tensei. I used to add decks for literally everything, but narrowing my focus has given me peace.
Decks are organized and good to go, so how do I pick new cards? Do I just learn in order? Definitely not! I FORQ!
When I browse each deck’s wordlist, I find words that I want to “Add to front of review queue”. We call this FORQing for short (and also because it’s fun). I have some criteria I go through when FORQing that has made learning a lot of new words per day much, much easier and faster for me.
First, I browse the word list to find words that I think I may actually know to some degree from reading. Some of these I know well enough that I “Add to: Vocabulary I’ll never forget”; a deck I pinned and set as “You know”, so any cards that go into that deck I won’t have to review since they’ll be set as known. If I am not confident enough to call it “Known”, I FORQ it. So my review queue ends up being words I’m somewhat familiar with. I go through this queue immediately after, until it is back down to zero. After a month of reading, I had a few hundred cards like this.
Then, I go back to that same word list and take a look for words that only have one English definition. So like, easy one-to-one words. In the process of doing this, I may also come across some words that would fit the first criteria of words I know or are familiar with already, so I FORQ those strays up too. I work through this queue over a day or two.
Lastly, I browse the word list for words that I think I could pick up easily. Sometimes this translates to finding words that have two or three English definitions that seem pretty straightforward. Sometimes, the word is similar enough to another word or expression that I already know. For example, 運がいい and 運のよい. Sometimes it’s just a word that I can guess the meaning of based off the kanji. And other times yet, it’s just a vague feeling that the word won’t take me a long time to learn. And of course, I’m FORQing up strays from the previous two criteria as well in this process. I’m always amazed at how much I can miss!
What I’m essentially doing is making it so that the deck word list ends up only containing words that I find are harder to understand. And over time, with more immersion, some of those will definitely end up fitting the above criteria for FORQing! But the best thing about spending a lot of time skimming the word list, and curating my own review queue, is that I inadvertently pick up new words just from the repetition of browsing. There have been so many times I remembered a word while I was immersing because of this very process.
So that is how I curate my new card review experience. But I’m also pretty strict with how I grade cards that I think ends up making the process go by quickly as well.
For starters, I don’t exactly take in every aspect of the flashcard unless I’m really struggling.
So if I’m presented with this:
I will just read the main vocabulary point. This one is こともなげ and means careless. Time to press “Show answer”.
This took me less than 3 seconds to come up with both the reading and the meaning, so I will grade it as “Okay”.
Now, let’s say that I had to read the example sentence in order to understand what the word meant. I’ll grade that as “Hard”. Having to read the sentence usually means that it took a bit longer than 3 seconds, but I at least got the reading and the meaning.
If I could not figure out the reading, but only remembered that it meant “careless”, I would hit “Something”. Likewise, if I only remembered the reading but not the meaning, I would hit “Something” after reviewing the back of the card.
“Nothing”, as you may be able to guess, is when I got neither meaning nor reading. I was truly just stumped. I try not to spend more than 10 seconds on a card, and even that is like the absolute upper limit. If it doesn’t come to me quick enough, I’d like to fail it so I can do better next time. Usually on the second pass, I will change the example sentence and add a J-J definition I choose from Yomichan.
“Easy” I save for words that make me feel…almost annoyed, that they’re even in my rotation. I could probably reproduce the word on my own or 100% understand it in any context it’s in, and the likelihood of forgetting it is low (but not zero). I think there are a lot of times where I’m underutilizing this grade, so I will monitor it a bit more in the future.
These are my general guidelines for grading that have made the process way quicker. I’m actually such a huge fan of the 5 grades, as I feel like I get to have a bit more nuance with grading. This is not to say this can’t be done in Anki or with other tools, but it’s one of the many reasons I like JPDB.
I do think I’m sacrificing retention for being able to get through more reviews and new cards. If I spend more time thinking about a word, I’m sure I’d be able to eventually come up with the right answers, and perhaps that word would stick with me better because of the time spent. However, I want to spend as much time as I can actually immersing. I guess my logic is: The more I read, the more natural reviews I do to make my SRS time even shorter.
There is a JPDB tab open on my computer and phone at all times. If I have a few minutes when I’m out and about, I’ll whip out my phone and do a few reviews. I’ll check in on the tab on my computer in the middle of other things too. So I think it helps that I’m not doing all of this in one go, but chunking my time a bit. For some reason, this is what brings my brain joy.
So, with my methodology to FORQing and grading, I feel like I can get a lot of out my SRS time which creates a more fun immersing experience. I can learn a lot of new words without spending more time than I need to in JPDB. SRS is how I prime my brain, immersing is how I internalize all the information.
Now, time for today’s new words…
学ぶマンダ 