Earlier I said that I would wait until I was further into my kanji studies before I gave details of my own tips and techniques. My reasoning may have been justifiable from a results-oriented point of view (I want to thoroughly test any advice I give), but I failed to factor in just how many tips and tricks I would develop. It’s far too many to keep track of in my head until I’ve mastered the kanji, so I’m going to start relating the most important tips right away, starting with this post, and just come back to make corrections if I need to in the future. So take these methods with a grain of salt; they are not yet fully tested.
When using any SRS, it’s essential that you review expired cards daily, and fully review the entire queue of expired cards. For the sake of progress it is important that you consistently add a certain number of facts to the SRS every day. You will find that the day-to-day workload will steadily increase with time, even if only the same number of cards are added each day. (There’s an exponential/logarithmic relationship here that I do not have the time or patience to derive.)
When I first started on the kanji I settled in on adding 50 cards/day to my SRS. I could do this in about 1.5 hours or so (a reasonable amount of time for me). However within a few weeks I was up to 100 reviews/day and reviewing was taking up so much time that on some days I was unable to add new facts. And when I went a day without reviewing…the backlog of cards took a full week to clear out.
To the point I am getting. Since the number of reviews were getting out of control, I decided to cut in half the number of facts I add each day. Now I am adding only 25 cards/day, and over the last week the per-day workload has been steadily decreasing. On the morning when I open Anki to find less than 50 cards up for review, I will resume adding 50 cards/day until the workload again reaches 100 reviews/day and I cycle back to 25 new cards/day. This is a sustainable system; a method that I can keep up indefinitely, and a method which will ensure a steady progress of 50-100 reviews and 25-50 new cards on any given day.
All Mandarin, All The Time 
4 comments
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August 9, 2008 at 6:00 am
Mike
Good idea. I wish I would of thought of this back when I was doing RTK.
August 12, 2008 at 12:18 pm
c
Are you learning the facts before putting them into Anki? Some people say SRS are to stop you forgetting what you’ve just learned, rather than to learn from scratch.
August 12, 2008 at 7:00 pm
jinsei
c,
Yes and no. Usually the act of inputting facts into Anki is enough to commit them to memory (as long as you’re focused on what you’re doing). But for harder facts it doesn’t always work. I have about a 40% success rate on first-time cards. Some of that other 60% is already learnt by the time it comes up for review again on the same day. The remainder are the really hard cards, which accumulate in my failed-card pile at the end of my study sessions. I spend extra time learning these, then mark them as “Difficult” so that they come up for review again in a day or so.
Specifically to Japanese studies, I find that graphemes require a good deal of extra study to learn. Kanji cards can be learnt in the time it takes to input them into Anki, as long as you remember to come up with a story while you do it. Sentences should already by learnt by the time you enter them into Anki because of the time you took to look up the words/grammar points.
August 18, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Maintaining a constant SRS workload, Part 2 « All Mandarin, All The Time
[…] 18, 2008 in Uncategorized | Tags: method, SRS, time | Earlier I spoke of a method for maintaining a more-or-less constant number of daily SRS reviews. That […]