Was just reading a post over at Nihongo day by day (雨と水) and remembered just how excellent SRS software is for not forgetting things that you've learned I could read most of the article bar a few vocab, that I'll be sentence mining by the way. Now for the last few weeks I've not really added much to my sentence deck and not had huge exposure either except the 5 hours of listening I got the other day but yet I still could read the majority of that article the only thing I had kept regular was my sentence reviews.
So even though I hadn't actively been using Japanese each day for a while I've not really forgotten anything and the bits I have forgotten get picked up much easier the second time.
So for all those that worry they are going to forget everything if they take a brake from there Japanese studies don't worry about it just be sure to keep up with your reviews and when your ready to get back to your Japanese you'll be almost were you left off.
Recently I've been thinking back to before I really started learning Japanese to a time when I thought that to learn a language you needed to be really smart or have it forced down your throat from a young age and also that other huge myth that a large amount of people (maybe the majority) still believe that you need to live in the country of the target language to reach any sort of fluency which i now know to be completly false and so does a growing number of language learners just checkout some more of the blogs on my blog list for some good examples.
As many of you may know Anki (SRS) has recently been updated to include a timeboxing feature which i think is great, for those who don't know timeboxing is basically setting yourself an allocated amount of time i.e. 10 minutes and within this set time you do your reps, when you reach the end of the set time you stop and take a brake.
This can work wonders for efficiency and getting alot of reps done in a short amount of time probably the reason being is because you know you hav'nt got long and there's no "oh god this is going to take forever" which causes you to procrastinate and be distracted easily, your mind tends to work more efficiently and you get distracted much less when you brake it into smaller chunks.
So now that Anki has timeboxing built in you can set your 10 minutes or what ever you choose and hopefully be more efficient as the problem was before with me anyway is that i would set myself say 15-30 minutes to do reps and completly forget to check the time etc so ended up going way over, which is'nt exactly a bad thing if your in the right frame of mind.
So the next time your doing your daily reps try timeboxing to see if it improves your efficiency.
Stats Update.
The 515 seen cards in this deck contain:
- 359 total unique kanji.
- Jouyou: 352 of 1945 (18.1%).
- Jinmeiyou: 2 of 287 (0.7%).
- 5 non-jouyou kanji.
Mature cards: 35 (6.80%)
Young cards: 480 (93.20%)
Unseen cards: 0 (0.00%)
Correct answers
Mature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)
Young cards: 76.0% (2009 of 2643)
First-seen cards: 78.6% (485 of 617)
