The best way to maintain any sort of rote memorized material is through the modern technology of the spaced repetition system (SRS). An SRS is a flashcard program with a twist: after you enter your flashcards, when you review them, you rate them based on how easily you remembered. The program then uses your answers to optimize the order in which cards are displayed to you. When you remember something better, it should show up less often. When something is troubling you, you’ll benefit by reviewing it more often. The old-school technique to do this was to weed cards out of your flashdeck, but the whole problem with preserving learned knowledge is that however well you know it now, when it slips out of your reality, it’ll eventually fade. With the new technology, a card is never completely removed, it just gets “spaced” out more and more.

The biggest problem when it comes to keeping vocabulary from the Spanish class you took years ago, is time. You’re a busy person and you have so many better things to study your old textbook every day– or even every week! But this is where the beauty of spacing really comes in. As long as you aren’t actively trying to expand your knowledge on a given subject, the amount of time investment you need to invest to keep what you’ve already got, becomes smaller as you do more reviews. Flashcards which are easy, rapidly get thinned to the point where they barely ever appear– I’ve got cards in my deck which won’t show up for almost a full year. Even flashcards which are hard, eventually get easier as you gradually, patiently wear them into the caverns of long term memory. In time, the difficult item becomes easier, and then it starts showing up less and less often.

In order to make Spaced Repetition work to maintain a language you’ve studied once but aren’t running into in your daily life, at first you’ll need to make a habit of daily review. The SRS software will take care of all the paperwork and organization (once you’ve added your cards), but it’s up to you to actually do the review. As you continue to grind the information into longterm memory, and rate your flashcard performance accordingly, the daily review will automatically shrink, until you can transition to doing reviews only on the weekdays, and then eventually only MWF, and eventually, if you’re never adding new material, in time you can do just one review a week. Provided you don’t cheat yourself when you rate your performance on the cards, less and less work will be needed, and yet with so little work you’ll keep your linguistic treasures as sparkly and shiny as the day you walked home with that “A” in Greek 101.

LangMaint is a skill, and like any other skill, you can train it and upgrade it. You may be born with some innate knack for keeping stuff in long term ROM– or maybe not– but you can always raise that ability. It’s not static. Train it like you’d train a muscle. Put it to use against light hurdles, and work your way up. A good way to get some light training is to give yourself a crash course in Esperanto, an artificial tongue designed specifically to be really freaking easy to learn. People report becoming fluent in this conlang in a couple months or even faster. You can use it as a “dumbell”, learn it and then maintain it, thereby increasing your LangMaint power so when you study something harder, it’ll be a little easier to keep it stored up in the ol’ noggin.

I wish I had known about the power of SRS when I took Spanish in junior college. I was very enthusiastic then, and I learned with gusto. But now, almost everything I learned in those accelerated 8-hour weekend classes, is gone. I’ve retained a heightened intuition about Latin derivatives in general, and even about my own English grammar, but this is all subconscious, and consciously I can remember very few concrete facts or concrete vocabulary words.

You don’t have to dish out tons of cash for SRS technology. In fact, the best two programs are absolutely free: Anki and Mnemosyne. You can read my compare-and-contrast between the two here.

Mnemosyne and Anki (and other programs) aren’t just for lang maintainers, either. They’re also great for people continuing to actively learn some new lexicon– or anything at all which requires lots of memorization, for that matter.

FURTHER READING

If you want to memorize the Japanese (or Chinese) characters, the concept of Imaginative Memory will help you out quite a bit. In fact, this technique can be applied anywhere there’s sufficient structure.

I’m a mathematician, but I’m something of a mathematical heretic in that I advocate a certain amount of rote memorization early on. Read more: Rote Memorization in Mathematics.

If you want a guaranteed way to become a better SLA-er, hit the gym. Learning is holistic, and a healthy body is one of the best tools you can apply toward a healthy mind. Read: Exercise and Language Learning.

When your deck gets “stuck”, you can’t add more cards without mucking it up even further. When the carddeck is one of your main study methods, that means you can’t learn new stuff for awhile (in my case, a long while).

For a long time I struggled with this barrier. I didn’t want to just start a 2nd deck exactly the same as the first, because it’d just get to where I have the same problem, only double. Finally I came upon the solution. I call it the Satellite Model of Spaced Repetion.

In the Satellite Model, you maintain one large “central” pile, and augment it with smaller helper piles. Since the helper piles are small, they never accumulate too many reviews due. Even if you neglect them for a couple days, it’s not a big problem. And when the flagship is overburdened and clogged up with failed/new cards, you can add additional cards to the smaller sets.

Maintaining a small SRSfile presents some interesting challenges on its own, which is giving me further insight into spacing theory as well as language learning in general. I’m starting to rethink certain habits which I took before as ideology. The main thing is, by definition, you want to keep small piles small. This constraint forces you to moderate your sentence mining. I’ll discuss this some more below. Anyway, by handling the new cardsets in different ways, I’m doing new things, thereby increasing my language-learning intelligence (see my more general article, Become More Intelligent By Doing New Things). I’m opening my mind to the possibility that I was wrong before in some of my habits. (Well, “wrong” isn’t the right word, there really is no “wrong” way to SLA as long as you’ve got regular exposure! “Suboptimal” might be better.) I’ll discuss some of this further on.

MY SATELLITE DECKS

Right now, for Japanese study, I have one main ginormous flagship pile of flashcards, and three tiny orbiters. The “motherload” currently has 9003 facts, which are mostly sentences, along with about 1700 Heisig kanji, and a much smaller amount of raw vocabulary. You can read about its Anki Statistics here. I’ve been working on this for years now. When I went to Japan for thirty days, I totally neglected this cardset and when I got back it had blown up to thousands of reviews due. I didn’t get it back down to managableness until finally getting my hands dirty and doing some huge review marathons while killing time last December while my GF was in Tokyo. (The reviews-per-day is still recovering from that.)

Then, I made a new file, “japtemp”. At first, this was mainly for vocabulary words for the JP101-103 independent study I was taking to cheatingly get up to the 9 units I’m required to take as a TA. (I’m overqualified for the class, and classes suck anyway, but there was still some unfamiliar vocab.) This file doesn’t contain any sentences. Later, the purpose shifted toward words I picked up when talking in Japanese to my girlfriend. Again, just vocab drill, no s-mining. Currently it has 182 entries, all vocab.

Encouraged by good results with japtemp, I made another satellite, “kanjiaid”. Here, as the name suggests, the purpose is to help familiarize me with kanji which I’m particularly struggling with. Heisig’s philosophy says you should learn all the kanji before you start learning to read them or actually speak at all. But I’ve come to really question the wisdom in that. I’m finding that when I spend only a limited amount of time per day on reviews, certain Chinese characters are a serious pain for one reason or another (usually it has little to do with how complicated they are, some of the hardest characters happen to be some of the simpler ones, just because they don’t have as nice a structure as the more convoluted ones). In this helper deck, I include both vocab items and sentence items containing the kanji I struggle with. But to avoid running into the same congestion I’m trying to avoid, I’m taking a very minimalist approach. For most kanji, I pick just one word and one sentence involving that word. This is a world of difference from my old sentence mining philosophy of going for as many sentences and clauses as I could get my hands on. Kanjiaid works nicely, it’s really helping learn those tricky Chinese characters, because it’s much easier to remember them when they’re familiar to your eyes.

Finally, just last night, I lauched my newest pack, which I call “latekanji”. This is to finally finish off the last couple hundred Heisig chars, which I’ve been neglecting ever since December just because I haven’t had a deck sufficiently cleared up to add more material since then. With this deck, it’s just Heisicards, with an English keyword (and possibly an example nihongo word) on the question side and the kanji on the answer side. This time around, I’m also going to be writing the memory-enhancing visualization stories on the answer side, using invisible text.

QUESTIONING OLD PRACTICES

Dealing with these lean, mean new helper decks has made me question some things I used to take as gospel, largely because of exposure to a kind of SLA “ideology”.

Raw Vocabulary Cards

I’ve been a champion of rooting out the raw vocab cards from the Spaced Repetition System, replacing them with lots of sentences full of context. I still believe that’s the optimal system for one particular word, but now I’m really in more of a time crunch than I was back then, and I’m seeing that in order to make real headway, it’s necessary to sacrifice some quality for some quantity. By using rote vcards in my helper decks, I’m able to expand my acquired lexicon at a much faster rate, and at the same time familiarize myself with tons of delicious Chinese chars.

Besides, we mustn’t underestimate the power of the subconscious mind to figure out the bigger pattern, given only very limited data. We are master interpolators and with only just one or two example sentences for a word, your mind can make long strides toward deducing how that word is properly used. There’s no need to go overboard and import every clause you find in every dictionary. Moderation, moderation!

English->Target Language

In the japtemp file I made, since part of the purpose was to cram for a specific class, and since that class sometimes involved English->Japanese direct translation, I went ahead and made some entries with English on the question side and the “Devil’s Tongue” on the answer side.

Among the hard core language self-teaching community, this is pure heresy. The problem is that there’s never a single fixed translation for a given English phrase. Often there isn’t even a direct correlation even on the word-to-word level.

What I realized, though, is that it doesn’t really matter. The Golden Rule of Language Learning says that all that matters is exposure. It doesn’t even really matter whether the translations are correct. I could make a card with question side “I want to eat” and answer side 「猫がかわいい」 (“cats are cute”). In the short term it might screw me up quite a bit, but in the long run the English cue will just be blurred out and all I’ll even “see” will be the target answer– which is exposure, any way you look at it.

The only thing to watch out for is making answering impossible by making two entries with the same question side, like two “body” questions with two synonyms for body in Japanese as their answers. The way to get around this is to paste the ENTIRE English gloss from your dictionary. At least with the WWWJDIC as a dictionary, this always solves the problem. Using the body example, the English gloss for one synonym (体) is

(1) body; (2) health

and the gloss for another synonym (身) is

(1) body; (2) oneself; (3) one’s place; one’s position; (4) main part; meat (as opposed to bone, skin, etc.); wood (as opposed to bark); blade (as opposed to its handle); container(as opposed to its lid).

A lot of the second gloss is obscure stuff we don’t really care about, but it sufficiently distinguishes the two cards, and in the long run, all we’ll “see” when that review comes up is the overall shape of the question.

ARE SPACED REPETITION ALGORITHMS BIASED TOWARD SMALLER DECKS?

This is purely, 100% speculation, but think about it for a second. The guys who develop spaced repetition software probably don’t test them very thoroughly on massive decks that have been slowly built up and reviewed for years. When you start getting in the high four digits, you’re really departing from where the algorithms have been carefully tested. I’m sure whatever theory underlies everything, carries over fine to arbitrary numbers. But often theory and practice clash.

On the other hand, the spacing computations have been very rigorously tested for small, lean little card decks. So you’re guaranteed to get really great system performance for them.

If you don’t know what spaced repetition software is, you should click that link above, but in a sentence: spaced repetition software is a digital flashcard system where you create and review flashcards and the software optimizes the bejeezus out of the review process, showing you cards in the optimal possible order so you can memorize the most data with the least effort.

Which is better, Anki or Mnemosyne? Let’s compare a few aspects of these two memory programs.

COSMETICS

Anki wins hands down for aesthetic appeal. It has the look and feel of a professionally built commercial application (even though, like Mnemosyne, it’s free). Mnemosyne has the bare bones look and feel of something a grad student whipped up for an obscure research project. (Grad students, please don’t feel offended, I’m one myself!)

EASE OF ADDING CARDS

For pure text cards, Mnemosyne is easier: you can “tab” your way through the whole process. Unfortunately, in Anki if you start “tabbing”, you’ll go through “tags”, “model”, “add a new model”, “edit the current model”, and “forward” before finally getting to “add”. That makes tabbing impractical; I don’t even know why it’s done in this order, since a person would almost never touch the model-related buttons. You can do a mouseless-card-add in Anki using shift-ENTER, but that’s not very intuitive.

However, if you’re adding multimedia flash cards, Anki has a brilliant feature where you can just paste the URL of the file on the internet. Anki will automatically download it and store it in a data directory, all quite seamlessly. When I was adding picture flashcards to Mnemosyne, it was a horribly convoluted process of manually downloading the pictures and then manually writing the html code for them in the card. Anki’s method is almost instantaneous, and it saved me a lot of time on, say, Day 21 of the “French Revolution”.

FLASH CARD PORTABILITY

Mnemosyne flashcards can be imported directly into Anki, but Anki flashcards cannot be imported directly into Mnemosyne. However, if you did want to import an Anki deck to Mnemosyne, you could first “export” the Anki deck into a tab-delimited file. An extra step, and any info about your card ratings would be forfeit.

FREQUENCY OF SOFTWARE UPDATES

Anki seems to be updating constantly. When I was doing my French Revolution Challenge, a bunch of people from the Anki “community” were following along, and some updates were released based on the feedback I was reporting, within days of my reporting it. Makes me feel pretty good Mnemosyne, on the other hand, hardly ever updates.

On the flipside, though, I’ve gotten emails from people complaining that the Anki updates sometimes change the controls, so if they keep up to date, they’re having to constantly relearn how to use their own SRS. In that sense, Mnemosyne is more “stable”. Of course, it should be emphasized that, officially, Anki is still pre-version-1.0 (as of the time of my writing this). Usually software stabilizes a lot after it reaches version 1.0.

EASE OF REVIEW

The two systems are pretty similar as far as ease of review goes. Anki does have some extra data displayed, however. Anki splits up “remaining cards” into “failed cards”, “cards awaiting review”, and “new cards added today”. Mnemosyne clumps these same cards into just two categories, “scheduled cards” and “not memorized cards”. Anki also has some “power bars” which attempt to measure “how good you’re doing”, although they’re not too reliable.

One feature Anki has, which really blew me away, is the “ETA” display. Somehow the program looks at how fast you’re answering cards, and makes an intelligent guess how long it’ll take for the “scheduled cards” to hit zero. In my experience, ignoring cases where you get up in the middle of a review, the ETA seems to be pretty accurate.

SPACING ALGORITHM

The heart and soul of the SRS, what sets it apart from paper flashcards, is the algorithm it uses to transform your own ratings into an optimized card ordering. If you rate a card easier, it should show up less often, and so on.

It’s not easy to get a perfect sense of an SRS’s algorithm, since it all takes place behind the curtains. Anki’s algorithm seems to be marginally better: if nothing else, it’s a lot more customizable. You can adjust all sorts of numbers to get Anki’s algorithm working the way you want it to work.

On the other hand, Anki has a “feature” where cards come due in realtime, rather than day-by-day. This sounds like a cool concept, and maybe it could be if it were somehow implemented differently, but to me it ended up being a nuisance. The main problem is, when I sat down to do my daily reviews on Anki, I had no idea how many cards I’d actually have to do, because new ones kept coming due in the middle of the review.

The day-by-day scheduling of Mnemosyne is not just an arbitrary constraint. Fact is, the process which transforms raw, rote-memorized data into structured, meaningful data, this process takes place while we’re asleep. You can force yourself to memorize something today, and it seems like just raw gibberish, but somehow after you sleep on it, it makes a little more sense, in a way you can’t quite explain. (I wrote more about this in my article, The Irregular Verb.) The point is, there’s a very real reason to make cards come due day-by-day rather than minute-by-minute.

STATISTICS

For statistics, Anki wins hands down. It even makes fancy graphs and pie-charts, if you want. If you’re using it to study Japanese, you can even get some very advanced kanji statistics (to enable kanji statistics in Anki you need to make sure your Japanese cards actually use the “Japanese” model).

On the other hand, if you only want the statistics infrequently, and don’t mind a little hassle to get them, you can get Anki statistics for a Mnemosyne deck. That article explains how.

FURTHER READING

The main article on SRS technology is Spaced Repetition Systems. For years, science fiction has told us of a future where computers mix with the human mind to create cyborg memory of unimaginable power. We’ve come to the beginning of that technology, and it’s Spaced Repetition; and you don’t even have to get any chips inserted in your brain!

To read about the most cutting edge method of language learning, which makes heavy use of Spaced Repetition, check out the article Sentence Mining.

When you get into SRSing, sooner or later you’re bound to go on vacation, stop doing daily reviews, and come home to a massive pile of scheduled cards. When that happened to me after my Japan trip, I got through it in an intelligent way. Read more at: Dealing With A Neglected SRS Deck.

One of the big advantages which Anki has, is a lot of cool statistics, much better statistics than you get with Mnemosyne. However, you don’t have to switch to Anki to enjoy this feature. Anki can import a Mnemosyne deck, and then give you the statistics for the imported deck; that means you can get Anki statistics and still do your reviews on Mnemosyne. Just re-import the flash cards when you want fresh statistics. It would be a pain if you like looking at your statistics every day, but I don’t need to look at such detailed statistics that often.

To get Anki statistics for Mnemosyne, using Anki version 0.9.9.4, first make a new deck. You’ll need to give it some name, it doesn’t really matter what, it can be some temporary file and you can delete it later if you want. Once you’re in the “Welcome to Anki!” screen, with 0 cards and 0 facts in the deck, go to File->Import, set “Type of file” to “Mnemosyne 1.x deck (*.mem)”, click “Choose file…” and select your Mnemosyne file. On the line where it says “Model:” you should see a button with a little picture of a pencil writing on a paper. Click that to open a “Model Properties” window. Highlight “Field 1: Front” and make sure “Prevent duplicates” and “Prevent duplicate entries”, down at the bottom of the window, are UN-checked. This is so Anki won’t stupidly delete some of your Mnemosyne cards. Do the same after highlighting “Field 2: Back”, then click “Close”. Back in the Import window, you’re finally ready to click “Import”. If your Mnemosyne file is big, Anki will freeze for a while. I currently have over 9000 Japanese flash cards and it takes about one minute on my computer.

If you want special language-specific statistics, like the very-useful kanji statistics, you’ll need to adjust the import screen slightly, switching the “model” from “basic” to “Japanese” (or whatever).

Once you’re done importing, browse Anki’s statistics displays at your leisure. They’re under the “Tools” menu.

This technique also lets you make use of some of Anki’s additional plugins. Like, the “Kanji Info” plugin which gives you info about the Japanese characters in your deck.

Here are the statistics for my Japanese deck at this time.

Total number of cards: 9084

Mature cards: 8746 (96.28%)
Young cards: 338 (3.72%)
Unseen cards: 0 (0.00%)

Averages… The cards/day numbers are off because they’re based on Anki’s algorithm, not Mnemosyne’s algorithm.

Average interval (average time between reviews for each card): 233 days!
Average reps: 188.7 cards/day
Avg. Reps next week: 120.7 cards/day
Avg. Reps next month: 66.7 cards/day

Kanji Statistics:

“Kanji” is the Japanese word for the Chinese characters. If you set the model to “Japanese”, Anki can scan the deck and check which kanji appear throughout it.

2052 total unique kanji
Jouyou (important kanji everyone should know): 1826 of 1945 (93.9%)
Jinmeiyou (some other important kanji): 60 of 287 (20.9%)
Non-jouyou: 166

Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 80 of 80 (100.0%)
Grade 2: 158 of 160 (98.8%)
Grade 3: 199 of 200 (99.5%)
Grade 4: 195 of 200 (97.5%)
Grade 5: 181 of 185 (97.8%)
Grade 6: 171 of 181 (94.5%)
Junior High School: 842 of 939 (89.7%)

Here are the Jouyou kanji I’m missing, by grade.. (if you don’t have Japanese or Chinese fonts, these’ll look like gibberish)
Grade 2 : 汽鳴
Grade 3 : 帳
Grade 4 : 芽極郡巣脈
Grade 5 : 益査承像
Grade 6 : 郷誤后鋼就蒸宅脳補論
JuniorHS: 亜井浦雅塊嚇郭潟且緩缶艦偽戯虐虚駆虞偶遇隅慶顕孤弧呉娯洪溝綱郊剛墾懇咲嗣璽湿釈襲循盾遵嘱娠審衰繊禅塑租粗阻喪託丹鍛衷駐脹朕沈抵逓邸陶騰篤屯悩濃覇舶搬藩盤罷膚譜舗捕邦撲繭免耗癒誉揺謡慮虜猟倫隷麗錬

FURTHER READING

Wanna learn a language? How about ten languages? Sentence Mining is the way to go. Read about how to use sentence flash cards in the most cutting edge language-learning technique known to man, a technique which makes heavy use of Spaced Repetition Software.

Are flashcards taking too long to review? Try Drilling Flashcards Without Music. I discovered this when I was experimenting with a fast from music for several weeks. My flashcard review efficiency really went up.

When I came back from my 30 days in Japan, my deck was swamped with scheduled cards, because I obviously wasn’t doing reviews of Japanese flashcards while I was in Japan itself. Read about how I coped with over 4000 due flashcards in my article, Dealing With A Neglected SRS Deck.

A Spaced Repetition System, or SRS, is a program that lets you review flashcards. But here’s the catch. Each time you review a flashcard, you rate yourself on it, based on how easy or difficult the card was. The program uses all kinds of advanced calculations and sophisticated algorithms to determine the optimal possible way to show you those cards. In the Russian vocabulary example above, reviewing each card 20 times a day for a week is very far from optimal. It would be much more efficient to review them a few times to learn them, and then wait a while, and then review them once more, and then wait even longer, review them again, and so on. The underlying discovery from lab psychology is that, if the timing is done right, each time we review a card we can go longer before we need to review it again. The difficulty is calculating that timing just right; that’s where the SRS flexes its muscles. When the spacing is done right, it takes very few reviews before you can go months or even years between reviews for that card.

So what’s the catch? Surely these Spaced Repetition Systems cost thousands of dollars or give you memory cancer? Nope, some of the best SRS’s are free, and I’ve been using them for years without developing any memory cancer (or at least, none that I can remember!) The most popular free SRS is Mnemosyne, and another one of my personal favorites is Anki. The latter is relatively new and being developed extremely actively. The only possible drawback to an SRS is that it’s meant to be reviewed every day. You can take days off here and there, but in general, you need to review your cards daily, in order for the SRS’s calculations to work their magic. I personally consider this almost a good thing, because it has really given me a boost to my self-discipline and it’s good to have a reliable anchor like this in my otherwise hectic life. Besides, with things like languages, you should be studying every day anyway.

Note: Thanks to Tobberoth from this excellent forum thread for the awesome mental experiment about the Russian flashcards, which I modified slightly.

HOW MUCH DAILY WORK IS SPACED REPETITION?

The amount of work you put into spaced repetition depends how much you want to get back out of it. The thing is, as you review any particular card, it’ll become more and more spaced, needing to be reviewed less and less often. Right now my Japanese language deck has over 9,000 cards, but most of those cards aren’t scheduled for review for over 100 days.

A general rule of thumb is that on any particular day, the overwhelming majority of the cards scheduled for review in an SRS will be the cards you added most recently. Therefore, the amount of daily work is approximately equal to how many cards you’ve recently added. In particular, if you just need to memorize some finite amount of information with a definite end, like the capitals of all the nations of the world, it’ll be a lot of work for a short while and then rapidly dwindle down until it’s almost nothing.

If you want to put in the work, this means that an SRS will let you learn at a staggering rate. It’s almost illegal. In fact, I’m pretty sure if the government ever finds out just how efficiently and optimally people are learning with SRS’s, they’ll ban the things for being too good for the common citizens

MAINTAINING WHAT YOU’VE LEARNED

As great as they are for learning things, the real power of the SRS is in maintaining what you’ve learned. Take languages, for example (one of the most commonly studied things on an SRS). What stops most people from learning lots of languages isn’t that each individual language is hard. Languages aren’t that hard, after all, babies learn them all the time and babies suck. No, what really stops people from becoming polyglots is that it’d take too long to maintain all those languages. You could learn German, then learn French, but by the time you’ve learned French, you’ve forgotten three quarters of your German! Or keep studying German, but then it takes twice as long to learn French, and four times as long to learn the next language after that…

With spaced repetition, maintaining what you’ve learned is easy. And it gets easier and easier the longer you’ve been at it. I could stop studying any new Japanese today, swear it off, cold turkey, and never listen to or read a word of real Japanese again in my life, but if I keep doing my daily reviews, my Japanese knowledge will hover right around where it’s at today. And within one or two months after swearing it off, my daily flashcard review will be down to maybe 20 cards a day. Within one year, it’d be in the single digits.

OTHER ADVANTAGES OVER PAPER FLASHCARDS

Besides the huge advantage of optimized learning, there are other advantages to doing your flashcards on the computer. These advantages would hold even if the program just naively showed you the flashcards in order, without any sophisticated scheduling computations.

* Handle extremely huge decks without filling your closet with shoeboxes. When I first found out about Spaced Repetition Systems, my office had a giant brick of paper Japanese flashcards, and that was when my Japanese language study was still extremely young (in other words, I probably had less than 1,000 actual cards then). And those cards cost money, too! If it’s a dollar for a hundred blank flashcards, my Japanese deck right now would cost about $90 just for the raw paper, not counting ink or storage. When my dad was in grad school, he actually made his own flashcards, cutting them out of scratch paper to save money, and of course that added up to many hours just cutting paper. And good luck managing such a huge deck! That would be a nightmare!

* Backup and transfer. With flashcards on a Spaced Repetition System, you can back the cards up, even back them up online so you keep your deck even if your whole house burns to the ground. You can also email your deck between work and home and school and not have to carry it around everywhere (no more bulk bags of rubber bands!) Anki even has a “synchronization” feature that makes this all automatic, if you want.

* Detailed statistics. With a few clicks, you can find out all kinds of cool statistics about your cards. Some SRS’s (like Anki) will even create graphs and pie charts and stuff like that.

* Multimedia cards. You can put pictures and even audio files on flashcards. Audio files are ridiculously useful for language flashcards, it’s like God’s gift to flashcards. Some SRS’s even let you “drag and drop” pictures right into the program, making it quick and easy to make the things.

* Community decks. As SRS’s become more popular, people are starting to publish pre-made decks, free to download. Then you only need to review the flashcards, you no longer have to even make them! One SRS site which specializes in community cards is Flashcard DB, which has thousands of community-made decks for free.

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SPACED REPETITION SYSTEMS

Misconception #1: There are only certain fixed things that you can download cards for.

The truth: This is true of some specific spaced repetition systems which are built for certain specific tasks, like the SRS at Reviewing The Kanji, which only lets you study the Japanese characters. But all the big SRS’s, like Mnemosyne and Anki, allow you to make your own cards for anything you want. Basically, you have as much freedom as you do with paper flashcards, in fact you have even more freedom since you get all the advantages I talked about above.

Misconception #2: “I accidentally saw Vocabulary Word XXX outside my SRS studies, oh no, now the spacing for that word will be all messed up!”

The truth: The point of the spacing algorithms is to show you the card as rarely as possible and still keep it in your brain. Of course if you studied the card even more, you’d remember it even better. Otherwise, you and me would have totally forgotten the Roman alphabet by now, I mean we see those letters all the time and never pay attention to the spacing between reviews! The point about the SRS, though, is that you don’t have to see the material between reviews in order for it to stick.

Misconception #3: Spaced Repetition Systems are inferior to paper flashcards because you can’t take the cards with you!

The truth: It’s true you can’t lug a desktop computer around everywhere, but many SRS programs are now available on various PDA’s and whatever other handheld devices are out there. In any case, many SRS’s let you do your review over the internet, so any handheld access to the internet will work for SRS’ing too.

SPACED REPETITION FOR BUSY PEOPLE

When I took a month long break from SRS’ing, I came back to a big pile o’ scheduled cards. I was too busy to plow through them all, but at the time I only wanted to maintain the knowledge, I wasn’t actively adding new cards at the time. I discovered the perfect compromise, which is to only review N flash cards per day, regardless of how many were scheduled. For me, N was 100, and it worked pretty well. I can review 100 flashcards in half an hour or less pretty easily.

So what’s the lowest N could theoretically go? In principle, any positive number will do, no matter how small. It might take a very long time to get through the whole deck, longer and longer the smaller N is, but any positive N will work. The reason is that, even if you’re initially moving backward (doing fewer reviews than the program is adding every day), you will be accelerating forward because of spacing. You might be making negative net progress, but as you make what progress you do, you’ll be increasing the intervals for those cards, so that eventually fewer and fewer new reviews will be scheduled, and you can eventually start making the ground back up.

The same idea would work if you devoted N minutes a day of study to reviewing cards, instead of reviewing N cards per day.

Even if you have only ten free minutes every day, Spaced Repetition can still work for you!

USING SPACED REPETITION SYSTEMS FOR SCHEDULING

If you’re creative, you can use Spaced Repetition for more than just memorizing facts. I’ve been experimenting with using Mnemosyne to diversify my music-listening.

Basically, if you listen to the same song over and over, it gets tiresome. And if you haven’t listened to a song in awhile, it sounds better. Hmmm, this sounds analogous to something, doesn’t it…

I’m experimenting with putting song names in Mnemosyne, and then listening to whatever song is “up for review”, and then rating it based on how good it sounds. A better-sounding song, I’ll rate worse, meaning there’ll be less space before it’s scheduled again. A really good-sounding song, I’ll outright fail, meaning its space goes back down to 0.

In the long run, spacing will make fewer and fewer things come up for review, forcing me to discover new music and broaden my music reality. This is still a pretty new project, but I might write a full-fledged article about it here later, so keep in touch!

MORE ON THE SUBJECT OF LEARNING AND MEMORY

Sentence Mining is the world’s most advanced technique for second language acquisition. It makes use of the Spaced Repetition System, and basically lets you learn a language with the natural exposure of a child but the efficiency of an adult.

The French Revolution: French in 30 Days. In order to learn more about language and how it’s learned, and about memory in general, I’m doing a 30-day French language-learning challenge. On day 1, I knew absolutely nothing about French. Each day has a daily writeup. I use Spaced Repetition and Sentence Mining extensively and write about them in great detail.

One of the most difficult things you can memorize is the set of Japanese characters. In my book review of James Heisig’s “Remembering The Kanji”, I write about the most cutting edge techniques for making this feat doable. And yes, Spaced Repetition Software plays a big part.

When you’re a self-teacher, life suddenly becomes a lot simpler. In my article, Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher, I talk about being a self-teacher and some ways you can train this meta-skill. Being good with Spaced Repetition Systems will make self-teaching a lot easier. Plus, you kinda have to be a self-teacher because SRS’s are so cutting edge and elite, they haven’t made their way into the classroom yet.

If you want to learn a language naturally, with the kind of learning that produces perfect native fluency, why would you do anything other than soak up millions of sentences? Oh, right, because it takes years and years to learn a language that way. Well, it doesn’t have to. And it doesn’t, if you use the cutting-edge language-learning technology of Sentence Mining.

Sentence Mining makes use of a fairly recent technological innovation, the spaced repetition system, or SRS. An SRS is a computer flashcard program (like Anki or Mnemosyne, both free) that lets you make and review flashcards. The thing about an SRS, though, is that when you review a flashcard, you rate how well you understood it. The program uses your ratings to determine when it’s best to show you the flashcard. In this way, the old process of reviewing flashcards gets super-optimized. But wait, aren’t flashcards just for rote memorization, the sort of thing which is entirely unnatural for language learning? No! Flashcards have another use, having nothing to do with rote memorization, and that use is Sentence Mining.

Sentence Mining is the process of making flashcards, where the “Question” side of the card is a sentence in the target language. To “answer” the card, you don’t try to recall anything from memory, instead you merely try to comprehend the sentence, by any means necessary. It doesn’t matter whether you parse the sentence using your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, or whether you just somehow know the sentence’s meaning because you’re familiar with the book it came from, or whether you memorize the sentence’s meaning outright. All that matters is that, somehow, you comprehend the sentence. If you comprehend the sentence, rate it based on how easily you comprehended it. If not, fail it (rate it “Again” in Anki, or “0″ in Mnemosyne).

The “Mining” part of “Sentence Mining” is the part where you go forth into the world and collect these sentences. Every book, every video game, every website, every textbook, every movie in the target language, is a goldmine waiting to provide you with linguistic fluency.

WHY DOES SENTENCE MINING WORK?

Think of the language processing center of your brain as a jungle. When you encounter a sentence, the sentence gets launched into the jungle and follows the path of least resistance, and wherever it ends up, that’s how you understand the sentence. If you don’t know anything about the language, then the necessary paths have not been blazed. The sentence crashes into a tree, and you “understand” it as freakin’ gibberish.

As you review sentences you can comprehend, you carefully push them through the jungle to the right destination so that you understand them correctly. As you push them along, they gradually wear paths through the thick foliage. The more sentences you comprehend, the deeper and more sophisticated the paths become.

The cool thing is that the paths blazed by the sentences in your deck, work just as well when you encounter entirely new, exotic sentences you’ve never seen before.

Eventually, you’ve comprehended so many sentences, that the “paths” in the jungle have evolved into an intricate modern superhighway. Now, whatever sentence you launch into the jungle, it’ll easily, quickly get to the right destination. Congratulations, you’re fluent at reading in your target language!

HOW TO CHOOSE WHICH SENTENCES TO MINE

Any sentence which you can comprehend, is good. When you get to an intermediate or advanced point, though, that’ll be too many sentences for a busy important person like you, so we’ll need to weed them down.

First, identify a “sentence target”. A sentence target can be:
* a particular vocabulary item
* a particular type of verb conjugation
* a particular grammar rule
* a particular idiom
* a proper noun (a place name or person’s name)
* a particular character (especially in Chinese/Japanese)
* anything else you want to learn

Once you’ve chosen a sentence target, the goal is to find a sentence which you could understand, if you understood the sentence target. For example, if your target is a particular vocab word, look for a sentence in which you already know all the other words, and you know the grammar, etc. The only thing you haven’t already learned is the target.

It’s important that you be able to at least know whether or not you comprehended the sentence. There are two primary ways to test your comprehension: 1) a translation which comes along with the sentence, or 2) prior knowledge of the context, e.g. the sentence comes from the target language version of a book you’ve already read in your native language.

When you’re first starting the language, the requirement that you be able to test your comprehension, really limits the sentences you can use. That’s why when I’m just beginning to study a new language, the bulk of my sentences come from textbooks (where they have English translations provided) or from translations of things I already know in English (a personal favorite of mine is to sentence-mine the target language versions of old video game classics like Final Fantasy 7 or Chrono Trigger).

If you can’t find any sentences meeting the criteria, then you’re not ready for that sentence target yet. When I was first studying Japanese, this happened to me frequently. If this happens, take a look at the sentences you did find for the target, and ask why they failed. For example, say I want to learn a tough Japanese vocabulary word about finance. All the sentences I find for it, they all involve other tough financial vocabulary. I can see whether any of those words are more appropriate sentence targets. Sometimes, you might have to go multiple levels deep! I know I did, but as a result I have a very good grasp of those vocabulary words, so much deeper than just memorizing an English translation.

In the beginning stages of the language, feel free to make some direct vocabulary cards as a “crutch”. After all, if you know absolutely no vocabulary, then it’s gonna be awfully hard to find some sentences you can understand! (Although, if the language is closely related to your native one, you’ll enjoy tons of obvious cognates) Later on, as you’re getting better at the language, you can gradually delete the rote memorization vocab cards. When you memorize a vocabulary word by rote, you’re not really learning it, since “translation” is really only “approximation”. But some rote-memorized vocab words will give you the foothold you need to start comprehending sentences (without having to spend several years, like a baby does).

Another alternative for vocab items if the sentences are too hard, is the picture card. With a picture card, one side is a picture (say a picture of a rabbit) and the other side is the word. Nowhere does your native language get involved. The point of learning a new language is not to be able to see a rabbit, and think “Rabbit. The Japanese translation is Usagi.” The point is to see a rabbit, and right away think “Usagi.”

HOW MANY SENTENCES TO COLLECT?

The more the merrier, but again, you’re a busy important person, so let’s optimize! What I do is grab a small handful of sentences that “hit” my desired sentence target. Usually, that’s enough. If it’s not enough, you’ll discover it pretty soon, when you notice that in your daily reviews, you keep failing those cards. If you make that discovery, you can go back and get more sentences. This actually leads to an interesting phenomenon where your flashcard deck becomes easier when you add more cards.

Bear in mind that however many cards you mine for the target right now, the list of cards which hit that target, will always grow, as long as you study the language. For example, say I want to learn the French word “escargot”. I mine 5 sentences using that vocabulary. A week later, I’m mining a totally different vocabulary word, and one of the sentences for that word just happens to contain “escargot”. Now I have 6 sentences for escargot! In this way, in my Japanese deck I have literally hundreds of sentences for some of the more common words, by now.

Also bear in mind, the sentences aren’t the sole way you’ll be learning the sentence target. Depending on its commonness, you should also be encountering it in your actual usage of the language (in conversations or movies or songs), where it goes unmined. Having sentences in your deck just optimizes the heck out of the learning process, but if for some word you just can’t find enough sentences, it’s still not the end of the world.

WHAT IF THERE ARE NO SENTENCES?

This is interesting. Let’s say someone studying English as a second language wanted to learn the word “antidisestablishmentarianism“. But, what’s this, there are no sentences anywhere that really use this word, besides using it as an example of a long word! In that case, that’s a strong indication that this word isn’t really important, and learning it is a waste of time (except, in this case, possibly, as an example of a long word).

For certain vocabulary words, there’s an exception to the value of sentences. For example, if I wanted to memorize all the dinosaur names in Japanese, it’d be better to just rote memorize the list (excepting the more interesting ones like the T-rex and the pterodactyl). Sure, it’d just be a meaningless list of words, but then again, the dinosaur names are a meaningless list of words to me in English! But really, if a word is an exception to the value of sentences, almost by definition it’s not worth studying. (At least, no more so than any other trivial information, and I’m sure if you’re gonna study trivia, you can find something more fun than lists of words)

WHAT TO PUT ON THE ANSWER SIDE OF THE FLASHCARD

Here are some things you can put on the answer side of a flashcard:
* An English (or whatever language) translation
* Contextual notes (See this article)
* Pronunciation notes
* An audio file of the sentence being spoken by a native speaker
* A picture illustration
* Any combination of the above
* Or, one of my favorites: Nothing!

Yeah that’s right, it’s perfectly okay to make a flashcard with a blank answer side. (On Anki, though, you’ll have to go into the model preferences and specifically enable blanks.. they’re disabled by default.. what the hell, Anki?) After all, the goal with Sentence Mined flashcards is not to memorize what’s on the other side of the card, but to comprehend the sentence written on the question side.

Basically, the whole point of the answer side is for you to know whether or not you did, indeed, comprehend the sentence correctly.

VARIATIONS ON SENTENCE COMPREHENSION

Besides comprehending the sentence, here are some other types of flashcards you can make with sentence mining.

Pronunciation: The point is to read the question side of the card aloud. The answer side contains any pronunciation notes you need (or an actual audio file) to check yourself.

Writing: If the target language has different characters than your mother tongue, you might make cards where the question side indicates a sentence, but written in Romanized form (or kana, or something), and the answer side is the real sentence. The objective when reviewing the card is to write the sentence based on the Romanized version. This variation is especially good for Chinese/Japanese.

Copying: An easier version of “writing”, in this variation the question side is the sentence, and the answer side is also the sentence. Your objective is simply to copy it onto paper by hand. Rate yourself based on how fast and easy the actual mechanics of writing are, how good your handwriting is, etc.

Shadowing: The “question” side is an audio file, and your objective is simply to speak along. The question side might also include the sentence in text format.

Listening Comprehension: Like the default sentence card, but instead of a text sentence on the question side, there’s an audio file on the question side.

Transcription: The question side is an audio file, and the objective is to write the sentence on paper. Feel free to replay the audio file as needed.

One variation you do not want to do is the reverse-sentence card. This would be where the question side is an English sentence (or whatever your native tongue) and the answer side is the sentence in the target language. If you tried cards like these, you’d just end up memorizing the answer sides (with great effort) and wouldn’t really learn anything you could generalize beyond that one single lone sentence. This sort of process would be very unnatural, because babies never translate.

If you use different variations of sentences in the same flashcard deck, make sure you can tell which kind of card each card is, before flipping it over.

SENTENCE MINING IN ACTION

I’m doing a 30-day challenge to teach myself as much French as I can in several hours a day for 30 days. Not that I’m particularly interested in French, but rather I’m interested in Earthian, the collective body of all languages spoken on Earth. The project is called: The French Revolution. You can read there about my own sentence mining efforts. The whole project writeup is packed to the gills with all sorts of other interesting language observations as I learn so much about learning languages.

OTHER COOL ARTICLES

Drilling Flashcards Without Music. I was shocked when I found out how much faster I got my scheduled reviews done!

Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher. Well, you don’t have much choice, because Sentence Mining is so elite and cutting edge, you won’t find it in any classrooms yet. When you become a good self-teacher, learning things feels almost too easy, it’s like playing the game of life with cheat codes on.

Irregular Verbs In Japanese. Japanese is one of the most regular, structured, logical languages in the world. Find out just how few irregular verbs it has, and wish that you’d studied Japanese in high school instead of Spanish!

And, you probably also know I recently started an experiment: I’m no longer listening to music while I’m on the computer. See my article, “Fighting Music Addiction: An Experiment“. Stopped cold turkey; this is my fifth day without mp3s or eurodancehits.com or youtube music videos. I intend on writing a general log of the experience when I’ve been at it a week. For now though, I’m so excited I couldn’t help but share about how it’s been affecting my Japanese study on Mnemosyne.

Usually, when I do my reviews, I do it while listening to music. These past five days, I’ve either been doing it quietly, or doing it to nature sounds (like streams, rainforest, etc.) Lo and behold, I’m going through the reviews much faster! With music in the background, it would often take me an hour or more to slice through a hundred scheduled reviews. Especially if I was listening to youtube music videos, since those can’t be looped so I’d constantly be switching windows to start a song over or find a new one.

The act of switching windows is also, to me, a temptation. A temptation to go check the news, check forums, check blogs, all stuff which, if I give in to the temptation, adds a good 10 minutes to my review time on Mnemosyne.

Without music in the background, it takes me significantly less time.. maybe 45 minutes to get through a hundred cards. And I seem to do better at them, as well. (Recall, right now I’m in an SRS rut, with over 3000 scheduled reviews, because I put my daily reviews on hold for a whole month while I was in Japan. Consequently, the cards are harder since many of them are long past due for review)

I guess it’s all about concentration. When I listen to some music I love, I really get into it. And I guess it steals some of my attention away automatically, not even counting the logistics of switching or manually restarting songs.

I still have to manually loop the nature sounds on youtube (when will youtube get a loop option?!) but the difference is there are 25 minute nature sound videos, whereas most songs are 5 minutes or less. I might have to only do one jump to the youtube window during an entire day’s review.

One other thing is, nature sounds are language-neutral. If I’m listening to a song in anything except the target language, it subtracts away from the “language trance” of the target language. See, doing flashcard reviews without English on the cards, it tends to set my mind in a “language trance” where the longer I go without English, the more naturally my mind thinks in the target language. Obviously if I’m listening to English lyrics in the background, it’s gonna disrupt that trance.

And finally, although this is rarely a problem these days, I’m less tempted now to go overboard and do more reviews than I intended. I’m currently resolved to review 100 cards a day. Sometimes if I’m listening to some really sweet music, it’ll be hard for me to peel myself away from the flashcards, just because they give me an excuse to keep sitting at the computer listening to the music.

But, I don’t know whether this should be advice for everyone. To copy what Khatzumoto says, I’m merely recording what works for me, and it can vary for other people. In particular, I don’t know whether most people are as music addicted as I was. Music addiction is funny, it’s a blessing at the same time as a curse, and I probably would never have even become aware of it if I weren’t so gung-ho about improving my productivity and level of consciousness lately. In any case, remember the golden rule of language learning: any method of language learning will work eventually, as long as it involves lots of exposure to the target language.

Here are the other articles on music addiction:
Fighting Music Addiction: An Experiment
Fighting Music Addiction: Week 1
Fighting Music Addiction: Week 2
Fighting Music Addiction: Week 3

Here are some related articles. The more recent ones were composed with no music in the background!
Dealing With A Neglected SRS Deck
A Goldmine Of Engrish
The Language Tradeoff: Learning Languages Through Travel

In case you don’t know about it, SRS stands for “Spaced Repetition System”. An SRS program is a flashcard program for the computer, where you make your own flashcards and review them. The cool thing is, when you review a card, you get to rate how well you know it. Then the program uses advanced algorithms to figure out what cards to show you. It solves the old flashcard dilemma: if you know a card really well, you don’t want to waste time over-reviewing it, but if you throw it away entirely, you’ll eventually forget it. I use Mnemosyne, which is free, but there are tons of other SRS programs available.

I’ve been studying Japanese for awhile, and my deck now has almost 9000 cards in it. Then I went and spent a month in Japan, and didn’t review the cards at all, so when I got back, there were over 4000 cards scheduled to review. Ouch!!

This isn’t the first time I’ve neglected my deck. Last time, I just got busy with other stuff, and ended up taking a month-long hiatus from the deck. Back then, the deck only had about 3000 cards, and when I finally returned from my wandering ways, there were about 2000 scheduled reviews. At the time, I thought that was a lot…

When this happens, there are two things you can do. You can brute-force your way, grit your teeth, and just blast through all the reviews. With the 2000 cards before, this is what I did, and it took about 4 days of 500 cards a day.

This time, I’m going about it a different way. I’ve decided I’ll review 100 cards a day. Yes, just 100 cards a day. At this rate, it’d take about 40 days to clear all the scheduled reviews, even if we assumed no new ones were being added. It’ll actually take closer to 60, because more cards come up for scheduled review every day. But I don’t really mind.

You see, after spending a month in Japan, I feel like I’ve made a big transition in my Japanese. I’m no longer using the deck to learn Japanese as much as to preserve Japanese and ward off the deathly grasp of forgetfulness.

My viewpoint of the language has changed. While I’m still a long, long way from fluency, I now see myself as knowing the language. In a way, that’s subjective. But I feel now more like a Japanese infant picking up the language naturally, than a westerner struggling with the bass-ackwards grammar and crazy alien vocabulary. The grammar now makes intuitive sense, almost more sense than English if that’s possible (Japanese is more “logical” somehow), and when I see “new” vocabulary now, it very often has a familiar ring to it.

What I was starting to notice just prior to my Japan trip, was that I was getting caught up in the SRS and it was becoming an end in itself. The jarring awakening came when I caught myself putting off doing fun things in Japanese because my deck was too full of brand new cards and I needed to clear room before I could “sentence mine” new things. I’ll say that again: I was putting off using Japanese so I could study Japanese. Put in such clear words, that’s ridiculous! But it’s an easy trap to fall into…

A fixed number of cards per day, in my case 100 cards, is a good way to inject sanity back into the program when it gets out of hand. It’s a good exercise in self-discipline: some days I’m busy and can barely find room to do my 100 cards. Other days (much more rare), I find myself enjoying the review so much, listening to good music as I do it, it’s hard to tear myself away after 100 cards. But I made the decision to do 100 cards a day and I’m gonna stick to it.

Should I have made such a limit in the beginning? It’s hard to say. I think when I was first learning the language, there was a big benefit to going balls-to-the-wall. I made huge progress very quickly, at the expense of a lot of invested time and energy. It was well worth it, especially since I learned a lot about language acquisition in general.

One thing is, when I was first starting out, I had too little Japanese to get much benefit from just listening to the language without any other structure. Watching raw, un-subtitled TV shows for example, I could understand almost nothing. If I’d gone to Japan back then, I would’ve been lost. I could have still learned the (spoken) language that way, but it would take a looong time! Not to mention the crazy-ass written language…

Now that I have a lot more confidence and ability in Japanese, I do most my learning naturally just by talking to Japanese people, watching Japanese TV, listening to Japanese music, etc. It’s a little like walking a path in the dark, because when I was in the heavy SRS phase, I pretty much had lists of everything I knew, right there in the card deck. Now, my subconscious is doing the learning, and I’m not even consciously aware of how much I know! Anyway, I’ve kind of “outgrown” the SRS as a learning tool, but it’s still extremely useful as a maintenance tool so I don’t forget Japanese (especially obscure stuff like economics/technical vocabulary…)

MECHANICS

Here’s the cool thing about SRS programs. If you pick any positive number of cards-per-day and faithfully do that many reviews per day, no matter how many cards were scheduled to begin with, eventually you’ll clear out all the scheduled reviews. Even though new cards come up for review on a day-to-day basis. Even if you just review 10 cards a day… or even, just one single card a day… you’ll eventually clear the scheduled review pile. (Well, if you do the 1-card-a-day route, it might take longer than a human lifetime, but if you lived forever and kept a good memory, eventually you’d clear the pile) I’ll explain why this works.

As you learn a card better, you rate it better. And when a card is rated better, the program gives it more “rest time” between scheduled reviews. That’s why it’s called “spaced repetition”, as you learn any given card, it gets more and more spaced out. Sometimes you forget a card, and rate it accordingly, and that shrinks its “rest time”, but you’ll only forget the same card so many times before it gets stamped on your long term memory.

So if you’re not adding new cards, and just reviewing old cards, each card will gradually get more and more “rest time”. That means each day, there are less and less cards added to the “review scheduled” pile. Eventually, the average number of “new scheduled reviews” per day will be smaller than your chosen number of reviewed-cards-per-day. And then, the review pile will begin shrinking, and eventually be taken care of.

ADDING NEW CARDS

Once you have fewer scheduled reviews than your chosen number– for example, in my case, when I have less than 100 scheduled review cards– you can finally start adding new cards again.

Here’s how I think of it, now that I’ve advanced a ways in my Japanese. There’s two types of vocabulary, active and passive. Passive vocabulary is the words you can understand when you hear/read them. Active vocabulary is the words you use in your own speech. Generally, passive vocabulary is much larger, even in a person’s native tongue. The way I see it, Mnemosyne trains both active and passive vocabulary. Listening to Japanese for fun, that trains mostly passive vocabulary. It trains active vocabulary, but much slower than Mnemosyne. But Mnemosyne takes far more energy investment.

Now that I have some basics, I don’t need to increase my active vocabulary as much as I need to increase my passive vocabulary. (When I went to Japan, I quickly had encounters where I knew how to ask a question, but understanding the answer was a much bigger struggle!) Therefore, it makes a lot more sense to concentrate on listening to Japanese for fun. And cut Mnemosyne back to a reduced level.

The great thing about learning languages, at least when you do it with passion, is you always keep learning, not just the language itself, but learning about language acquisition in general, and about how your own mind works.

Here are some other articles I wrote. Put them in an SRS program and memorize them.
Foreign Language Sentences With No English Translation
Learn The Idioms, Not Just The Word
Invisible Text in Mnemosyne Flashcards
Book Review: James Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji”

People commonly ask me if they can save time by downloading pre-made flashcards. I don’t know of any such flashcards. But here, you can look at mine. Exactly as exported from Mnemosyne. The formatting is generic enough that you could use them for Anki flashcards, SuperMemo flashcards, VTrain flashcards, or any other SRS flashcards.

To see these cards probably, you’ll obviously need a font which can render Japanese characters.

A bunch of flashcards are one-word direct translation flashcards. These aren’t really optimal. I made those before I discovered the 10,000 example sentence method. I’m (verrrry slowwwwly) replacing their English definitions with Japanese definitions from a J-J dictionary. In the one-word flashcards for verbs, an asterisk (*) indicates the verb takes a godan conjugation instead of an ichidan conjugation.

Most of the sentences are from either the Yahoo Japanese-Japanese dictionary or from Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar.

Four Thousand Flashcards: 4kcards.txt

Just by looking at these flashcards and reading my webpage, you’ve already taken a big step toward polylingualism.

Here are some other articles you’ll enjoy reading.
How to Learn a Language the Right Way
The Two Types of Music
Learn the Idioms, not just the Word