Declaring SRS Bankruptcy

at first, I thought you were talking about the company that creates Anki was going bankrupt....

I use pleco. It's ok. I need desperately to do a better job of using Pleco as my daily review tool. But for whatever reason, Pleco is uncompelling for me to use for review. But others have posted here raving about Pleco as the greatest thing since sex was invented. I'd say 3 out of 4 Cpod users that use Pleco rave positively about Pleco. But that's just my opinion/casual observation.

pretz, could be you're just not a flashcard person. There's no reason flashcarding needs to really be at the center of anyone's review regimen. For me personally, I'm just someone who's masochistic enough to value a strict daily dose of drudgery. Esp. w/SRS, flashcarding for me is like drinking 8 glasses of water a day: I know I don't really have to do it, but I've established the habit now and doing it every day just seems so gosh-darned virtuous.

'drinking 8 glasses of water a day: I know I don't really have to do it, but I've established the habit now and doing it every day just seems so gosh-darned virtuous.'

Living in China might break you of the habit. :)

LOL! I'm actually a 可口可乐 girl though (in which there is no virtue, I know). The water thing was just 比喻。

'he water thing was just 比喻'

Oh that's a relief, I had visions of you overdoing things.

Actually even bottled water can be a problem in China - the cheap stuff is sold as 矿的 ('mineral water') which it turns out can give you kidney problems, particularly in children. I have just revised our order to the picturesquely named 怡宝的 (plain water).

I'll answer your last question first since it kind of bears on everything else for me.

My deck is 15,000+ cards. Only about 300 of that is phrases connecting nouns with measure words (and those are "recall" only). The rest are words and short fixed phrases for which I have both recall and recognition cards (so a total of about 7500 facts). I've built that deck gradually and organically (about 60-70 new facts per week) over the past 2+ years.

With a deck that old, most of the cards are mature, and my average interval is now over 365 days. However, on any given day more than 80% of my card load is cards with current intervals of less than 60 days. These days I'm reviewing about 280 cards daily (in doses over the course of the day).

I make a lot of mistakes (about 15% failure rate), but that's the theoretical beauty of SRS, isn't it? It keeps track for me and patiently keeps trying to help me learn the ones I get wrong. So I kind of "need" the little ego boost I get at the beginning of each day where the first two dozen cards or so are very mature, very easy, and satisfyingly announce that I'll next see them in 4 years. :-)

Anyway, with a deck like that you can probably see why taking my current facts and starting over with them is impractical. Not only would the initial load nearly kill me, but the subsequently unnaturally high rate of "immature" cards (that I had gotten right!) would still keep my card load up way too high for months.

I'm interested by what you say about writing. I don't think it would work for me given the way I've set myself up over time to treat flashcarding as something I can do while only half-paying attention (watching TV, standing in line) but it's intriguing just the same.

Wow! That definitely is a lot of cards. You must have a massive vocabulary. I only do recognition, so that cuts down a lot. At my current rate, it would take me about 20 more years to reach 10,000 cards.

I heard Jenny say once in a long-ago podcast that when she was learning English her target was 20 new words EVERY DAY. I was inspired to try it, but found that I couldn't sustain that. 10 new words per day (with permission to fail) is my max target.

For my Chinese vocabulary to ever be half as good as Jenny's English (if you listen to her word choice, her English vocabulary is astoundingly large and nuanced for a non-native speaker not living in language) is still an extremely aspirational long-term goal.

I only review sentences in Anki and remembering is easier when I have audio. The easiest way I've found is to open the dialogue file in Audacity and export the sentence/sentences that I'm adding. I also have the dialogue tab opened and copy and paste the sentence right from there. When I don't have the mp3 right at my fingertips (if I'm watching something on youtube or listening to random sentences found in the cpod glossary) I have even used my computer's own mic to record something with audacity. Sure, the quality is pretty horrible. I have quite a few audio files that have someone talking, sneezing, or a phone ringing in the background. Poor audio is still better than none for me.

Root -- Interesting, thanks. Personally, I find that directing, creating, and maintaining my own content is more than half of the learning exercise from me. I've never understood the attraction of using decks that other people create. But as I've said other places before, I tend to find drudgery satisfying.

I'll also be the first to say that I know that I SHOULD be using flashcards for whole sentences, not individual words. (Sigh), vocabulary acquisition has sort of become my crack. How could something that's so wrong FEEL SO RIGHT?

I do all my full-sentence work with a pencil and paper, for which I set aside a couple of hours a week. I agree, it makes a ton of difference. Largely, I suspect, because you're constantly reinforcing the high-frequency stuff so that it's impossible to forget it. The moderate frequency and low frequency stuff doesn't stick so well that way, but everything gradually accumulates over time.

Yea, I also do love the simplicity of a simple context-free flashcard deck, quick to review, can do 100 or so cards very quickly, I did for about a year with Pleco. With Pleco entering is pretty easy, just add directly from the dictionary on the device, no need the PC at all. Anki iPhone app is a bit more limited, it's not too easy to add new items, afaik, so that's another plus for Pleco.

Both Anki and Pleco do make it a bit more difficult to attach context to cards, which is where I find iKnow is much stronger. Every word fact can have 6 different quiz modes (pairs of sound, pinyin, hanzi, and translation), and on top of it will show you one out of several example sentences when you get the anser right (with a picture and an MP3). In addition it's also useful to type pinyin for these example sentences from hearing the sound, using the same content. The progress feels much slower, but I am just hoping that context is important, or so they keep telling us here at CPod :)

As far as entering data being half of the learning -- also fully agree. You can enter your own facts on iKnow no problem, the biggest effort is finding MP3s for words and sentences, that's why i mostly used pre-made "top 3000" content up until now. In the first 1000 the most frequent characters pretty much overlap with my CPod-learnt material, so it wasn't a problem. In the second 1000 now, it's getting a bit divergent, so I am looking for an automatic way to export daily CPod vocab and expansion MP3s to a folder. Making your own content would solve this issue, but the effort of grabbing 20-40 sentence MP3's every day with Audacity still scares me a little bit, don't know about you.

My ideal situation is that the learning happens mostly by doing CPod lessons, with the vocab and expansion content magically being added to my SRS deck, with the same high-context review modes as I've gotten used to on iKnow... Yea, I know, that's a big want. The learning from entering would be replaced by the learning from the lesson, and all would be well, no overhead :) It just seems too good of a match to pass up, both CPod and the other place emphasize lexical, context based learning, and full sentences, with the only difference being CPod has a lot of content but barely any way to access it, and iKnow has great apps, but no teaching lessons...