TLDR: a long blabbering why I think reading is better or as efficient as reading+srs also known as "sentence mining" in terms of acquiring vocabulary at all stages not just when you are already "good enough". Aka how I overused anki and if I could go back not only would I use it less but probably not at all. Aka problems with SRS and how to fix them. Aka if most of the vocabulary you know is in your Anki deck(s) you are going to regret. Aka the best way to acquire vocabulary is to not care!

It's been about a year since I finished "core 10k" and started "sentence mining" and it's a good time to reflect! So, I've been studying from January 2017, about 22 months and ever since I started I was obsessed with vocabulary the most. My goal was simple, to be able to undersatand Japanese text/speech no matter the topic/setting/time period etc without constant vocabulary help. Not to downplay grammar, I did go ham on grammar first 5 or so months and I feel like it's just something that is constantly improving by interacting with the language, but just in pure quantity, vocab is much bigger problem for that goal. And I feel like I've reached it, yay! For a while actually, since sometime during this summer I've felt like I'm there, maybe it's just good old Dunning-Kruger! I don't have crazy deck graphs because I don't have a deck, so my actual passive vocabulary is 0, but since graphs and data are essential to be credible and it's necessary to flex some(/s), I typed in google "test my Japanese vocabulary" and went to the first link, so here's one graph, don't know how accurate it is though. Another statistic, [here's the stuff I've read in about a year] and if we to trust this, most of those have more than 50000 sentences each so that's ~1000000+ sentences in total. minus most of the hentai cause who reads that blasphemy! plus blanant eroges I didn't 100% but still...Also, this one goes for my man MattvsJapan! random words every time game if anyone wants!

Now that we're done with that, let's get to the point. Now that I feel like I have decent overall vocabulary, why I think flashcards are waaay overemphasized, aka every thread "how do I learn vocab" 100% monopolized by advice "get anki and add stuff there". So here are problems I see with anki. And for the sake of an argument I won't even touch problems like "knowing the card =/= knowing and being able to understand word outside anki", lets assume the most generous stance of "if it's in your SRS cycle - you know it".

    I see vocab split into 3 categories: super important, kinda useful to know, not even worth. So "super important" consists of about 1000, if I'm being super generous, 2000 words that you should know. So you could SRS them, but if you are serious about learning a language there is no way you will not see those words even for more than a week naturally, in your textbooks, teaching videos, any article, story etc you'd try to read so putting them into SRS is obsolete. Like unironically making sentence card for 私. The other side of the coin "not even worth" consists of tens of thousands of words, proverbs and expressions that you'd see once a year if you are lucky and it shoudnt even be a discussion if you should SRS that. Like unironically making sentence card for 汝.

So the most interesting category, are those inbetween. If you're unlucky you wont see them for a month or two but you'll definitely see them multiple times in a year. So the problem with SRSing these ones, is there's just too many of them(intermediate plateau?). There are tens of thousands of these, so if you are committing to SRSing them, it's going to be an endless journey, even if you add like 30 of those a day and never fail it would take multiple years, I guess for those who don't mind spending 4 years in anki every day and who consider that efficient can just commit to this, 神速!

But I thought - no! So I did it a bit differently and it worked miracles. First, I believe that amongst those tens of thousands of words not a sigle word in that group is more important to know than another one and until you know most of them you'll feel like you know nothing anyway(hence intermediate plateau). So once I assumed this, SRS of concrete words kind of lost it's value. Say I read a book and see a word I saw a month ago and I forgot what it means, if I add that sentence to SRS, now seconds I spend reading that sentence during reviews could be spent continuing reading a book and SRSing other words naturally that are just as valuable to know in the greater scheme. As a result, if you don't add that concrete word to SRS you have more chance of forgetting it again but at the same time you gave yourself more opportunities to remember new words. Namely, opportunity cost. So it this line of thinking is sound, net value of articifial SRSing should be close to 0 +-your enjoyment of doing reviews every day instead of watching Japanese. So if you like it it's cool but if you don't like it you don't have to do it and not much will be lost in the long run. Except there are other factors that make SRS relatively a bit inefficient if you're not careful and those will be the next 2 points.

2. This point will be filled with examples and anecdotes, sorry about that, but it has to be. The point being: artificial SRS is such a meme when it comes to learning a language. Now, I don't doubt the power of SRS for learning abstract information, the problem is mostly intervals. Imagine you came to your friends house and asked them for wi-fi password. If they say the password is 87654321 you'll remember it even if the next time you come visit is 2 months later, if the password is 65485643 you'll probably remember the outline but forget the actual thing in an hour. The point being intervals isn't the main thing what makes us remember information or keep it in memory. Among the words you come across while you are reading/watching Japanese will be words that you'll see once/twice and remember for a year and there will be words that you will forget in a minute. In my experience there are multiple factors that are way more important for remembering words than frequency. Clarity of the concept(comprehensible input?), ability to associate words with something you know, impactful context(both situations in stories that are so powerful you'll remember them for years and contexts in which words are so clear that word just clicks by itself) and other hidden factors that I wish were the topic of discussions when it comes to learning vocab instead of just parroting SRS intervals because science. For example, more than a year ago I was reading through "core 10k deck" and I came across 日ソ, I natuarally read the sentence and instantly deleted the card and here I am, I still remember that word even though I'm pretty sure it's impossible to encounter it in 2018. I wish I knews which forces are at work here that make me keep that word in my memory!

So saying all that, if you commit yourself to artificial SRS, you have no choice but to treat all words as if it would take equal effort to remember and keep it there, when it's not the case. So inevitably your deck will get stacked with information that you have to review but you'd have a slim chance of forgetting anyways. And I know the argument goes "but it only takes 5 seconds to review the card, so what's the big deal?" and I guess true, but the point is if you add a card to your deck that on the front says "What is my name?" and answer on the back it's useless but it doesnt waste much time but now imagine adding like 500 copies of that and adding more copies every day and my point is pure efficiency so even a second wasted is bad. I had this exact phenomena happen to me during my couple months of "sentence mining", where I would get 200 reviews in the morning and I wouldn't fail a single one and I felt like I just wasted almost an hour reading stuff that I'd not forget.

So the good thing, if you are crazy committed to SRS, there is bandaging of this in form of dead points. I know MattvsJapan talked about this also, but I remember he said a dead point of a YEAR and it's just insane. For a card in SRS to reach an interval of a year and for you to still not know that word is, yeah...In my opinion, the dead point should be a month at most, if you are faced with a flashcard and the "good" button says "1 month", just delete it, the chances are if you interacting with Japanese and the word is somewhat relevant you will see it in a month anyways making the card obsolete even from that perspective. And with that, it's also good place to adress "this fucker did core 10k and he says SRS is not that good?", the thing is, I didn't SRS core 10k, I acidentally did the correct thing not even knowing it! I had a dead point for cards of 5 days. So if I could read the sentence and "good" button sayd "5 days" I just deleted it. And for cards where I knew all the words ahead also instant delete. So when I got to the end the deck had less then 4000 cards which I deleted shortly after and with that "core 10k" took me a bit more than 3 months. So tip for those who grind core decks, please don't keep reviewing those cards forever.....

3. The other point why I think spending any time doing flashcards is inferior connects to one of the points I brought up earlier about what makes us learn words for good - impactful context. I believe this happens only when you watching or reading Japanese. Even if you "mined a sentence" the more time passes the more you'll forget the context of what was said before and after, what was the atmosphere etc and it just turns into a random sentence from tatoeba.org! So maybe some sort of "context" will stay but impactful part will be gone. And if it stays, aka if that was the scene that you remember for years you'll probably remember words they used as well rendering SRSing them obsolete. In other words, your best chance to learn words for good and for long period of times is to maximize encountering moments in stories that are impactful, when you feel like you're immersed in the story(I guess that's why those AJATT people keep parroting "immersion" in every damn sentence) and spending time in flashcard app lowers that chance, you're reading sentences devoid of any sort of impactful atmosphere.

What I'm trying to say here, if you are one of those guys who uses subs2srs to flashcard anime, just rewatch the damn episode you weirdo.

So le time has come. Here's what I feel like helped me to learn a lot, and I mean A LOT of vocab in about half a year, from winter to summer of this year, and the advice I'd give myself from the beginning. Don't try to hard. Trying to remember words shouldn't be the main goal. The main goal of looking up words while you are reading should be so you can understand what the sentence and the story is about. Learning words is just byproduct of that(That's why I wouldn't use SRS at all, creating a card means you are trying to remember that word for some reason). So once you understand what sentence is saying, move on to the next one. The goal is to encounter as many words/new words overall per day as possible. Which is controversial, I remember a couple of days ago some guy posted that he reads light novels and encounters 15 new words per page and thats every sentence so he should read something easier. I believe the opposite to be more productive. The more new words you encounter every day the least time it will take you to acquire them all and in my experience there are no diminishing returns to this at all since you are not exhausting your brain, you are just reading a story you enjoy/watching a show you enjoy. So you should be able to encounter hundreds of new words every day without care in the world if you will remember them next time you'll see those words. And in relatively(6-12 months) short amount of time you'll find yourself having nice little passive vocabulary under your belt.

So even for people who get off by pressing that "good" button in anki and need to add cards for that daily fix to feel like they learn something(been there), I would encourage to add those 10 daily card limit but after that just try to encounter as much words as possible, look them up and try to learn them naturally without a thought "I'm at my limit today so I add this one tomorrow" or "I wont add it to SRS so I'm not even going to look it up" as if flashcards is the only way to remember stuff and soon enough you'll see it works for yourselves!