What do you put in your SRS?

August 23, 2009 by Josh | 5 comments

I’ve been reflecting on how I use Anki, my SRS program, and I think I’ve perhaps gone a bit overboard with it. For a long while now, any unknown word that I’ve come across has gone into it – even words that I really don’t need (or even particularly want) to know. For example, a few days ago while doing reviews with my German deck, I came across a card that I had made over a year ago. The card was for the German word for “hot water tap.”

I think I pulled this word from the Using German Vocabulary textbook that I’ve mentioned before, because I’m sure I didn’t come across it in reading. It’s not an expression I ever use in English, and actually, I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard “hot water tap” used in any meaningful sentence. So why do I need it in Anki? I probably don’t, so I deleted it.

How do you decide what to put into your SRS? I know Khatzumoto basically advocates adding stuff that you find interesting, but in following that rule, I feel like I’m going to end up missing a lot of words I “need” to know. Then again, doing what I’ve been doing, I’m learning words like “hot water tap”, so perhaps only adding things that I find of interest might work.

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  1. Louis’s avatar

    Louis on August 23, 2009 at 7:26 pm

    I use anki too, for learning French and Japanese. With Japanese, I put everything in (mainly JLPT vocab words as I come across them, but any word I find goes in a great big google doc which slowly gets inserted into Anki, when I have the time) considering I only have a little patience to actually add vocab, I don’t add much at a time which prevents me from overstudying and allows me to learn a lot of weird vocab which I probably don’t need, like ‘morning-after pill’ or ’suicide by asphyxiation’

    Perhaps there’s something to be said for sticking to the basics though. And I recenty decided to add example sentences for all the words I wasn’t 100% certain of. When I get around to it. French is the same- I just began studying and got about 200 words in when I realised I wasn’t including the gender of any of the nouns I had added, or anything to indicate the gender, which is becoming a problem. Also, I was only adding cards one way, so only French-English (which is sometimes difficult because all my study materials are in Japanese…)

    I agree on the adding interesting things, vocab you think you’ll actually use in a conversation with a native speaker (and if I ever have a conversation in Japanese about the morning-after pill or suicide by asphyxiation, I’ll be set. Let’s hope I don’t ever have that conversation though.)

  2. Josh’s avatar

    Josh on August 23, 2009 at 8:20 pm

    Yeah, it sounds like you work the same way I do. I have an almost obsessive approach, in that I hate to let any unknown word go unrecorded. Which is good in that I’m sure to eventually know all of the words I really need to, but it’s also bad, because I end up with a lot of cards for things I’ll never, ever use.

  3. Jeff Lindqvist’s avatar

    Jeff Lindqvist on August 24, 2009 at 11:17 am

    I basically enter everything (for Chinese), vocabulary from the lessons or other texts I read outside class, sentences from the lessons (those that I feel provide good “grammar content”). In the latest Anki version I have, the items that I regularly “don’t know” are suspended. Which is good in a way, because they obviously haven’t entered my mind after n number of views. Now and then I go through that filter to re-activate them.

  4. doviende’s avatar

    doviende on August 24, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    Firstly, i only put phrases or full sentences into anki, except if they’re nouns that really don’t require a sentence. a lot of nouns don’t really have much “usage” information, but it still makes me nervous to just put a single word in.

    I generally get my sentences from books that i’m reading. Currently i’m reading harry potter #2 in german (“Harry Potter und die Kammer des Schreckens”), and although i understand a lot of it, i constantly come across words that i don’t know. I don’t put every single unknown word into Anki, however. I usually wait until i’ve seen a word more than once, or if there’s a certain paragraph where there were MANY words that i didn’t understand, then i concentrate more on that particular paragraph.

    I do this because i put a lot of emphasis on reading without stopping. If there’s a word that continually bothers me, then i’ll use a highlighter to mark it for later, and then go back to it later when i’m working on new anki cards. Sometimes when i go back to it later, it makes perfect sense so i don’t bother.

    Combined with this, i sometimes get some cards in anki that just annoy me. Maybe they seem useless now, or maybe i always get them wrong and they just bug me. these get deleted mercilessly. I know i’ll have no problems finding more words to put in anki, so i don’t worry about losing a couple of the stupid ones.

    Another thing i’ve been trying lately is using electronic copies of books in order to do some statistical sentence-mining. I use an emacs add-on that a friend wrote, which makes a list of all words that i have in any cards in anki, and then uses that “known” list to find words in my book that are “unknown” and are also of a high frequency. It then gives me example sentences for those words. This way, i can work through the important vocab in frequency order, which helps tremendously.