For Japanese, I use Anki as my SRS. It’s a great piece of software for studying Japanese. Here are a few reasons why:

• It guesses kanji (Chinese character) readings automatically. This saves me from having to manually type in readings.
• It has a lot of cool graphs and stats you can use to analyse your progress.
• You can customize the font size and color for all entries.

One of the downsides of Anki (and the main reason I switched to Mnemosyne for Pali) is that it doesn’t handle missed days well. If you miss two days of studying and come back on the third day, you will have three days’ worth of cards to study. Not a big deal. If you miss five days and come back on the sixth, you will have six days’ worth of cards to study. That’s annoying, but doable. If you miss 2-3 weeks due to the birth of a child, you will come back to 3 weeks’ worth of cards due! Ahhhhh!

In my case, I had 1,100+ cards backlogged. Just seeing that number on the screen made me not even want to try. I chipped away at it, very slowly, over the past two and a half months. Finally, last Friday I got that number down to zero. Some things I noticed on the journey:

• I didn’t add any new entries to my SRS for two and a half months. There was just no chance I’d get to study them with 1,100 old cards in the way. The Japanese Fight Club project saved the day here. I could still learn new Japanese by repeating movie quotes out loud.
• When the number of cards due was high, I wouldn’t answer very many in a day. Usually I’d quit after 30. There was no sense of progress and it killed my motivation to do more. Once the number got down to around 500 (early December), I was pounding them out. 100 in a day. 150 in a day. With the finish line in sight, it was easy for me to run through the cards. The first 500 took me 2 months and the last 500 took me a week. What the hell? Looks like it was all in my head.
• I had some ridiculous sentences in my SRS. I ended up purging about 230 entries. I would likely have purged more if I had thought of it earlier. I will be more selective in the future.
• I remembered most of the cards! My retention rate was 85%, even for cards that were 80 days late. Sweet!

Moral of the story: Don’t miss days. Keep up with your SRS.

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