Orphan Projection

Nothing much new to report, here - progress has been steady and plentiful. Took yesterday off of adding more cards to Anki, with the exception of a few based on new words (from 我輩は猫である), focusing more on reviewing, listening, reading, watching instead. Khatzumoto actually recommended taking an occasional "SRS holiday" in his latest post, which was an interesting read coinciding with my laid back day.

Anyhow, my SRS habits revolve around something like this, currently.

On adding material:

• On average, I'll add 30 new sentences from iKnow per day, with maybe one day a week off.
• Miscellaneous other unknown words I come across will also be added to Anki if I can find decent example sentences or phrases in Yahoo's dictionary - usually four or five per day, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes none.

On formatting added material

• I'll often highlight a new word in bold font that I don't know to emphasize the need to learn it over other words in the sentence or phrase. I'll often do the same while reviewing old sentences.
• On the answer side, I have a very literal word for word "translation", only including the English translation if the sentence is especially ambiguous or complicated. I feel that this helps me to keep my mind on a sentence in a Japanese grammar context.
• The answer side also contains the iKnow dictation, which serves mostly as an additional associative tool, as well as a means to train my listening (and speaking if I feel like repeating it).
• And finally, in the "reading" section of the answer side, a hiragana transcript.

An example card would be something like this:

Expression: 弟は野球が好きです。

Meaning: [sound:a91ef5b04bfc9aed1ab894254ebe238b.mp3]

Younger-brother [as-for] baseball [subj] likes is

Reading: おとうと・は・やきゅう・が・すき・です。

So far, so good. However, I do plan to include iKnow pictures when I begin step 3 in a day or two, which should contribute another level of association to words and sentences. Whether I do this by hand or let Anki's iKnow importing plugin do all the work, I'm not sure yet - I don't mind adding everything by hand, but the process of adding 30 sentences can already take a while, even without the inclusion of images (though it should be noted that adding an image to Anki is literally as easy as dragging it from the webpage to the field of choice in Anki!). On the other hand, letting Anki import everything would mean more sloppy hiragana transcripts and a bit more time reviewing on my part (as I'll have slightly less exposure to the sentences). We'll see.

And finally, I'd really like to transition into J-J dictionaries in the near future (the benefits of which have been discussed at length by Khatzumoto and RevTK folks). Perhaps when my deck is closer to 1000 entries, I'll be ready. Shouldn't be long, now!