Well, where am I currently, in my journey... It's difficult to say, exactly. I estimate that I'm probably somewhere around 3,000 cards in my SRS, not counting either of my kanji decks (oldskool keyword-to-kanji Heisig, and new Japanese word-to-kanji deck).
My old deck of 900~ cards was deleted with prejudice, never to be missed again, and mostly consisted of various tidbits from Smart.fm, 2001KO and dictionaries. I simply couldn't bear going through that thing again - the boredom and drudgery drove me nuts, so I did the most sensible thing that came to mind. DELETED!
My newer, vocabulary and onyomi-centered deck (with sentences almost exclusively from Smart.fm) topped out at exactly 1,000. While I can generally force myself to plow through its reviews, it's getting more and more monotonous as time goes on, and I can't really foresee myself adding very many new cards to it (for reasons I'll get into later). This will probably mark its demise in the near future, though I'll keep it around for the time being as it's served me quite well.
The rest of my decks are miscellaneous bits and pieces such as grammar points and so forth.
For the most part, I feel like I've been pretty lazy when it comes to actually adding material. Well, strike that - I know I've been lazy. On my hot streaks, I can add 50 or more cards per day for a week straight. But more typically, I hover between 20-30 and take a heck of a lot of days off.
Actually, I haven't added one new card in at least three weeks, and my reviewing has taken a sharp decline as well. This is thanks in no small part to a very busy June, but I also hit a massive wall of SRS burnout somewhere around my 1,000th card in the aforementioned vocabulary deck. Life happened, I had suddenly come to a screeching halt, and it took me over a week to get back to my studies... which didn't include very much SRSing. Try as I might, I just couldn't justify the frustration and tedium when I had hours upon hours of drama, anime, games, books and various listening material to indulge in. Of course, this wasn't necessarily a problem inherent in SRS itself and more to do with my dull sentence material, but I'll get to that part yet...
At this point, my hard drive was pretty much full with anime and drama. I have a 500GB drive, which isn't enormous by today's standards, but considering how conservative I tend to be with space, for me to fill the poor thing takes some serious downloadage. Before I knew it, I was up to my neck in roughly a dozen anime series and a handful of dramas, as well as about a half dozen movies and a few good gigabytes of audiobooks, podcasts and radiocasts. よしっ！I was ready to rock.
A main character so remarkably badass, he can make pointed ears, makeup and nail polish look cool. (モノノ怪 (eng))
Of course, all of these things have one thing in common as far as studying goes - they're all listening material. At this point (roughly one month ago), I felt like my reading comprehension and vocabulary had "leveled up" significantly, but my listening really left something to be desired. Even if I knew all the words in a spoken sentence, it'd still take my brain a few extra seconds to actually process it all into something I understood, unless said sentence was a phrase very familiar to me. Clearly, this was a problem stemming from my lack of input on the listening side - something I knew I've been neglecting, but... well, you know me and neglect, don't you?
For about a week straight, my studying involved little else but watching drama and anime, and listening to podcasts - very little SRS review, and just enough reading to keep me sharp. Though I'd have periods of several seconds where I didn't understand diddlysquat, I began to notice my listening comprehension improve steadily with each hour I invested in my active listening. After some time, I was able to follow the story pretty reliably, at least getting "the gist" of things, even if I missed a lot of the details otherwise.
I've been trying to get in at least an hour of active listening material each day, ideally two if time permits. Gradually, my listening is definitely improving.
Meanwhile, I've kicked up my reading, as well. I've found a goldmine in 16-bit RPG classics, which are packed with text and generally pretty easy on vocabulary while still introducing plenty of interesting new words. I can quite easily play through and understand the majority of dialogue, understanding the details of storyline and rarely getting into a "wait, where am I supposed to go, again?" situation.
Sadly, the chocobo kinda got screwed when it comes to screen time.
I sorta got bored with FF6 (knowing the game inside and out kinda does that eventually...) so I picked up FF5, a game I've actually never beaten and had a massive craving to play through. Though lighter on story than FF6 (and arguably, FF4), FF5's dialogue is also surprisingly easier. Whereas FF6 is packed with dialect and (comparatively) complicated vocabulary, FF5 is really a piece of cake. I stop and look up words frequently, but mostly for completion's sake; if there's one word in a sentence I don't understand and I haven't looked one up in a while, well hey, why not? Otherwise, I tend to either work things out through context, ignore unknown words for the time being or look up only the repeating vocabulary I come across (I figured it was probably important to look up 流砂 after having been warned by several NPCs...).
I figure I probably understand about 70% of the game, which is more than enough to understand what's going on at any given time, though I miss out on nuances and quite a few of the hiragana words (kanji has seriously spoiled me - never thought I'd see the day).
As with my listening, all of this reading via RPGs has done a heck of a lot in the past month to improve my comprehension, speed and (to a lesser extent) vocabulary and grammar. I absolutely intend on playing through more of these puppies once I complete 5!
Ahh, and tonight I had planned to start a fresh, brand new SRS deck - the next step in my SRSing cycle of life. I keep a list of all of the words I look up while playing RPGs, and nearly all of them are awesome words I'd like to memorize, so SRSing them in sentences seems like a logical step.
Then more SRS rage kicked in. This time, because Anki decided it was a great time to tard out on me, bugging up whenever I tried to modify the deck properties of a new deck. This is sort of a show stopper, since I really need to customize fields to get a deck to my liking - not to mention, I won't trust any SRS deck with my data if I suspect it's gonna toss its cookies at any moment.
Arrrrgh. We'll see if I can't get this bug sorted out soon, but my "screw it all" side might just opt to keep up the reading and listening, SRS be damned. SRS is absolutely the most efficient way of retaining knowledge, but boy, can it be a headache.
When I seriously get back into the swing of things, I'll be adding things at a much slower, more limited pace of only the little goodies I really want to remember. I finally feel as though I'm now at the point where I can cherry pick, without stumbling around barefoot in a dark room full of mousetraps, now that my language abilities are at a far more sustainable level. Now I can really watch and listen to and play things and understand enough to actually enjoy them, something I struggled with in the past. キリスト神神様、it's taken me long enough.
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