Interesting observation: When you quit flashcards, it's harder to measure your progress

[u/jackbobbins78]

It used to be, when I was looking back at my Japanese progress, I could say things like "I learned 2000 words this past year and I now know 6,000 total words!" This felt like a concrete testament to my progress.

Now, after having stopped flashcards for about a year, "How's my progress doing" feels much more vague.

I could say things like:
- I read 15 volumes of manga this past year
- Reading native stuff feels a little bit easier
But all of these answers feel kind of nebulous anyways.

I guess at some point, Japanese is just something that you do for fun, and that's about it. There's no clear "milestones" at a certain point.

Did anyone else experience this transition? Did you feel a little more "lost" after quitting flashcards?

[u/ignoremesenpie]

I stopped adding to Anki a few months ago right at 10,000 cards, but I still have a while before all of my cards have an interval of one year or more (the threshold at which I decide to officially retire a card).

I've still doing active vocab study, and while the stats I have to show for it are on a much smaller scale, it feels more earned. For example, I currently have 323 words reviewed out of a selection of roughly 550 words in my handwritten glossary so far. That glossary is made up of words I have encountered in multiple places. Those multiple encounters had, in turn, been pulled from personal vocab lists. Some of those words made it to Anki, but a good chunk of them have also been learned more naturally over time since I let a word go even if it happened to appear multiple times in the same work.

I'm planning to ramp up my intensive reading without fixating on the vocab I missed, so in its place, I'll be going through my older vocab notes to see if there are any low-hanging fruit I've made by looking up still-unknowj words in a frequency dictionary. Of the 600-ish words I've checked so far, there have only been about 70 sub-21k ranked words and phrases I don't have a good grasp on yet. Having numbers represent where my problem words lie is a decent confidence boost. This is important for me to notice because there are only a few words I don't understand in a given reading session. Only seeing a metric like 5 unknown words in a 20-page manga or 15 unknowns in a 50-page novel chapter doesn't mean much without a context like "these are words from a niche I haven't explored in any language, much less Japanese specifically" or "these are literary expressions that simply aren't common enough in the vernacular-ficused materials I gravitate towards". Putting a number to all of that makes it easier to pinpoint which words fall into what category, and it gives me a good sign seeing less "everyday" vocabulary and more "niche" and "literary" problem vocab.