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[imron]

. But I suppose with your system you'd just add it (back) to your Pleco SRS so it would achieve exactly the same thing.

Precisely! You'll still be doing multiple revisions when you come across forgotten words, all that happens is that at the mid- to long-term level the review interval is controlled more by your current reading habits rather than the spaced-repetition algorithm, with the flascarding coming in to play in the shorter term once your reading habits determine that a word is useful to you. This means that you're spending more time on words that are relevant to you and less time on words that aren't.

or had more time to spend reading Chinese

If only you didn't have such a large deck and weren't spending so much time on flashcard revision

Ok, so I'm only partly joking when I say that, but on a more serious note, it is possible to try my method out without losing anything. Rather than delete your old deck, just keep it around, but start a new one. Then only add new words to the new deck and only add them as you come across them in reading. Once it gets to the point of taking too long to review, start another new deck (and maybe merge the other one in with your older one if you don't want to lose those words). Repeat as necessary until you find it either works for you or it doesn't. But make sure you're getting enough reading material as input. This might require sacrificing a few reviews on your old deck, but they can easily be gotten back over time, or simply not worried about if you decide starting fresh actually works quite well.

I also think "natural SRS" is a slightly daft phrase: reading isn't SRS, natural or otherwise, it's reading

I don't mind it so much. Yes, it might just be reading but it's also any other form of natural exposure to a word. I think where this term comes in useful is that sometimes people can get so caught up in the SRS mindset and worried about upsetting the algorithm, that it can help to say, you know what, the algorithm and the revisions aren't the important thing, the whole point of doing this is to be able to use the language, so don't worry about going out and using it.

I've always felt that words I would only see in SRS aren't strongly learned: the real neural connections will normally only be strongly made once I've seen the word "in the wild", e.g. in a newspaper or book.

I agree with this completely, which is partly why I do things the way I do. It helps ensure that the neural connection has a strong starting point before being added to a flashcard, and the flashcards then reinforce that connection, rather than the other way which is to start with a weak connection and wait for the word to appear in reading before it gets made strong. It also means that forgotten words will wait until another strong connection is made through reading before being added back to the deck.

[Guest realmayo]

I should make clear, even though my deck is 13,000+ words it only takes 30 minutes a day, and that's 10 mins here, 10 mins there during quiet periods at work. So it's no weight on my shoulders.

Your suggestion is an interesting one. But I don't see the point for me because my time spent on SRS is not onerous and it's not usually time that I would otherwise be spending reading Chinese. I keep my deck manageable by limiting the number of new cards.

I read a book or a newspaper or a 锵锵三人行 transcript and add 10-20 words from that process. Any more words I come across that day I don't add. I suppose I could add any surplus to a new deck which I then delete after a few months.

But I don't see the point: I'm not confident that I am able to read enough to see those now-discarded words again before I'd forget them. It would only work if I was to abandon my main deck too. And I won't do that because the main deck allows to me remember words "for free", i.e. with negligible requirements on my time or energy.

Again, if I was reading quicker and better then the attraction of SRS would diminish as a long-term tool and perhaps I'd adopt your approach of seeing it as a short to medium way of pushing a new word into the memory and then letting it sink or swim there depending on how often I see it again in future reading. But that's for the future.

Also on my last point I should say that I'm not grabbing words from a dictionary and adding them to Anki: I find them in the wild, add them to Anki (often adding the sentence they occurred in to the 'answer' field). I then rely on SRS to keep the synapse alive until the next time I see them in the wild.

The battle for brain-space is vicious, it's "use it or lose it" up there and until I'm a faster reader I need the help that SRS provides.

[Lu]

The other argument for SRS is hard for me to make confidently but I've always felt that words I would only see in SRS aren't strongly learned: the real neural connections will normally only be strongly made once I've seen the word "in the wild", e.g. in a newspaper or book. But that process doesn't just involve seeing the word in a book, it involves seeing it, and successfully making an effort to remember it.

One final thought about SRS. It's tempting to think that SRS is better than sitting with a written-out list of new vocab because it's more modern. But, if you subscribe to the newer notions that our brains are quite plastic things, maybe the old-fashioned way of learning vocab was easy for people who had to do lots of rote-learning at school, and SRS is more suited for people who didn't do much of that at school and who are used to flicking from one thing to another all the time online. The more I read about brain plasticity the more I wish I'd done more rote-learning at school and regret my rather condescending attitude to that aspect of education in China.

I have done a lot of rote-learning in secondary school, first from lists, later making my own flashcards. With the flashcards I often found that by the time I was finished making them, I would half know the vocab already. There were some computer programs with flashcards, but it sure would have been nice to have Anki (on a phone) at the time. I don't really see though how it's different from learning from a word list, in the end it's pretty much the same thing, except the word list goes into a computer. The only difference is that you're fed the vocab at a scientifically determined rate, and that's not actually that new either: my French textbook did it too, repeating words in vocab lists in later chapters.

I now still make my own flashcards, which takes some time, which is part of the reason my deck is pretty small compared with those of you (also because I only re-started using Anki a month ago). I add one or two example sentences to each card, usually the sentence from the wild that I saw the word in and another one from the dictionary, both to give me an idea of the way the word is used and to help me remember the meaning. In the past I would just try to read more and look up some of the words I didn't know, but I always found myself looking up the same words again. Actually learning them works better.

[imron]

Yes it's important to actually spend time learning the words rather than just looking them up and moving on.

I just want to clarify I'm not suggesting anyone to do the latter (note the all important '+' in my post above). Words still get added to flashcards for drilling and learning over however long it takes to fill a deck (usually a few months) with longer term intervals for forgotten words being controlled by your reading.

[Olle Linge]

Your suggestion is an interesting one. But I don't see the point for me because my time spent on SRS is not onerous and it's not usually time that I would otherwise be spending reading Chinese. I keep my deck manageable by limiting the number of new cards.

This is the key and the reason I think SRS is so good. If the time I spent reviewing flashcards started influencing the time I have for reading Chinese, I would seriously consider changing my studying habits, but since that isn't the case, I think SRS is an extremely efficient way of maintaining and expanding vocabulary. This doesn't mean that it's vastly superior to other methods in theory but it definitely is in practice.