Putting whole sentences into an SRS definitely beats isolated words, but it's still not a replacement for actual reading.
The AJATT guy was big on SRS, but he was also watching hours of Japanese TV each day and even playing Japanese music and various other MP3s in his sleep. He got the requisite comprehensible input. He achieved a good level of language skill, but for the time he put in it wasn't exceptional.
L2 acquisition linguists generally agree that the important thing is "massive comprehensible input". This could be reading or listening. There is disagreement on whether if input alone is enough-- hardliners such as Krashen would say yes, others would say no. However, there's little disagreement that input is the most important factor. And an SRS will never keep up with actually reading a book when it comes to input.
3 years ago, I was that guy with a huge SRS deck, reading AJATT and writing my own blog about it. If you're unconvinced with the above, all I can say is make your huge SRS deck, do it daily and then come back in a few years and let me know how it went.
Haha, no, I believe you! Just curious to hear another perspective on it... and I had forgotten that he was getting hours of passive input in addition.
It just always sounded interesting because I had reasonable success with flashcards for single words. In retrospect, that was before I had the ability to read even short stories, so maybe I am remembering the utility of them wrong, or they seemed useful because the alternative was nothing.
Comments
Putting whole sentences into an SRS definitely beats isolated words, but it's still not a replacement for actual reading.
The AJATT guy was big on SRS, but he was also watching hours of Japanese TV each day and even playing Japanese music and various other MP3s in his sleep. He got the requisite comprehensible input. He achieved a good level of language skill, but for the time he put in it wasn't exceptional.
L2 acquisition linguists generally agree that the important thing is "massive comprehensible input". This could be reading or listening. There is disagreement on whether if input alone is enough-- hardliners such as Krashen would say yes, others would say no. However, there's little disagreement that input is the most important factor. And an SRS will never keep up with actually reading a book when it comes to input.
3 years ago, I was that guy with a huge SRS deck, reading AJATT and writing my own blog about it. If you're unconvinced with the above, all I can say is make your huge SRS deck, do it daily and then come back in a few years and let me know how it went.
Haha, no, I believe you! Just curious to hear another perspective on it... and I had forgotten that he was getting hours of passive input in addition.
It just always sounded interesting because I had reasonable success with flashcards for single words. In retrospect, that was before I had the ability to read even short stories, so maybe I am remembering the utility of them wrong, or they seemed useful because the alternative was nothing.