I said I was going to talk more about Anki vs. Smart.fm/iKnow the other day. This post on Nihongoup: The end of smart.fm tells you the whole story of what happened to that service. I’m not feeling to mad about it; it seemed to good to be true when I started to use it, and I feel lucky now that it got me back into more serious studying cause I was just screwing around. But it wasn’t perfect. It they had kept it just like was and made it, like, $5/month, I would have stuck with it. The $10-12 a month is not so bad, but the way they did it sucked. Instead I gave my money to Koichi Ko’s Textfugu. He had a perfectly timed sale for lifetime accounts. (Too perfect…)

Koichi had been using Smart.fm himself, putting up a ton a free lessons. He said to he would be switching to Anki. So did a lot of users in the various comments sections. One of these pointed towards the Smart.fm Importer (which no longer works of course). I’ve been able to continue all the lessons I had as decks. Don’t feel like you’ve missed out on too much because you can still get the main courses which have been uploaded wherever these things get uploaded. I started on Smart.fm with Core 6000, because I am an arrogant buffoon. I then went back and worked through the entire Core 2000, which I’m reviewing now on Anki. So right now I’ve got steps 1-10 of 2000 and step 1 of 6000 being reviewed. I’ve given priority to getting through the whole 6000 course but I’m also doing Textfugu’s Transitive & Intransitive Verbs. Then I’ve got these user-made ones which are vocab lists based on songs. A couple were from the Learn Japanese Through Music online classes, which I got into through someone on Last.fm weirdly enough. I wound up getting more out of the non-class material. I’m sure most people learn the opposite way better. (This course used to be on edufire, which I had completely forgotten about till just now…oh crap. I just never got into it.)

I think I’m learning most with Anki. I enjoy classes and videos and readings and whatnot, but I don’t retain enough. I feel smarter doing those things, but Anki makes you feel dumber and dumber. THAT’S how you know it’s working. The thing about Smart.fm was it was a lot easier to feel like you were learning more than you were. There was multiple choice questions; sentences were an option, a separate section with fill-in-the-blanks! It was more like a video game than studying. (There was also a straight up game that tested speed…damn I’m doing a pretty good selling this thing that doesn’t exist anymore…I don’t know how much they changed.)

Screw all the bullshit, I’m trying to track my damn progress. I took a screencap at the beginning of the month and one this morning:

Huh.

Ahh, fuck. This tells me nothing. Except I’m another day behind. I did get that down to only a week behind at some point in the month. It’s obvious I’m doing too many decks at once but I can’t undo that now. I thought the download option might go away entirely so I got every deck loaded in there. And the song decks aren’t nearly as big as the real ones, I should be able to “finish” them this month. (They never end, the review time just gets longer.) I should be able to clear out the new cards anyway. I’ve cleared out some of them already. Let’s make a list here and meet back here next month. [Why not cap the whole thing and put it behind a cut.]

That’s the stuff. Ok. I’m wanna talk some crap about some of these song decks but I’ll save it. The real shame about them is most of them were works in progress. There’s no reason they can’t be improved upon and put up for d/l. They could even be traded with version numbers. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

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