Using Cram to learn new material

Bunpro
#1

I think I’ve found a study workflow that’s going to work well for me. Basically it’s just using Cram on grammar points I didn’t learn yet.

  • Go to Lessons and select one lesson I want to study (e.g. N4 Lesson 8)

  • Read ALL the grammar points in the lesson (e.g. all 18 of them for N4 Lesson 8)

  • Take notes in a separate document. I include a couple example sentences and syntax hints for each grammar point.

  • Go to Cram and select everything in the lesson (e.g. N4 Lesson 8). Set “Number of Questions per Grammar Point” to 2, so it generates about 40 reviews.

  • Do the reviews like I’m taking an open note test. I’ll try to answer everything without notes, but I’ll check my notes any time I get stuck.

  • Re-test myself once per day or whenever I can. Hopefully using notes less and less each time.

  • Keep adding cards to SRS at the normal 3/day pace so reviews don’t pile up

I think this has a lot of advantages:

  • Easy grammar points are learned and gotten out of the way quickly

  • Difficult grammar points get more attention

  • It incentivizes me to take good notes

  • It should help avoid synonym hell (I can figure them out all at once instead of adding them one at a time and losing context)

  • It should let me spend less time grinding SRS with much fewer ghost reviews

Disadvantage: Spending an hour plus to write notes for a new lesson.

Not sure how sustainable this can be for N3+, but is anyone else doing something like this?

7 Likes
#2

I think if you’ve found something that’s both efficient but also helping you retain information, you should ride it as long as possible before one of the variables begins to change. The ‘fun’ part about learning is that different things work for different people, and it’s cool to hear and see examples of it.

Personally I don’t think I’d have the brainpower to absorb all of a lesson’s information in one sitting. Using Cram though I think is really underrated, I sincerely hope that after the big update to it that more and more people begin to use it. In the past people have said a route they would take would be this:

  1. Learn X grammar points per weekday (or weekend if you’re feeling spicy)
  2. Do a Lesson cram at the end on Sunday to see how much information has been retained
  3. Re-study anything that you’re slightly unsure about

Whether or not this leads to “overstudying” (if that’s even a thing), I have no clue. But especially with the introduction of being able to cram sentence audio, I think there are a lot of different ways it can be utilized throughout normal studying.

Feel free to update this thread from time to time with anything you are willing to share. I think it’d be very, very valuable to new (and old!) learners about what worked for someone and what they needed to tweak to keep continuing down the path of success.

7 Likes
#3

Wow, I never thought of using it like that. I’ve only used it for grammar points I’ve marked that I have trouble with and keep forcing myself to try to grasp it. I will definitely give this a try.

4 Likes
#4

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Yeah, I don’t want to say anyone should feel obligated to do that. I just got the idea because the Cram interface made it very simple to select the full lesson. So I thought: why not try it?

I’ll probably close out N4 Lesson 10 this weekend (ignoring my own advice about not adding too many reviews). It helps that some of the N4 points are stuff I’ve been exposed to but just hadn’t gotten to in the Bunpro list yet.

I’ll definitely wait a while for my review workload to settle down before I add any N3 reviews.

3 Likes
#5

Yeah, I hate that feeling of “forcing myself to try to grasp it”, which led me to this.

SRS is a very efficient tool for not forgetting things you learned, but there are some things I don’t learn well from just reading and I really need to do some homework problems to make things click.

2 Likes
#6

So happy to hear that! Like mentioned previously, if you have any feedback (good or bad!) please feel free to reach out whenever you’d like to let me know. I’m super happy with how the new Cram turned out, but we can always make things better, and user feedback is the perfect way to let us know exactly what you all are experiencing and going through~