SRS: How NOT to Delete Cards

Those of you who read any AJATT at all will notice that I am a huge advocate of card deletion. I am a believer!…In the healing power of throwing away. It’s digital danshari (断捨離＝だんしゃり) for the SRS generation. But, as in all things, while there are many right ways to do it, there are also some wrong ways. Some ineffective ways. Exhibit A — also sprach ganko:

When I experimented with SRS across a period of about a year I found myself repeating the following pattern:

1. Take interest in a method (i.e. cloze), or a subset of the language (i.e. a specific drama, or dramas in general, etc.);
2. create anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred cards;
3. work with them for a period lasting somewhere between a week and a couple months;
4. find myself growing so disinterested with working on every card that I would
5. delete the whole deck and start again.

After a few iterations of this, I felt like all the time spent gathering and making these cards was disproportionate to the amount that I was learning, because I was wiping the slate almost, if not completely clean, too frequently.

EE-EEEN! WRONG! Bad! Which part? The part in red up there, step 5: “delete the whole deck and start again”. This is the wrong way to do it. A wrong way to do it. A very bad way of going about it. Here is a new principle, a rule of thumb, for your SRSing lifestyle: Point deletion good. Bulk deletion good. Total deletion bad.

• Small deletion: GOOD
• Frequent deletion: GOOD
• Bulk deletion (e.g. Surusu’s culling, leach-killing and other “decimation“ ¹ modes): GOOD
• Total, clean-slate deletion (as above): BAD

As a general rule (to which there may be exceptions with which we will not concern ourselves today), total, clean-slate deletion is a BAD thing. A very BAD thing. Deletion is your first resort, yes. But clean-slate deletion is not! Take total deletion off the table of options, because it basically doesn’t belong there. ²

Why is total, clean-slate deletion such a bad thing? Surely, if deletion is good, and bulk deletion is good, then even more deletion — total deletion — is even better? Well, そうは行かないわ. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not linear. More is not always better. At some point, there is a need for some level of finesse, and this is coming from someone who loves quick-and-dirty, brute forcey methods — I literally burned my suits in protest at the world; I own no suits — so you know I mean it: when I say finesse is called for, it’s really called for. Recall that even in the flood story arc in that rather famous book of Semitic legends, there was carry-over — a whole human family plus two of every animal, kept on board a ship until things died down.

So, again, why is total, clean-slate deletion such a bad thing? Well, it’s the difference between annihilation and evolution. Total deletion is annihilation — destruction without learning, destructive destruction, if you will. It’s like they say on Hoarders, a show which I clearly watch too much, don’t judge me, I have Japanese friends over and we indulge — anyway! — you can’t just yank their (the hoarders’) crap and burn their house down, much as you might want to: they have to learn the lesson of throwing things away; they have to learn how to make decisions, because, fundamentally, it’s not their stuff that’s oppressing them, it’s their own minds(ets), their own habits, their own faulty decision-making processes about stuff.

My mum, who is, how you say…classist, nationalist and racist…would often say things like: “you can take a man out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the man”. Hippies would say: “wherever you go, there you are”. In SRS terms, this means that the same poor habits of card selection will haunt you until you learn how to select cards in a way that is right for you. And the way you learn that is not by simply burning the house down and running away to a new house where you’ll just repeat the same process (like those families in Hoarders that buy two houses and then fill them both up with sheet), but by sifting through, sometimes by hand (manual, singleton, “point” deletion), sometimes with a leafblower (bulk deletion) and all the while finding out what did work, what did go right, and building off of that.

When you delete in toto, you lose the lesson. You lose the bathwater and the baby. You lose the chance to truly see and learn not only what and how you went wrong, but also what went right! In virtually every deck, no matter how apparently bad, there are good cards. Delete, yes. Delete. Delete lavishly. Delete liberally. Delete pre-emptively. Delete 50%. Delete 90%. Dare I say it, delete 99%. Go to town. But hold on to the chosen few that work, the good cards, the righteous cards, for it is with these cards that you shall repopulate the Earth I mean deck.

These good cards, in format and content, are the seeds of a bright future. In all your killing, don’t kill your future. The temptation is to start afresh, to start clean. It’s like when people go back and do RTK all over again right from the beginning (another practice I do not recommend). No. Don’t start clean. Start dirty. Start where you are right now, with what you’ve got right now.

OK, let’s review:

• Point deletion (singletons): GOOD
• Bulk deletion (multiples): GOOD
• Total deletion (annihilation): BAD