Background
I passed N1 about a year ago, and am currently trying to get closer to native-level fluency. I've been an immersion based learner from the start, and the only real 'studying' I've had in my routine is Anki for 20-30 mins/day – I do vocab cards with the word on the front, and the reading and meaning on the back. I have completely ignored handwriting to this point, and I know how to handwrite 0 kanji.
Anki
However …. I've slipped up. Haven't done Anki for like 2 months now and have a 2800 card backup. What I realized though is that I'm doing fairly OK without it. I can still immerse (in books and TV etc that I'm interested in), and when I come across a word I don't know, I just look it up and that's that.
I'm trying to figure out if getting back into this routine is worth it, or if I can just drop vocab cards altogether. In hindsight, these cards were helping me disambiguate kanji (by learning the readings; more on this below) but were NOT really helping me learn the meanings of words. I found that to grasp the meaning you really have to see a word many times in context.
Does anyone else have experience dropping Anki and/or opinions on the benefit it provides at this stage? If it matters, I have just over 11k words "Mature" in my deck (https://i.imgur.com/tNR3e3s.png)
Writing Practice
Reflecting, I realized that the main benefit my vocab cards were giving me was practice disambiguating kanji, through learning the readings of various words. For example it trained my brain to be able to recognize the difference between 系 and 係 and which is which. And to be able to pattern match that the kanji 汚 is the same in 汚い and 汚物.
However, this benefit is sort of hitting a wall and providing diminishing returns nowadays. I wonder if I could speed it up by learning how to handwrite? My thinking is if I know how to handwrite a word then I absolutely HAVE to know all the kanji in the word and their radicals etc. Meaning I'd obviously have no trouble pattern matching kanji across words, or disambiguating similar looking kanji.
Anyone have experience or opinions about this? Does my reasoning make sense, and I should drop vocab cards in favor of writing practice? Or should I bite the bullet and do both?
by njdelima