Getting Personal with your Learning

So I need to thank my coworker Casey for this one.  Casey came in to my office to talk about a pretty specific instance of a possible use of the SRS, but it generalizes pretty well.

At our work, like at most places where teachers teach, there are student evaluations of the teacher’s performance at the end of the semester courses.  Of course, these evaluations are always in Japanese, so it can be a bit challenging to evaluate how you did if you don’t speak Japanese yourself.

Casey’s solution?  Use the comments themselves as your learning materials!  Go ahead and put them into your SRS.  Great idea!  I always printed out the positive comments and posted them on my wall, taking the time to remind myself that I do good work and reminding me what I did right, but I never considered using the comments themselves as study material. 

If you’re studying a language, I’m going to assume that you’re making an effort to communicate with speakers of that language.  Which means at some point, you will have developed some sort of correspondence with them.  Go ahead and use that correspondence with your SRS!  Everytime that card comes up, you’ll remind yourself of the real, human moments that you decided to learn the language in the first place, upping your motivation and skills at the same time.