No, the difficult part of japanese is not about vocabulary or funny symbols. I have a JLPT level 2 certification in Japanese and at this stage, the wording and kanjis is just about memory and practice. What's harder is to learn expressions, idioms, how to use them and how to understand them in different contexts. What you are saying is just like : "as long as you know words and alphabet, then you know the language". There's no way it is that simple.
And human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing.
> What's harder is to learn expressions, idioms, how to use them and how to understand them in different contexts.
Well, that's hard too. But knowing all the words involved makes it a whole lot easier.
I haven't had much success with SRS for Korean vocab. There are so many words that are just too similiar to each other.
> human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing.
I don't claim it's the same thing; I'm just making a comparison. Something like switching from SVO to SOV order isn't particularly difficult for the average programmer. Idiomatic expressions with irregular grammar are going to be problematic, granted.
Why do you feel that the SRS's utility is determined by whether the words are in context or not? In fact, the people over at AJATT[0] have recommended using sentences and never using individual words. You want to practice in the types of situations you're actually going to encounter the language in. And in almost all cases, you'll encounter Korean (and any other spoken language) in the form of whole sentences, or at least phrases.
And human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing.