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+--- Thread: Goodbye Sentences (/thread-4602.html)
Goodbye Sentences - igordesu - 2009-12-16
@burritolingus: I know, it is a bit clunky, and there really isn't very much content to choose from. But...that's why I import most of my stuff
There's a website on the web that displays all the Haruhi novels, and I also found the Alice in Wonderland stuff in translation for free on web. And God knows there are enough news articles and that stuff on the internet, so I'm good for a while with the content 
Goodbye Sentences - yukamina - 2009-12-16
PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:Oh, and I play the Japanese version of Pokemon games almost everyday if nothing else for recreation. That and Tokyo MX or well, music.One thing you could do is write down new words from the game as you play, and SRS them afterward. You can look them up when you write them down, or when you SRS them.
My ideal learning method is reading a lot, and SRSing the new words I pick out from the reading. It's been my method for over a year, when people here would start hissing at the idea of learning isolated words. Funny how methods here drift over time. Unfortunately I'm a lazy learner and I don't do this too often.
Goodbye Sentences - RaySan - 2009-12-19
IceCream Wrote:Here's what i would advocate:Hi Icecream!
1.) Read the basic and essential grammar sections of Tae Kim, or whatever grammar guide you prefer. DO NOT SRS.
2.) Pick an easy drama, such as "my girl", download, download japanese subs, watch with english subs. SRS any sentence you like, along with sentences you think may be common phrases and expressions. Use Tae Kim / your own grammar guide, along with the english subs, to work out the grammar. Ask questions when you need to.
3.) After about a month / 2 months of doing this with various easy dramas, start your vocabulary deck. Don't do the whole core 6k at once. Start with the commonest kanji, and unsuspend by compounds. (using a common kanji-by-grade book is good for this).
4.) Set a limit to the vocabulary you want to learn, say, every compound with a kanji in 1st grade, or 1 week of time. Resuspend ALL kanji you can't remember after a few direct failures, as you will definately come to that compound again later.
5.) Go back to srsing drama for a set length of time (2-3 weeks), while keeping up with your reviews on the vocab. This way, you get your vocab in chunks, and you let it settle and sink in while you read and listen more. You will progress faster this way than trying to learn a whole bunch at a time.
6.) Repeat... go back to vocab, go back to drama, repeat repeat repeat.
7.) Stop using english subs as soon as you feel semi-comfortable, and also use a J-J dictionary when you can.
Thanks for sharing your method.
I was wondering which kanji by grade book you would recommend?
Thanks!
Goodbye Sentences - RaySan - 2009-12-22
Thanks IceCream
Goodbye Sentences - Blank - 2010-02-11
Mezbup or anyone else who's been SRSing vocab instead of sentences for a while, how's it been working out? I'm coming to a point here where I may make that transition as well, and was wondering if you think it was a good move, whether there's anything you'd do differently, and all that.
Goodbye Sentences - Tobberoth - 2010-02-11
Blank Wrote:Mezbup or anyone else who's been SRSing vocab instead of sentences for a while, how's it been working out? I'm coming to a point here where I may make that transition as well, and was wondering if you think it was a good move, whether there's anything you'd do differently, and all that.It's working out really well for me. It's much faster and I haven't felt any hit in my understanding of the words. The reviews are slightly harder, but at the same time, I feel like I learn the words better, I have a better chance of understanding them in a new context.
Goodbye Sentences - nest0r - 2010-02-11
I've tried both ways in the past, all sentences, all single word, but to clarify some stuff I mentioned before, now I do 'both', but like so, with subs2srs decks: The 'sentence' cards are all in one deck with video clips. I don't target/prioritize vocabulary for those, I prioritize the audio and the grammar and understanding as a whole. So to prepare to do a set of new sentence cards in that deck, I take all the vocabulary I don't know from those sentences, and do those as single word cards in a separate deck--sometimes with audio from Breen's dictionary or TTS, maybe with pictures (haven't bothered with that in a while, though, too much trouble) I dragged from a Google image search.
That goes pretty quickly, and after I've passed them a couple times i.e. when they're somewhat mature, then I go back to the other deck and it's much easier to just work on parsing the grammar and focusing on listening, etc., for the entire sentence. In that sense, I have no problem picking up vocabulary quickly but still get some SRSed contextual benefits. It's just a matter of reducing overhead but trying to keep the complementary relationships.
To highlight some terms I think in: From: http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/tesl-ej/ej32/a1.htm - "Corpora come in many shapes and sizes, because they are built to serve different purposes. [3] There are two philosophies behind their design, leading to the distinction between reference and monitor corpora. Reference corpora have a fixed size; that is, they are not expandable (e.g., the British National Corpus), whereas monitor corpora are expandable; that is, texts are continuously being added (e.g., the Bank of English). Another design-related distinction is whether a corpus contains whole texts, or merely samples of a specified length. The latter option allows a greater variety of texts to be included in a corpus of a given size.
In terms of content, corpora can be either general, that is, attempt to reflect a specific language or variety in all its contexts of use (e.g., the American National Corpus), or specialised, that is, aim to focus on specific contexts and users (e.g., Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), and they can contain written or spoken language. Corpora can also represent the different varieties of a single language. For example, the International Corpus of English (ICE) contains one-million-word corpora representative of different varieties of English (British, Indian, Singaporean, etc.). As implied in the previous section, corpora may contain language produced by native or non-native speakers (usually learners). Finally, corpora can be monolingual (i.e., contain samples of only one language), or multilingual. Multilingual corpora are of two types: they can contain the same text-types in different languages, or they can contain the same texts translated into different languages, in which case they are also known as parallel corpora (Hunston, 2002; Kennedy, 1998; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; Meyer, 2002)."
So at the moment, in essence, I've always got a vocabulary deck and a sentence deck. I think of them as a general/reference corpus (sentences) and a specialized/monitor corpus (words). Well actually my KO2001/smart.fm deck is more of a reference corpus as it doesn't 'grow' and I use it for kind of all-purpose stuff, and then you could think of all subs2srs stuff as specialized/monitor work with specific goals, that're always changing in size.
Then there's my extemporaneous stuff, where I just stick interesting words or small phrases into the vocabulary deck as I come across them.
Point being, it's working extremely well for me, but I think it works best post-foundation stage. Personally I prefer having those complementary aspects in the SRS, but I could see mass vocab working well alongside mass media input.
Goodbye Sentences - mezbup - 2010-02-11
It's going flippin awesome. I've noticed a definite increase in reading ability, especially in news and tech fields but I think general reading has doubled. I was reading a kanken site with virtually 0 problems over the whole site.
I also find I'm reading more and more every day because I'm really enjoying it. The minimum amount to put into anki is 30 words a day but lately it hits 50 very quickly and climbs to 80 if I read lots and lots. It's really motivating being able to move through 1000 vocab so quickly.
I've also started doing something new; saving the video clip for every news article I read so I have them looping in a playlist to really level up my ability to understand the news and drill in the vocab by ear too. I've also decided I'm going to capture the audio of sentences I like from dorama and collect those to play in a seperate playlist.
I kinda figured out that tactic after listening to a certain podcast so much I could automatically parrot the opening and closing announcements at full speed just because I'd heard them so many damn times so I thought why not give it a try for sentences? Haven't realllllly started doing it yet but I've only just started collecting the news clips.
Goodbye Sentences - TheVinster - 2010-02-11
God, I can't wait until I'm at a higher level like you guys. It seems a lot more fun and motivational. It's tough for me right now, but seeing you guys succeed so well kind of gives me something to work toward.
Goodbye Sentences - Blank - 2010-02-11
Cool, thanks. I believe I'll start a vocab deck before too long.
TheVinster: I feel the same way about people who are more advanced than I am. Like you said, it just gives us all something to work towards!
Goodbye Sentences - Grinkers - 2010-02-12
I've been doing it for a few days now, so I haven't really noticed any gains/losses compared to full sentences. I do however notice that cards are much easier to review.
Also I don't think it's a "goodbye to every sentence". There's always going to be some sentences that are very useful as a sentence instead of just a vocabulary word. I think just the freedom from "It MUST be a sentence" is good enough for less bulky reviewing.
Goodbye Sentences - Asriel - 2010-02-12
Wow, there have been some really long posts in here, and the entire thread was a tl;dr
What I've discovered in my studies, although I do have the advantage of being in Japan right now:
SRSing vocab in isolation: EXCELLENT***
***caveat: depending on how you learned the vocab, and whether it's something that will come up again.
To me, SRS is simply for "this is something that I don't want to forget"
It's a reviewing tool, not a learning tool.
What I do is: read/watch/listen to native media all the time. If there's a word that I like, or a word that I want to learn, I write it down, or put it in my phone, etc. Then, I head over to http://www.alc.co.jp/ or other such sites, and see how it can be used.
Stick it in my SRS list, and put an *gasp* english definition on the back, perhaps with some of alc's "examples" that they have.
It's generally very easy to remember the context, especially if it comes from something that will come up again, like a book.
Grammar and such...well, that's different.
Goodbye Sentences - mezbup - 2010-02-12
Asriel Wrote:Grammar and such...well, that's different.The plus side i've found with the vocab deck is that I'm not bogged down reading sentence reviews so I actually read a lot more real Japanese and this has really helped me in terms of understanding grammar. Some stuff that previously was a little shaky or that I didn't understand that well is starting to really become second nature when reading
I think sentences work well for an OUTPUT deck.
Goodbye Sentences - raseru - 2010-02-12
I'm pretty much the opposite of you guys. I've started with vocab decks and slowly have been starting sentence decks to see what all the hype is about.
My input? Both have their pros and cons. One thing I do follow though is that if you're reviewing more than you're reading, then you're doing it wrong.
Now, the problem with sentences is that often you find sentences that suck for SRS and they take forever to put in
I'm getting my sentences from books that I downloaded in txt form. This allows me to copy and paste them in. Then I use the C command to copy the hard words straight from rikaichan and paste them in. This allows me to operate insanely fast so I can continue reading without too much hindrance.
For vocabulary, they have multiple meanings and you can be overwhelmed if you add too many a day.
I'd suggest not going too crazy and adding over 50 words a day or so because you tend to not retain very well when you cram too hard. Take priorities, and add the better words, like べた over 排卵日 (unless you're going at a slow pace, then no worries).
Also, I'd recommend adding sentences for really vague words.
I also choose a definition of the tons of definitions you get from rikai-chan and underline it for vocab and sentences. You can't be expected to learn multiple meanings at once. It's very important to find that closer definition when you first encounter the word, otherwise you won't be able to tell later when you add it in.
Goodbye Sentences - mezbup - 2010-02-12
Holy crap I did NOT know about the C command! productivity +1!
I find if I know the scope of the meaning say there's 3 - 5 definitions, so long as I can spout off 1 or 2 of them and have a feel for what else it means then I'm cool with that. Once you see it again in context your brain puts the pieces back together pretty well.
There's definitely a sweet spot for adding just the right amount of cards but It depends on the person. It has no impact on my retention how many I add a day with my vocab deck but it does have an impact on motivation if I do too much for too many days in a row.
Goodbye Sentences - Jarvik7 - 2010-02-12
C command sucks, use S command and the N command. That is how I add 200+ words per day
Goodbye Sentences - raseru - 2010-02-12
not a fan of the S command. I've used it but I find that I can't remember which meaning the word is closer to without consulting a dictionary which is time consuming. The more meanings you try to learn, the more screwy it gets. I always pick the most suitable one from the get-go
Goodbye Sentences - mezbup - 2010-02-12
Woah... it's even set up to perfectly import into Anki at the end of the day. This ***** rocks!
I think i'll still do what I always do and that's when mousing over it really just have a little think about the word and try to take it in and get it into my mind. Then I can just hit S and it's waiting in a nice list for me at the end of the day. Brilliant.
Goodbye Sentences - chochajin - 2010-02-12
That's quite an interesting turning point if you ask me.
I remember the times when most users here were like: Vocab decks are EVIL! And you don't know how and when to use a word properly if you learn it isolated. Thus you should learn them within a sentence etc. etc.
I wonder why the mainstream now is "back to vocab decks". Hmm.
Anyway, do you just do Japanese -> English or how exactly do your vocab decks look?
And I didn't know about the "C command" either, awesome!!
Goodbye Sentences - mezbup - 2010-02-12
I advocate sentences for your first 3000 or so words (something like KO2001 or Core) and after that you can do without them provided you do a lot of reading every day. They're good in that sort of an environment. I don't think their any good for canned vocab from a list, only stuff you actually come across.
I have 3 fields
Front: Kanji word
Back: Hiragana
English defs from rikaichan
Goodbye Sentences - fluxcapacitor - 2010-02-12
Thanks for the tips about C and S in rikaichan. Very useful. I wish there was something similar for Thai.
Goodbye Sentences - raseru - 2010-02-12
I hear ya. I wish they had it for Korean. The peraperakun guy already made it for Korean it seems, he just doesn't have a dictionary
Goodbye Sentences - chochajin - 2010-02-12
mezbup Wrote:I advocate sentences for your first 3000 or so words (something like KO2001 or Core) and after that you can do without them provided you do a lot of reading every day. They're good in that sort of an environment. I don't think their any good for canned vocab from a list, only stuff you actually come across.But won't you forget after a while in what kind of context you found the word (especially if it's a rare word you won't come across it anytime soon - even if you do a lot of reading)? In the end isn't that ALMOST the same as a mere isolated vocab list in the end?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against it at all. I'm not a sentence fan nor a vocab fan, I just try to figure out what's good about them in order to plan my studying from here on.
Goodbye Sentences - mezbup - 2010-02-12
chochajin Wrote:Kinda, not really. Yes and no. Try the two and you'll spot the difference.mezbup Wrote:I advocate sentences for your first 3000 or so words (something like KO2001 or Core) and after that you can do without them provided you do a lot of reading every day. They're good in that sort of an environment. I don't think their any good for canned vocab from a list, only stuff you actually come across.But won't you forget after a while in what kind of context you found the word (especially if it's a rare word you won't come across it anytime soon - even if you do a lot of reading)? In the end isn't that ALMOST the same as a mere isolated vocab list in the end?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against it at all. I'm not a sentence fan nor a vocab fan, I just try to figure out what's good about them in order to plan my studying from here on.
Goodbye Sentences - howtwosavealif3 - 2010-02-12
mezbup Wrote:for me no because i put the context i found it in in the answer field.chochajin Wrote:Kinda, not really. Yes and no. Try the two and you'll spot the difference.mezbup Wrote:I advocate sentences for your first 3000 or so words (something like KO2001 or Core) and after that you can do without them provided you do a lot of reading every day. They're good in that sort of an environment. I don't think their any good for canned vocab from a list, only stuff you actually come across.But won't you forget after a while in what kind of context you found the word (especially if it's a rare word you won't come across it anytime soon - even if you do a lot of reading)? In the end isn't that ALMOST the same as a mere isolated vocab list in the end?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against it at all. I'm not a sentence fan nor a vocab fan, I just try to figure out what's good about them in order to plan my studying from here on.
i put the context ifound it in plus the definition.