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+--- Thread: Vocabulary building? (/thread-7819.html)
Vocabulary building? - overture2112 - 2011-05-13
dizmox Wrote:Yes, I'm curious, what's your accuracy if you don't mind saying?Coreth Wrote:I have to stop and let it get down to under 200 and stuff.You're getting 200 reviews a day from adding 5 a day? That... shouldn't happen :S
Vocabulary building? - KMDES - 2011-05-13
SRS is cruicial, but not so much in the SRS program way. Everyone needs refreshment of the neurons in the brain to keep memories, of course except a select few, but you don't want to be like these people as they can't function (Example: The rain man.) It is possible to create a memory that stays permanently through out your life i a single instance, but usually these happen when you're young and usually because of something super life threatening or traumatic. (Like seeing someone be killed or being attack by a dog.) In general though, with enough proper encoding you can keep things in your head without the need of an SRS program at all. Of course, usually said things need to be interesting and not just some random vocab. It also helps when the word is refreshed naturally through books, movie, speech, etc.
One thing SRS programs don't take into account really is that if you absolutely forget word or any other memory item, then you are basically learning it from scratch in your SRS program. Something that's learned from scratch can be forgotten in 30 seconds or less. This is why we write down things, because we'll forget that phone number a minute later literally. Yet the lowest Anki time frame before a refresh is 10 minutes that I've seen. If you fail the card, you still have to either wait until the end of the deck or until you've maxed out your failed cards and cycle through those. This is a very bogus feature. It causes things like fail card cycling which tends to increase the time spent SRSing substantially.
As for 35 words, that is easily doable. Try 250 words in a day. >
I did an experiment about this (240 words, not 250, but close enough), listing my results not using an SRS program. I retained 99.2% of the words after 24 hours and 90% after 17 days with only about 4 hours of studying. So doing 35 words a day should take you about 35 minutes of study time. The basis being if a word was failed, it's removed from a deck via a leech function. So I could never get higher than my previous precentage as it was like failing a question on a test. Either way, this left me with only 24 failed cards, and only SRSed them manually 4 times which ended up being less than an hour of SRSing a month. Nothing more freeing than not having to be trapped by a program you're forced to use every day. The details of the experiment are at http://kmdes.com/kms-japanese-blog/2011/03/the-km-method-version-1-guide/overture2112 Wrote:Sounds like the Anki curse strikes again. :odizmox Wrote:Yes, I'm curious, what's your accuracy if you don't mind saying?Coreth Wrote:I have to stop and let it get down to under 200 and stuff.You're getting 200 reviews a day from adding 5 a day? That... shouldn't happen :S
Vocabulary building? - Evil_Dragon - 2011-05-13
500 in one day? Seriously?
Vocabulary building? - KMDES - 2011-05-13
Evil_Dragon Wrote:500 in one day? Seriously?Given about 8.5 hours, it should be possible.
Vocabulary building? - ta12121 - 2011-05-13
KMDES Wrote:lolEvil_Dragon Wrote:500 in one day? Seriously?Given about 8.5 hours, it should be possible.
Vocabulary building? - dizmox - 2011-05-13
Uhmm, the reading and meaning for most words is self evident for most words from the kanji, so it doesn't really take that long.
I gave up after 2 days though...
Vocabulary building? - KMDES - 2011-05-13
ta12121 Wrote:What? I'm totally serious bro!KMDES Wrote:lolEvil_Dragon Wrote:500 in one day? Seriously?Given about 8.5 hours, it should be possible.
I'm assuming that you'd also have the attention span to actually plow through 8.5 hours of vocab in a day.
Vocabulary building? - Tori-kun - 2011-05-13
KMDES Wrote:Wow, you have a nice capacity thenEvil_Dragon Wrote:500 in one day? Seriously?Given about 8.5 hours, it should be possible.
@overture: I don't get quite the hang of the purpose of your newly coded plugin... Something's telling me it's extremely useful.
Vocabulary building? - ta12121 - 2011-05-13
KMDES Wrote:That's deadly. Even I won't be able to do that. Although I might be doing that a few months before JLPT 1. So I can get 90%+ on vocab.ta12121 Wrote:What? I'm totally serious bro!KMDES Wrote:Given about 8.5 hours, it should be possible.lol
I'm assuming that you'd also have the attention span to actually plow through 8.5 hours of vocab in a day.
My goal for JLPT is to get at least 80%+ on each section. Still got until decemeber. I'm lucky since, the JLPT Test site is only a 40min bus ride away
Vocabulary building? - KMDES - 2011-05-13
I think the upward theoretical limit in a day would probably be around 960, for 1 minute per word. Unless you were able to speed encode, cutting down the amount of time need for each word. But also apparently the record for random words in 15 minutes 300, so who knows what you could potentially do in a day. @_@
Vocabulary building? - overture2112 - 2011-05-13
KMDES Wrote:One thing SRS programs don't take into account really is that if you absolutely forget word or any other memory item, then you are basically learning it from scratch in your SRS program. Something that's learned from scratch can be forgotten in 30 seconds or less. This is why we write down things, because we'll forget that phone number a minute later literally. Yet the lowest Anki time frame before a refresh is 10 minutes that I've seen. If you fail the card, you still have to either wait until the end of the deck or until you've maxed out your failed cards and cycle through those. This is a very bogus feature. It causes things like fail card cycling which tends to increase the time spent SRSing substantially.Anki has settings to change behavior for failed cards. I used 10min for my RTK deck because I learned them outside Anki and could generally remember them for awhile due to memorable stories. I use just half a minute for decks where I do my initial learning in Anki (I use v1.0 or v2.0 beta for this) since I don't have memory aids to assist and thus can't remember brand new stuff very long. In either case I also set mature cards which failed to 5-10% of their previous interval since if I remembered it for months, even with a failure I can probably last a few days/weeks after re-reading the story.
KMDES Wrote:As for 35 words, that is easily doable. Try 250 words in a day. >I agree. 35 an hour is easy even when you're just starting out if you've done RTK. Of course, actually putting in a full hour of work is the hard part (and it's even worse if you're doing multiple hours straight).
Vocabulary building? - Cranks - 2011-05-13
There's one big, big secret...
There are in fact three different types of people on this forum:
1) Doesn't use SRS. Does lots of 'just do it' type activities.
2) Does a bit of no.1, but also rips interesting stuff to SRS.
3) Lives in their SRS and loves it.
Shhhh... don't tell anyone.
Seriously though, what fits, fits. I, personally, am a shade greyer than no.2, but not quite as vanilla as no.1. Each approach has different tools and none are in anyway superior to any of the others. Pick what works - I recommend option 2 as a beginner and then either grey down or black up to what works best for you.
Vocabulary building? - KMDES - 2011-05-13
overture2112 Wrote:That's the problem. That's basically a whole different kind of forgeting, like Tip of The Tongue and such. If you've really failed the card, then the card should set to being like a completely new card, and then reviewed with 30 seconds. The reasoning behind this is if you have truly forgot the item, then the neurons associated with that item have reset themselves, so they act like they've never even heard of that item in the first place, so you are in fact, starting from scratch.KMDES Wrote:One thing SRS programs don't take into account really is that if you absolutely forget word or any other memory item, then you are basically learning it from scratch in your SRS program. Something that's learned from scratch can be forgotten in 30 seconds or less. This is why we write down things, because we'll forget that phone number a minute later literally. Yet the lowest Anki time frame before a refresh is 10 minutes that I've seen. If you fail the card, you still have to either wait until the end of the deck or until you've maxed out your failed cards and cycle through those. This is a very bogus feature. It causes things like fail card cycling which tends to increase the time spent SRSing substantially.Anki has settings to change behavior for failed cards. I used 10min for my RTK deck because I learned them outside Anki and could generally remember them for awhile due to memorable stories. I use just half a minute for decks where I do my initial learning in Anki (I use v1.0 or v2.0 beta for this) since I don't have memory aids to assist and thus can't remember brand new stuff very long. In either case I also set mature cards which failed to 5-10% of their previous interval since if I remembered it for months, even with a failure I can probably last a few days/weeks after re-reading the story.
It'd be nice to have a detailed account to what happenswhen people fail there cards but all I've ever heard of people doing is doing the failed card shuffle or going too easy on the cards when they actually didn't know them.
Also, on a side note? Is it just me, or does everyone else hate how this forums handles quoting too?
Vocabulary building? - overture2112 - 2011-05-13
Tori-kun Wrote:@overture: I don't get quite the hang of the purpose of your newly coded plugin... Something's telling me it's extremely useful.1) I thought the standard Core6k orderings were suboptimal. The ko2001 index sorts by kanji's appearance in the sentences but it doesn't take readings into account and so I would often get a lot of interference because I'd learn multiple readings for a kanji at around the same time and get confused as to which to use (especially if there isn't an obvious pattern of on vs kun yomi). My plugin solves this since you can sort by vocabRanking, which takes into account kanji you've already learned _and_ whether they have the same readings.
2) I don't like the fact that after learning all the words in Core6k, I'd still know only a 1/3 of the words I need to watch my favorite shows and likely a similar ratio for light novels I wish to read. My plugin solves this by letting me find all the words in some source material I'm interested in, subtract what I know, and get a database of all the words I need to learn for that material. Then I can focus on learning those words via my Mass tagger and/or Morph match feature.
3) I like vocab-only cards as well as sentence cards and wanted a way to make my subs2srs deck into vocab-only cards. I tried doing this by hand but it was very quickly apparent that this was dumb. My plugin solves this by setting an 'unknowns' field so you know which word(s) to focus on learning from a sentence. If you want a 1:1 matching of words to learn to sentences, you can use the morph match feature.
4) The reason I like vocab-only cards is because they're i+1 (really, they're 0+1). I thought I'd enjoy sentences more if I could enforce that they're all i+1 too. My plugin solves this by setting the i+N'ness of facts, so that I can then suspend everything but i+1 cards.
5) I'm generally curious and want to analyze things. My plugin lets me break down some source material by parts of speech, which I find neat.
5.5) This also allows neat things like taking a database of source material you want to learn and then make a new database with only certain parts of speech, eg only the verbs or only verbs+nouns as generally if you only know 70% of the words in the sentence you'll be far better off at understanding the general meaning if that 70% includes all the verbs and nouns.
6) It's a decent platform for implementing any cool ideas people can come up with that can leverage the databases of morphemes. Like a Firefox plugin that automatically displayed a number in a corner with the expected difficulty of reading a page, which could also be clicked on to get more analysis, save to a db, add to a want-to-learn db, etc.
Vocabulary building? - overture2112 - 2011-05-13
KMDES Wrote:Also, on a side note? Is it just me, or does everyone else hate how this forums handles quoting too?I'm just glad it's better than gamefaqs.
Vocabulary building? - Tori-kun - 2011-05-13
@overture: So basically that means you are analysing two databases ("two decks", so the ko2001 one and the core6k one right?) and take the vocabulary out of ko2001 which is missing in core6k in order to gain more vocabulary only cards for your own benefit being able to read favourite novels, shows, that require right this vocabulary? Sounds neat.
Vocabulary building? - overture2112 - 2011-05-13
Tori-kun Wrote:@overture: So basically that means you are analysing two databases ("two decks", so the ko2001 one and the core6k one right?) and take the vocabulary out of ko2001 which is missing in core6k in order to gain more vocabulary only cards for your own benefit being able to read favourite novels, shows, that require right this vocabulary? Sounds neat.Note quite, although you could. I'm just getting started, but specifically I've done the following things so far:
Code:
fsnEp01-09.db = subs2srs of Fate/Stay Night Ep01 to Ep09
fsnEp01.db = subs2srs of Fate/Stay Night Ep01
nogizakaEp01.db = subs2srs of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu Ep01
animeWords.db = fsnEp01-09.db + nogizakaEp01.db
koreWords.db = all words in Core6k
koreSentences.db = all sentences in Core6k
kore.db = koreWords.db + koreSentences.db
koreWordsLearnt.db = all words in Core6k that I've studied
fsnLearnt.db = all studied sentences in FSN
known.db = koreWordsLearnt.db + fsnLearnt.db
animeWordsToLearn.db = animeWords.db - known.db
wordsToLearn.db = animeWordsToLearn.dbIn my kore deck I used the morph match against wordsToLearn.db and suspended everything that didn't get a matchedMorpheme (or that I've already studied), that way I focus on only learning words that are actually useful to me. I'm slowly weaning myself off of using this deck, though.
In my subs2srs deck I morph matched against fsnEp01.db since I want to prioritize learning all the words necessary to watch a full episode. I plan on eventually suspending all but those matched sentences, but for now I'm just going through all the i+1** sentences since my vocab is still pretty small (at least vocab applicable to these anime) and I haven't been adding much in the last week due to focusing on improving my tools and doing grammar review as required for adjusting from kore to subs2srs.
** also some i+0 sentences since there's a lot of standard expressions, colloquialisms, turn of phrases, etc that I've never studied before and are higher level concepts than morphemes and thus not always handled by the plugin.
Vocabulary building? - lanval - 2011-05-13
My standart approach is to learn words out of a textbook because you have context.
BUT
I just started a book, tengoku no honya. I wanted to wait with reading until I had more words in my internal hard drive, but I couldn't wait... When I noticed how much I understood on the first page it motivated me enough to read on for 2,5 hours (way beyond my sleeping time). Even though my comprehension could be around 50%, it's just way more FUN than textbooks and a nice CHANGE. I've copied lots of words into Anki while reading.
Also trying to pick up words from animes (long series, words repeated a lot!).
You should never bore yourself, or your memory will switch to off-mode.
Therefore, why not try different media.
Vocabulary building? - KMDES - 2011-05-13
I was thinking, what if there was a way to stop off-mode in your brain. Imagine an empty room, just you and a Japanese study book of some sort. No eletronics, no nothing. I imagine after a few days of that, studying a vocab list might seem mighty interesting.
Vocabulary building? - rich_f - 2011-05-13
I learned the hard way to keep it simple. My Anki deck has 3 fields. Expression, Meaning, and Reading. Expression for the "thing I want to learn", Meaning for "what it means, + any notes," and Reading for the kana reading of Expression.
3 years and so far, so good... with some mistakes, usually from trying to get too fancy.
Simple also means short sentences/phrases, but not too short. Context is key. Too much bogs you down, too little doesn't provide enough context. I don't like learning words in isolation. It also means not too much new stuff to learn per sentence.
I use 2-3 sentences to learn each vocab word. Any less, and it won't stick. When I add new sentences, I look for ones that contain recent vocab to help reinforce it. (But I don't drive myself nuts.)
I like a few things about Kanji Odyssey. You can pick up a lot of Kanji readings while picking up a lot of useful vocab... useful if you're going to read newspapers.
But you will learn the readings. I like the way they chunk kanji in groups of 5 that relate to each other. I don't like the sentences so much, so I use yahoo.co.jp and alc.co.jp's dictionaries for the most part. (You can always bust up the sentences, I suppose.)
I also like the idea of using a JLPT vocab book as a supplement for extra vocab, because it will cover big chunks of stuff you're supposed to know... and you can go look it up somewhere else.
Vocabulary building? - overture2112 - 2011-05-13
KMDES Wrote:I did an experiment about this...not using an SRS program...The details of the experiment are at http://kmdes.com/kms-japanese-blog/2011/03/the-km-method-version-1-guide/I read your blog's post and found it similar to something I tried initially. In the end I decided it was equivalent to using anki v1.0 with micro intervals or anki v2.0's new card learning system, except with anki I retain the native audio recording (plus image, sentence for context, etc if I want) and can easily copy/paste to jishio or something to get more information about the component kanji. Plus it's less effort to have a computer take care of the timing. Note, anki v1.2 unfortunately doesn't refresh the reviews due queue constantly and thus doesn't work so well for this.
I'm curious if you've tried this method?
Vocabulary building? - KMDES - 2011-05-13
I would use Anki if one, it wasn't so slow to add cards to it. You really need a mass card copy paste system or you can't keep track of what you did and didn't remember per grouping.
Two, if getting it to actually do the proper intervals for you weren't like pulling your teeth out.
Three, where are you getting this Anki V2.0 from? Seriously, I want try I out. I've really wanted something that can do the timing for me so I don't have to keep track of it. :/
Vocabulary building? - Asriel - 2011-05-13
Coreth Wrote:35 a day!? Jesus. I usually do like 5. My deck gets too many cards even at that rate sometimes. I have to stop and let it get down to under 200 and stuff.200+ Reviews should definitely not be happening to you. You're not trying to keep your entire deck under 200 words are you?!
...Looking up example sentences and context for 35 words every day sounds like hell.. I would definitely not be remembering them as well as now, my brain isn't that good.
I think you're trying too hard. Let the SRS do it's work. 35 cards a day shouldn't be that bad. The reviews will start to pile up, no denying that, but it shouldn't be too difficult to retain them. I approach SRS as being the 'bare minimum' for what I need to not forget something. I don't need to think of it in a sentence, I don't need to try and make it up on my own -- do I know what it means? If so, that's enough.
Also, my approach is to just add words I find in the wild, so there is no 'looking up context' and things. Rikaichan's 's' button works well. You'll pick up the nuances as you read more or reread things you've read before.
Vocabulary building? - Asriel - 2011-05-13
Coreth Wrote:Thank god, you're the first people to agree with me about that. You might think it's normal or whatever, but most people on forums yell at me and tell me to memorize readings. Then they leave me in the wake of their 60,000 post aura and leave. How can I disagree when they have that many posts?...1. The internet sucks at learning languages
... talking on forums helps clear the confusion for me sometimes though. Getting people's general views on stuff. I've gotten a lot of replies already.. this is definitely the forum I'm sticking with from now on. I've tried others and they usually just yell at me.
There's so many abandoned blogs, ghost forums, post count/reputation whores out there, and everyone claims to be so great. Most of them are beginner/early immediate. Don't take the internet's advice. Take bits and pieces and find what really works. For you.
2. "Learning" a language == getting used to a language
This is what people who treat language like a class with grades, memorization charts, learning every reading to every kanji don't seem to understand. This is the whole philosophy behind the "all japanese all the time" phenomena. My dad never studied English a day in his life, he just came to America when he was 24 on a motorcycle trip, and now how's indistinguishable from a native. You shouldn't be pushing yourself or stressing too hard. It should be fun, like learning to ride a bike -- you make mistakes, you laugh and you learn.
Vocabulary building? - overture2112 - 2011-05-13
KMDES Wrote:I would use Anki if one, it wasn't so slow to add cards to it. You really need a mass card copy paste system or you can't keep track of what you did and didn't remember per grouping.I always generate a .tsv file from a spreadsheet and then import that into anki. I believe anki will even update from a .tsv file now, although in the past I've just written code to update my deck if needed.
KMDES Wrote:Two, if getting it to actually do the proper intervals for you weren't like pulling your teeth out.In anki 2.0 you literally specify the intervals you want for new cards in terms of minutes.
Just type in '0.75 2 5 10 30 60 120 240' to get it to make them due at 45s, 2m, 5m, 10m, 30m, 1h, 2h, 4h.
In anki 1.0 it's a tad more difficult but it adjusts intervals if you waited extra time after a card was due (like if I took a short break but happened to still recall my most recent learned items). It's measured in days so I just use google calculator to get the initial times to ~45s for 2, ~60s for 3, ~80s for 4 if I recall.
KMDES Wrote:Three, where are you getting this Anki V2.0 from? Seriously, I want try I out. I've really wanted something that can do the timing for me so I don't have to keep track of it. :/The anki google group has a thread about the v2.0 preview. It's not fully done and there's some minor bugs but it works well enough for initial learning.
I was just using it for the first day of learning a card and then unsuspending them from my anki 1.2 deck (since I need the sync system to do reviews on my phone while walking to/from work).