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Struggling with core6k - Printable Version

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Struggling with core6k - s0apgun - 2012-04-30

Okay, I just started NukeMarine's Core2k/6k deck here recently. I'm at around 200~ facts in Anki. I made sure to download the associated media for the deck too.

I've been doing 35 new cards a day with a goal of finishing out by the end of the year (6 months). I've been having a little bit of trouble and constantly fail cards 10-20 times before something sticks and I pass it. Just wondering if anyone has any methods or advice to help cards stick better. Maybe I need to change my settings in Anki? I let the failed cards show up to 20 at a time and I introduce new cards mixed in with the reviews.

Here is what I usually do... 1. Look at picture and read as much of the sentence as I can and guess the clozed section. 2. Show answer side. 3. Audio plays and I'll usually listen first. 4. I'll read the meaning and the translation 5. Then I'll replay the audio 2-3 more times and subvocalize it while I follow along the reading. 6. If I have paper I will write down the hiragana reading of the bolded word.

I fail the card if I can't read the bolded word and know its meaning together. I usually have trouble with the bolded words which are almost always clozed. What I notice happening the most is I'll actually remember the other context words in the sentence first (they come first in the reading) and then get stuck on the bolded word which is what counts! Am I doing Core 2k/6k correct? Its quite the change from RTK1 without the use of mnemonics or stories. Should I expect such a high fail rate with 35 new cards a day?

Struggling with core6k - kainzero - 2012-04-30

35 sounds like a lot, so that fail rate seems pretty natural.

i did ko2001 which was only 15 a day and i still found myself struggling with it. but in the end i got used to it and got better at japanese, now i can even add my own sentences and i'm usually at 10-20% fail.

Struggling with core6k - vix86 - 2012-04-30

s0apgun Wrote:Okay, I just started NukeMarine's Core2k/6k deck here recently. I'm at around 200~ facts in Anki. I made sure to download the associated media for the deck too.

I've been doing 35 new cards a day with a goal of finishing out by the end of the year (6 months). I've been having a little bit of trouble and constantly fail cards 10-20 times before something sticks and I pass it. Just wondering if anyone has any methods or advice to help cards stick better. Maybe I need to change my settings in Anki? I let the failed cards show up to 20 at a time and I introduce new cards mixed in with the reviews.

Here is what I usually do... 1. Look at picture and read as much of the sentence as I can and guess the clozed section. 2. Show answer side. 3. Audio plays and I'll usually listen first. 4. I'll read the meaning and the translation 5. Then I'll replay the audio 2-3 more times and subvocalize it while I follow along the reading. 6. If I have paper I will write down the hiragana reading of the bolded word.

I fail the card if I can't read the bolded word and know its meaning together. I usually have trouble with the bolded words which are almost always clozed. What I notice happening the most is I'll actually remember the other context words in the sentence first (they come first in the reading) and then get stuck on the bolded word which is what counts! Am I doing Core 2k/6k correct? Its quite the change from RTK1 without the use of mnemonics or stories. Should I expect such a high fail rate with 35 new cards a day?
When I did the core6k I used Nukemarine's ordering for the upper 4k. I also never used the cloze deletion on the words, so you are doing it considerably harder than me. Near the last 2-3k of the Core6k I was doing about 40 words a day. For the core2k I would do about 100-150 a day depending. I based the amount I did on the ease of the cards that day. There are a lot of katakana loan words in the core2k which I considered freebies and never counted for the day. At 40 words a day, a 10% fail rate on mature cards, and about 30-40 mature rises a day; I had a constantly increasing young card card. This lead to a slow but surely increase in reviews across the days. 20-30 is the sweet spot but it really depends how well you are maturing the cards, including those freebies.

Don't worry about fail rate for new/young cards. Its expected. Worry about fail rates on mature cards since those are the cards you are suppose to know. My suggestion is to actually not pass a card when you first see it, till you can get it correctly. I realize a lot of people have this thing about passing a card once when they first see it, but I feel its just because people are lazy and don't want to keep seeing the card. I think this causes you to constantly fail a card continuously later on as well and forces the maturing cycle out longer than if you had just passed when you actually knew it. This method is also helpful because it lets you spot cards which are problematic for you for some reason. This lets you decide if you need to create a mnemonic for it, research it a bit to make it stick or whatever. Sometimes the solution for me making a card easier to remember was simply noticing that it was one kanji I couldn't recall the reading for, then I simply noticed "oh hey" the bushu for this is 子 and its こ, "Aaaha!" And I never struggle on it again. Usually if I can read the character, it cements better.

How you decide to put your new cards in is really up to you, its a bit of personal choice. But I always set mine up AFTER my reviews. I wanted to make sure I always finished my reviews before starting anything new. This was a good indicator also of how my deck load was. If I was getting overwhelmed with reviews and couldn't keep up with them (either because I was slacking or what not), it become apparent very quickly. This method also encouraged me to finish my reviews because I always viewed reviewing new stuff as a treat; it was the fun part of it all because I would always go "Oh shoot, I see this word every day! Now I know what it means!"

So don't fret over 10-20 fails on new/young cards. It doesn't effect the ease of the card till it has matured once (I believe).

EDIT: Just wanted to reiterate that I did non-cloze so my reviewing was considerably easier. I wasn't interested in production too much, just recognition.

Struggling with core6k - s0apgun - 2012-04-30

Thanks for the replies! I just wanted to state that the NukeMarine i+1 deck has the cloze in it automatically however when I am grading the card pass or fail I base it solely on if I can read the bold word and understand its meaning. The meaning has usually been simple thanks to RTK though. Whether or not I guess the cloze correctly doesn't matter to me. For example, 終わ[...]ます is 終わります, if I guessed り correctly or not I don't care- I'm sure it will pick up along the way.

I did notice that if I recognized the fact in special way in my mind it picked up much faster than a lot of the rest. Like today for example, 「に似ています」picked up really quick because I remember doing a dictionary look up on ni+nite and the kanji -> reading association in my mind cemented quickly, where as 「昨日、父[きのう ちち]から 手紙[てがみ]が 届[とど]いた」、todoita saw a lot of fails even though I knew every word in the rest of the sentence before the reading stuck.

I will probably continue with the 35 a day... which has been 2-3 hours a day which is where I would like to keep my Anki time.

Struggling with core6k - vix86 - 2012-04-30

I guess I'm confused as to how your cards look like. I looked at Nukemarine's thread to try and see if I saw the deck you were talking about to take a look at the card template but it didn't jump out. I did see this recent post though:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=166838#pid166838

Do your cards look some what similar ( maybe without the key word being in the cloze )?

I'm not too wild about this style of reviewing really. For me, Core6k was all about the word recognition. Cloze is great for production re-enforcement (maybe, some question cloze), but they way you are grading isn't forcing production, it almost seems somewhere in the middle. Know what you want out of the deck. Use card models. If you want production practice use the cloze or use blank cards with audio. If you want to be able to read have the sentence with the bolded word on the front, and meanings on the back. There has to be a field in the deck for non-furigana sentences. If you want both, make a model for both.

Struggling with core6k - s0apgun - 2012-04-30

Here I took a screen shot...

http://driftwolrd.com/up/core1.png
http://driftwolrd.com/up/core2.png

If there is an option to turn off the cloze in this deck, that would be great.

Edit: That card is kind of a bad example though, the bold word doesn't have kanji.

Edit 2: In that thread, it appears NukeMarine uploaded a whole Core2k/6k deck right after I started on his old version... I compiled all the Basic, Beginner, and Intermediate decks into one.

Struggling with core6k - aphasiac - 2012-04-30

That's not anki cloze delete, as you don't have to type anything. You need to change your card layout to use the full sentence rather than the one with parts deleted.

On a side-note, looks like you don't have the "Japanese Support" shared plugin installed/enabled in Anki. Go to Download > Shared Plugin > Japanese Support; the hiragana in brackets on the answer card will then appear as furigana above the kanji (makes the sentences much smaller and easier to read), plus readings will automatically be generated for new sentences that you enter yourself.

As for learning new words/sentences, yes it's always tough at the beginning. Personally for Japanese i get frustrated with constantly failing the same sentences over and over, and ended up creating a separate vocab deck.
This was used to mass-memorized the vocab for each unit (using brute force and mnemonics) before adding the sentences. Vocab cards are so much quicker to review and fail/pass, that it doesn't matter if you take a while to learn a new reading.

Struggling with core6k - Nukemarine - 2012-04-30

@s0apgun,

Ah, that's the older deck that included cloze deletion for kana portion of the verbs (okurigana?). I uploaded a new deck that removed the verb specific cloze opting for all words being english context clozed (English word, clozed kanji sentence, english sentence all on the question side).

If you don't care about the clozed sentences in the old deck you can delete them. They're a holdover from the time when Kana to Kanji was a popular question and answer format. Reason I made them was realizing I was getting the active and passive verbs mixed up.

Struggling with core6k - s0apgun - 2012-04-30

@aphasiac, Thanks for the heads up on the "Japanese Support". I usually do my cards on my phone which it seems already includes that function.

@Nukemarine, Gotcha, in your opinion do you think I should switch to your new deck instead? I'm not too deep into the old one yet. I am going to download it now and check it out.

Struggling with core6k - s0apgun - 2012-04-30

I believe vix86's lengthy post on the previous page describes exactly what you want to do. http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=165665#pid165665

Struggling with core6k - Nukemarine - 2012-04-30

The previous page offers tips on updating your deck to the new version. It's pretty intensive, as you have to set up all the fields, import the new material with "update" option, then use the steps described to do a re-import. It's a trade off of keeping your current progress while new cards are in the new order and just starting over with new ordered deck.

If you can do the importing trick, then go that route especially if you've got a lot of time already invested.

Struggling with core6k - Irixmark - 2012-05-01

You could try spending more time on learning before you dive into reviews. I used to do around 50/day with the method I described here: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=9335

Though the reviews are piling up quickly then, and you can only maintain the learning pace if you also get some Japanese exposure through reading/watching TV etc.

I also always reviewed (and still do) only with dictation cards, from sentence audio + kana of the individual word to sentence in kanji + sentence audio. Getting a card correct means understanding every word in the sentence, and being able to write the word shown in kana in kanji. Not for everyone, of course, if you don't care about writing then it's probably not very efficient.

Struggling with core6k - PotbellyPig - 2012-05-01

I've been trying out the iKnow! site for Core 6k. I figure I'll give it a shot for 2 months. Right now I'm 800 words into core 1000. They have split up the courses into six separate ones, Core 1000-6000. I like it but the issue I have with it is the amount of time spent on reviews (you review a word in different ways and you have to type in the answer so it takes more time). I had 100 reviews to do today and it took me over an hour to complete them. Granted, there were many words I didn't know well so I spent some time memorizing them. I'll have to reassess the situation after I finish the first 1000 words. I may switch over to Nukemarine's new deck which looks great. The more time you spend on reviews is less time you have to learn new words.