Apologies if this post is repeating several in the past. But it really helps to frame the question in my own terms, and I want to make the right decision as this is an important stage in my studies.

When studying vocabulary, do you think you lose a lot by just studying Recognition on Anki? Obviously this is the only skill required on the JLPT (I'm working towards level 2 at the moment), but I'm wondering if it will hinder my speaking vocabulary by not studying Production.

Recognition should be KANJI COMPOUND => YOMIKATA + ENG. MEANING, right?

Production should be ENG. MEANING => KANJI COMPOUND (+ YOMIKATA?), right?

I do mostly production cards. I have never done English to Japanese production, and I usually do not do vocab cards alone. My cards are mostly set up as so:

Along with the occassional picture, kana sentence OR audio (never both) → Sentence with proper kanji in place and Japanese explanations to glance at if needed

However, recognition cards are in place for when stylistic choice needs noting, such as video game text (different characters have their text rendered different ways) or works of literature. In this case, it is:

Occassional picture along with original sentence with notes on context → Reading along with explanations in Japanese if needed and along with notes about what might be special about this sentence if not too obvious.

Speaking vocabulary is trained by speaking, not be production in an SRS. It helps but not enough to be worth the time. I would only recommend a lot of production to people who expect to write a LOT of Japanese by hand since it trains you a bit better in which kanji are used for which word.

And no, it should be like this:
Recognition = Japanese sentence with kanji -> Japanese sentence with just kana, japanese definition of words if needed. A note on context if needed. Only English for certain words if it's desperately needed.

I don't use production for japanese, but there are several valid techniques here. For Chinese I used one which was like this:
Production = Audio of sentence -> Sentence written with Hanzi, each hanzi colorcoded to show which tone is the right one. English translation IF NEEDED.

I disagree. While production won't help with conversational skill, it WILL improve learning speed and retention of vocabulary far better than recognition alone will. If I only could have one set of cards, I'd only have production. But that's silly. I have both production and recognition, because they're discreet skills that reinforce each other.

And I don't know about you, but I still have to write a lot in longhand. Being able to write is a basic function of literacy that is one of my language goals, so I have production in my deck.

Note that I didn't say it was faster to do production cards. It isn't. (At least not at first.) But after a few months, I got into a groove and figured out how to do them at a decent speed.

For production, my quick and dirty approach to it is:
Sentence in Kana -> Sentence in Kanji + whatever notes I deem appropriate.

I do it this way because I do about half of my reviewing by cell phone, so I don't have mp3 audio available in Anki. It took a while to get used to reading sentences full of just kana, but it's not *that* bad. Read the whole sentence before you start writing it out if you have trouble with it.

The major downside is that if you plan on writing out the entire sentence, you're going to need a LOT of time to do it. I would recommend doing it for a short period of time, just to get used to writing. (During which time I wouldn't add too many sentences, because you'll get overwhelmed.)

But once you get more comfortable writing, stop writing it out, and use the "finger in the air" or "visualize it" method. That's where you simply write out only the kanji you need to reproduce with your finger in the air, or you draw them in your brain. This speeds things up considerably.

The other way to do it would be to consider penmanship a separate skill, approach it separately, and just go straight to doing it in your head or with your finger in the air (or on the table. whatever.)

The important thing is to force your brain to go from reading -> producing kanji.

I wouldn't have called any form of drilling where you get the learned language full sentence in the question "production". It's more like listening and writing practice. Those are good but can probably be done outside of the SRS I think.

SRS are awesome but there is a high risk of falling behind in the revision schedule and being swamped by due revisions and it's a lot easier to quickly get back on track with a recognition deck.

rich_f Wrote:And I don't know about you, but I still have to write a lot in longhand. Being able to write is a basic function of literacy that is one of my language goals, so I have production in my deck.

Personally, I never have to write anything in longhand in Japanese, not even when I lived in Japan. I can't even think of a situation where it would be needed.

That aside, it's not like you don't learn how to write just because you don't practice production. You're not going to sit around and wonder which kanji are used in 勉強 after having studied Japanese for a few months, enough exposure fixes that just fine.

What I mean in my first post was that if you're in Japanese class and NEED to produce kanji in writing on a test in the near future, production will be needed because the exposure might not be enough. Eventually however, exposure will be enough so if you don't have a certain time-limit and especially if you don't use longhand regularly, I don't see the point. I mean, wasn't it discussed on these forums before that overexposure might be detrimental? Having both a production and a recognition card would certainly count as overexposure, no?

Tobberoth Wrote:

rich_f Wrote:And I don't know about you, but I still have to write a lot in longhand. Being able to write is a basic function of literacy that is one of my language goals, so I have production in my deck.

Personally, I never have to write anything in longhand in Japanese, not even when I lived in Japan. I can't even think of a situation where it would be needed.

Under what circumstances were you living in Japan?

I work in a Japanese company, and I find myself writing in longhand all the time. And in many instances, I am under a time limit, so the need to produce the correct kanji quickly is essential.

And there are many instances outside of work where I need to write something in Japanese, as well. I just recently came down with a bout of pneumonia, and when I went to the doctor, I had to fill out a form explaining my medical history (it was my first time to this doctor) - about half of it in longhand (the other half was a yes/no checklist).

Like rich_f said, being able to write a language is a basic function of literacy. To say that you don't need to write because you can 'get by' using computers and such is the same as admitting that you are satisfied with being almost, but not quite, fully literate.

Of course, if you don't intend to become fully literate, than production drills would be less necessary. But for those of us whose goal is full literacy, I think production drills are essential.

Tobberoth Wrote:That aside, it's not like you don't learn how to write just because you don't practice production. You're not going to sit around and wonder which kanji are used in 勉強 after having studied Japanese for a few months, enough exposure fixes that just fine.

I think you are overestimating the effect of exposure.

Japanese people don't learn how to read and write through simple osmosis. They do it through years and years of diligent study.

And they still often forget which kanji are used to write which words!

Tobberoth Wrote:Personally, I never have to write anything in longhand in Japanese, not even when I lived in Japan. I can't even think of a situation where it would be needed.

Heck, I can think of plenty of examples.

o Illustrating a point on the whiteboard with colleagues.

o Ordering a home newspaper delivery.

o Filling out an in-store credit application.

o Taking notes in sales calls.

o Some restaurants, where a sheet of paper
goes around the table and everyone writes his order on it.

I'm of the school of thought that you should not translate for the purpose of learning. I use essentially three types of Anki cards for studying Japanese:

Kanji compound -> reading (cards with and without context)
Kana (in a sentence) -> Kanji compound
Cloze deletion

The last type is by far the sparsest, and consists of memorable sentences I've encountered where the missing word can be inferred from the context.

onafarm Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Personally, I never have to write anything in longhand in Japanese, not even when I lived in Japan. I can't even think of a situation where it would be needed.

Heck, I can think of plenty of examples.

o Illustrating a point on the whiteboard with colleagues.

o Ordering a home newspaper delivery.

o Filling out an in-store credit application.

o Taking notes in sales calls.

o Some restaurants, where a sheet of paper
goes around the table and everyone writes his order on it.

1. Only if you work and at the point you get a job in a japanese company and are expected to write Japanese on a whiteboard, you shouldn't have any problem picking the right kanji.
2. Internet.
3. Usually doesn't require much kanji skills. You don't have to practice production in an SRS to be able to write your adress and stuff like that.
4. I've never seen such a restaurant ever, in any country.

EnjukuBlack Wrote:And they still often forget which kanji are used to write which words!

They often forget which kanji it is by an EXTREMELY small amount. Such as putting 奉 instead of 泰 in 安泰. They have seen the word thousands of times, they know the shape of it.. they just don't have the same kind of framework for picking the correct radicals.

That's the whole point why RtK is awesome. If one feels they have to produce each kanji they learn for each word, they may just as well skip RtK.

Tobberoth Wrote:That's the whole point why RtK is awesome. If one feels they have to produce each kanji they learn for each word, they may just as well skip RtK.

I don't really understand your point here.

I write kanji from memory when I'm writing handwritten letters to my fiancée. Of course there are times when I'm unsure which characters to use and I look them up, but it would be a drag if I had to do that for each one.

Aside from that, passing a high level of the kanji kentei can be some good street cred ;-)

JimmySeal Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:That's the whole point why RtK is awesome. If one feels they have to produce each kanji they learn for each word, they may just as well skip RtK.

I don't really understand your point here.

I don't either. Doing RTK makes writing out kanji compounds from memory MUCH easier than it was before I did RTK. And using production cards makes those sorts of activities even easier, because you don't sit there trying to squeeze the words out of your brain.

If you don't want to write, that's fine with you. But the rest of us want to be literate.

The question is not whether one wants to write or not. But what's the most efficient path to getting there.

At first getting to a point where you understand Japanese is much more important than practicing how to write every single word you study. There is a lot of vocabulary to be learned to get there and that should be done in the most efficient way possible.

If you systematically add a production card for each item in your SRS instead of doing recognition only, you're multiplying your workload by at least a factor of 3 (a production card takes at least twice the time it takes to review a recognition card).

Also does it make sense to add a production card at the same time you add the recognition card? Production practice should at least be delayed until you've learned to recognize the new item so that you won't waste time attempting production on something you don't know well enough. (An anki option to do that automatically could be nice I guess)

Once a sufficient level has been reached it could be a good time to focus a bit more on writing. No need to SRS everything though. Practicing writing real texts, playing kanji games on the nintendo ds and reading a lot should really help a lot more than brute force drills a this point.

So my plan was to add tons of production cards after RTK1. But now I've read this thread and changed my mind. I'll start out with recognition! Thanks guys...

rich_f Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:That's the whole point why RtK is awesome. If one feels they have to produce each kanji they learn for each word, they may just as well skip RtK.

I don't really understand your point here.

I don't either. Doing RTK makes writing out kanji compounds from memory MUCH easier than it was before I did RTK. And using production cards makes those sorts of activities even easier, because you don't sit there trying to squeeze the words out of your brain.

If you don't want to write, that's fine with you. But the rest of us want to be literate.

That was my point. RtK makes writing kanji from memory extremely easy and that's why production cards are excessive. You already know how to write the kanji from memory, why waste tons of time training it?

I don't want to write? Sure I do. I just like to prioritize. I will be able to write just fine eventually by just doing recognition. If I waste my time on production I might be able to write a few compounds a month sooner but I'd rather learn to recognize even more in that time.

It's not about becoming literate or not, it's about becoming literate fast or not. I'd rather get to a really high level of comprehension with longhand writing lagging slightly behind than being stuck on medium Japanese with exemplary longhand.

It's all a bit of finding your own comfort level. In addition it's got to work for you.

I don't think any of us are doing production. We're really doing dictation, right? Hear the word or phase to find out how well we know it. Speed depends on what kind of dictation you're doing:

1. Mental dictation - thinking it in your head
2. Partial dictation - writing out only a portion of the sentence, such as a key phase, grammar point, or vocabulary word.
3. Translation production - now this is production, but you're going from L1 to L2. When I did this, it was very controlled to remove chance of ambiguous translations.
4. Full dictation - writing out the entire sentence.

Then with the above, there's the problem of how strict you're going to be for marking it wrong. I would recommend not doing full dictation, but definately encourage partial and mental dictation.

Anyway, I'm for the partial dictation myself with mental dictation for the rest of the sentence. Reason this is important to me is it really is helping my listening comprehension.

Now, I'm am doing a Recognition/dictation method with my grammar sentences. For now, I'm typing out the entire recognition sentence. Main reason it's just to train my typing, but perhaps add a little reading comprehension to the mix.

Thanks for all the replies guys. I've also been convinced now that starting out with recognition (JAPANESE -> YOMIKATA and possibly ENGLISH) is the best way to go in learning the copioius vocabulary necessary for JLPT2 in the most efficient manner.

Production can be added in later using Anki, and as you say there are other ways of doing "Production"- SRS isn't necessary for everything, and I do enjoy playing my Otona No Renshuu game on the DS.

Now to just finish the damn RtK so I can get onto the next stage of study!

For what it's worth, as of 0.9.9.7, Anki uses the term 'recall' instead of 'production', as that seems to be more widely used in linguistic circles. So it's now recognition and recall.

Nukemarine Wrote:I don't think any of us are doing production. We're really doing dictation, right? Hear the word or phase to find out how well we know it. Speed depends on what kind of dictation you're doing:

1. Mental dictation - thinking it in your head
2. Partial dictation - writing out only a portion of the sentence, such as a key phase, grammar point, or vocabulary word.
3. Translation production - now this is production, but you're going from L1 to L2. When I did this, it was very controlled to remove chance of ambiguous translations.
4. Full dictation - writing out the entire sentence.

Yeah I'm doing number 3. I start out with recognition (smart.fm) and after I finish the lesson in about 3-4 weeks I put it into Anki as a production card. I go from the English sentence and have to write out he Japanese one. If I use different vocab I give my self slack, it's mostly for writing practice and to be able to effectively produce the words in conversation more quickly.

I also do it because I have tons of free time and loads of Japanese around me so I can do whatever I want a learn at a pretty fast pace thanks to having to use it all day long.

Hello,

I could really use advice..
So far, for my Genki cards, I've concentrated on Production. I'm in the process of connecting the Genki words to my Kanji knowledge. I wonder: should I leave this as:
engl word => Kanji and pronounciation
or make two cards? Kanji/pronounc.?
And then, do you think it advisable to add Recognition? I feel like it would mess up the intervals, as in: make me see words too much. But it would probably be good for my listening comprehension, which is kind of bad. I often hear words I know, but can't recall the meaning right away. Its frustrating...
Please help me with this or I'll go crazy (in fact, already am, because the whole Genki I and Genki II are a nice pile to work on...)

Sorry for the necropost, but didn't seem necessary to make a new thread.

Here's a chart from Anki showing my cards and how the intervals are. Only thing I can gleem from it is that although Recognition has 10% more cards being 6 months or longer in interval, they're still pretty close to the dictation cards. Had Recognition been very high up there, it may show that it's wasting time in that I'd get results with just Dictation.



Personally, there are cards that I don't remember pronunciation, but can write. While other cards are the opposite issue of knowing how to pronounce it, but cannot write it. I'm glad I have both types of cards in that I catch these few anomalies.

Recently, I added Tanuki cards. Those are reading (recognition) only due to having no audio and I'm not going to go kana to kanji without that. However, I made a choice to write out the vocabulary word as they come up in review for those.

Looks good Nuke-

I just started Production cards today. I'm trying an experiment with making the production cards from recognition cards that are 4-6 months till they're due. Production cards will be audio only in the question box, and Kanji + Kana in the answer (I'll write in in just kanji of course). Not sure how this will go, but I think I can get through the production relatively painlessly, as I know the cards well by that point. I'll just check my cards due dates once or twice a week, and once I make the production card, add a * to the tag. I suppose eventually I will need to do it daily, as it will catch up.

Has anyone tried what I'm doing? I'm wondering if anyone thinks this is a good idea? It is new ground for me.

I do audio and kana on the question side. Seems reasonable, and is there to make sure I know which word in the sentence I'm supposed to be writing out.

Out of interest, are you using Anki's ability to give the same spacing to cards that are of the same fact or starting from 0 spacing?

@stevesayskanpai Why don't you try it for a while and judge by yourself?
And production shouldn't be done from English O_o!