Has anyone every heard of MCD. Khatz for ajatt has talked about it. I was following is sentence method and about to start it today because I just finish RTK 1. But the day I was going to start he post something about MCD. http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...ent-192115
Does anyone know how to use this if so can they give me some easy examples and better explanation thanks for the help.

It seems some people posted it in the comments section of that post. I have been using MCD's for a bit now. I get where it's trying to take people. It's basically close deletion for either a vocabulary word,kanji,grammar,etc but it has a lot of context around it(i.e. if you take a paragraph from a site and you close delete one part, you can guess what it is by reading the rest).

Thanks I might just stick with the sentences a least until I get a better understanding of Japanese and grammar.

jordan3311 Wrote:Thanks I might just stick with the sentences a least until I get a better understanding of Japanese and grammar.

Plus monlinigual look-ups for whatever your close deletion part is. It does work but searching up the monolingual cards takes time(dictionary).

It's basically the same as the sentence method but has a lot more context. So it works well if your really used to Japanese.

having tried MCDs for a while... this is my advice. There is no silver bullet. Whatever method you use, you will get bored of eventually because this process takes a long time. Make some MCDs, make a Subs2SRS deck, do core6k, do sentences, do whichever and whatever is most interesting that you can SRS. MCDs are great but lacking in certain areas the others make up for. Doing your reps is also more interesting when you are presented with a variety of challenges instead of the same old formulaic card over and over again...

if you go to the "download shared plugin" under "file" and "download" in anki, there is a plugin for to make MCDs available. It allows easy creation of multiple cards ffrom a piece of Japanese text. I have used it many times, I thing you have to find the right materiel for MCD but it can work just as well as regular sentences. I have noticed is that sometimes I don't want to read the entire card and I feel cheating when I don't do that,but sometimes it's the same with sentences.

MCD to take a lot of time but i can kind of see how they are of some use. Could I get an example of how someone does the MCD? I just wanna see of im doing it correct.

Its CLOZED DELETION. Basically a setence with a part missing, Iknow.jp already does this, It's just Kaza's way of getting more money, hes already getting money with Silver spoon and big silver spoon -.-. I like the guy and all of his blogs but since the webpage is littered with "PAY NOW TO GET MORE SECRET HIDDEN CONTENT" and "DONATE PLEASE?"
I can't trust him when he post a new post saying "HEY A NEW TEQNIQUE!, Pay me money and ill tell you what it is, this huge post will say nothing about what it is".

fyi cloze deletion is REALLY helpful if you plan on taking a test. using it for test questions helps immensely.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...cds-part-1

But didn't he explain what it was?

blackbrich Wrote:http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...cds-part-1

But didn't he explain what it was?

Oh I guess I only read the first 5 posts that said "10,000 sentenses are dead, go buy the MCD pack ", everyone1 in the comments was asking what they were in the beginning, I guess he explained it.

JunePin Wrote:I have noticed is that sometimes I don't want to read the entire card and I feel cheating when I don't do that,but sometimes it's the same with sentences.

It's not the purpose of MCD's to read the entire card.
The text is just there... You don't need to read it, just glance over it to guess the CLOZE DELETION. That is the only important thing.

For example, I have a little paragraph of the website "gigazine" I make about 10 cloze deletions. After all the cards have come by, you'll be to the point where it's the same as reading it once through. Only it's more fun. ^^

Peeps who do MCD cards...

Can you give some examples here? I hate digging around AJATT and would like to get my head around this いわゆるMCD concept.

kitakitsune Wrote:Peeps who do MCD cards...

Can you give some examples here? I hate digging around AJATT and would like to get my head around this いわゆるMCD concept.

I'm wondering about this as well as I'm starting over my sentence deck (too many overdue cards) today and plan to go the MCD route after testing it out. I just made my first card which looks something like this:

Front:
クマに☓う方法とは、簡単に言えば、 1）クマがいる場所に行く 2）クマが ..... ☓う場所を選ぶ. クマに☓える可能性がとても高いことは分かりました。ではどこで☓うかが次の問題です。場所選定の条件は次のようなことでしょう。

Back:
あ・う
会う　（１） 集まってひとつになる． (対)離れる

The only problem is that it took me nearly 25 minutes to make this card, which obviously isn't motivational at all. Am I doing something wrong here? Is this recommended for vocab or just grammar?

Sorry, but I'm not understanding why it took 25 minutes to make that card.

kitakitsune Wrote:Sorry, but I'm not understanding why it took 25 minutes to make that card.

Well, it takes time to find a decent chunk of text that has the word you're making the card for. It also has to be parsable (enough to make out the word given the context) in case you need to fall back on it during a study session. That took he bulk of the time, but aside from that, getting definitions, copy and pasting, it all takes time (especially on a laptop). Granted, I should get faster the more I get used to it, but we'll see.

The card looks pretty solid though.

it looks way too long to me. SRS cards are better if they're short and simple. If they're that long, you'll simply learn the card... plus you're wasting too much time you could spend away from the SRS.

I'm sure cloze deletions are very good for grammar, but keep them short!! If you want more context, use a picture that links with the situation (or use an english cue if necessary).

KREVA Wrote:Well, it takes time to find a decent chunk of text that has the word you're making the card for.

I believe the idea is to use text that you come across... stop in the middle of reading and make a card, or mark your spot and make a card later from text that you're reading just for fun. Searching for an arbitrary paragraph would be a pain, I'm sure.

I'm not sold on MCDs anyway - I do prefer -sentences- to standalone words, but honestly, I prefer dictionary sentences. As a general rule they are short and illustrative, and there's usually at least one that is fairly concrete except for the most abstract words - I always pick sentences with concrete imagery by preference. Literally colliding with another person is a more memorable image than a difference of opinion for 衝突, for example, and the figurative and abstract meaning is easily understood from the literal and concrete one while the reverse is not true.

I stopped using sentences from native material because the 'interest level' of taking a sentence from an interesting source simply vanishes as time passes since originally reading/watching the work.

I'll probably try some MCDs though, just to see how they work out - one reason I stopped taking my reading material as my anki sentence source is because the lost context makes it hard to understand the words once the details of the work are forgotten. MCDs would address that, probably (but then, you can't include the whole work either, unless it's an -extremely- short one.)

Postscript @IceCream : MCD's are massive context cloze deletions, or something like that. By definition they are long. You're not supposed to read the whole thing every time. I'm not sure I'd be able to stop myself, but that's the theory... the context is there if you need it to clue you in.

lol I alrady do this. I was wondering what that crap was.
I personally like this a lot... it's like more active yet sometimes it's more passive (more fun and easier) than the normal deck.

so according to anki I made it 1.5 years ago
I have 539 cards right now

So i'm gonna post my example...
1. I do monolingual because I'm at that level.... I've been monolingual for 3/4 years
2. sometimes I don't "really" do my reviews in the normal one where you have the vocab card or the sentence card.. .I just read it but I don't really engage in it so I don't know it but for some reason I keep pressing 2 or 3 on some of them lol.

Lately I've been taking cards that I've been ignoring/"not really know but want to know" in my normal deck into this deck.

3. also by doing this deck... it really really makes my brain work more and it can help me put it in my active vocabulary.
4. I love japanese tv but I don't learn much any more because I understand almost everything they say. But at the same time, it's not like I can produce as much Japaense as the people on the japanese tv without effort and without mistakes or funny sounding japanese so .... it's a good way to help that. ALSO it's a way to take advantage of the fact that they put huge ass text all over the screen lol.

I either kill a part of the word, the whole verb, or a whole phrase.
examples:
front: ＿そる
back : そそる
ある感情・行動を起こさせる

front: その音に た__られるように
back: その音にたぐられるように

ぐぐぐぐぐ (this one I didn't put the definition because i have the definition in my sentence deck and i alrdy know the definiton)

from TV:
example of me emptying out a whole phrase is there tooo
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/826/58841758.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/706/99602628.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/638/19322320.png/
the screenshot got cut off. if anyone's curious the blank is から。So it's　生活から悟れ
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/41/15913031.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/215/67952270.png/
Like the person said... putting it in arbitrarily is mad time-consuming . I know for some of these cards... it might seem a little extreme blanking out a whole phrase or blanking some random word or part of the word and whatnot but it wasn't hard to remember because I saw the TV show ( I liked it/I was engaged while watching it...). In general, your deck shouldn't be full of arbitrarily crap.. but for this format especially... you should only put in crap you are interested in.

also i think it's helpful for keigo.

I think you should only MCD if you're somewhere along the way. Because for me.. I can't do this for korean because it's too difficult but for japanese it's so easy. Also for korean they have so many possible sounds.... you know how japanese only have 50 sounds... korean has god knows how many more times this so.... maybe once I really get used to korean it'll be possible?

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Postscript @IceCream : MCD's are massive context cloze deletions, or something like that. By definition they are long. You're not supposed to read the whole thing every time. I'm not sure I'd be able to stop myself, but that's the theory... the context is there if you need it to clue you in.

but..... what's the point of them then? What part of learning Japanese are they supposed to help with??

Like I say, I'm not endorsing them or currently using them, but rigamboo has been posting explanations on the ajatt.com blog page recently if you're curious.

(Edit: That sounds, in retrospect, like I'm saying I can't be bothered... I'm actually saying 'I don't know'.)

ah, ok... well, i've read the page now. i'm gonna stick with my original view, i think. shorter cards are better. cloze deletion is good, but deleting one word out of a paragraph is probably the worst way possible to test your knowledge of it... it's not going to help you produce it in context, and it's not going to actually test you on anything but recognising that particular card...

better ways are:
* cloze deletion of grammar done in similar ways to howtwosavealife suggested.
* picture context + cloze deletion of a relevent word. If you have picture context, it connects it in your head with a situation or visual image, which can help you produce it in a real life situation.
* call and response cards can help you say whole sentences (though they should still be short), as well as get a feel for grammar.

oh and I was thinking that in all honesty ... if you want to learn the verb au.... like the fact that you use the particle "ni" with au and all that almost effortlessly, just listen to Japanese music. Well maybe looking up lyrics would be helpful. And maybe that's not even that difficult if you use rikai-chan. NOT TO MENTION that verb is overused like crazy in songs ESPECIALLY by nishino kana. she says the words aitai or aitakute or aenakute or aenai in like every song that she writes so.... I think certain words that are that common aren't really worth it to make a card for it at all...

You obviously learn more and more effectively singing along to that "shitty" (says me and a bunch of 2-channelers.. it's a catchy song though.) nishino kana song (that song aitakute aitakute). Like I said, you'd learn a whole phrase with it... kimi ni aitai etc etc.

It's not even the fact that you're making a card for "au" in this format. It's the fact that's youre making "au" in the first place that puzzles me. It's so common... I don't see the reason and a whole 25 minutes? Well I guess that was just an example of what not to do when it comes to MCD cards.

and here's nishino kana!
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_qu...l10.5l15l0
Oh I look through the lyrics and there's no "kimi ni au" type ... particle usage example with au... but like I said a lot of songs use this verb so... lol oh wait up. nishisno kana has the song 西君に会いたくなるから. problem solved lol.

IceCream Wrote:i'm gonna stick with my original view, i think. shorter cards are better.

I'm starting to agree with this. One of the important aspects from my sentence deck was I was reading Japanese and understanding it through the context given. If I'm creating "massive" amounts of text to go with the word and I forget the word, I'll have to attempt to read it in order to see if I can guess right. I'd much rather do that with a sentence or two worth of context as opposed to a paragraph.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:It's not even the fact that you're making a card for "au" in this format. It's the fact that's youre making "au" in the first place that puzzles me. It's so common... I don't see the reason and a whole 25 minutes? Well I guess that was just an example of what not to do when it comes to MCD cards.

Well, I've been learning Japanese on and off (on mostly) for the past 3-4 years, so I'm fully aware of the meaning of 会う, but the question is will I remember it along with all the other variations and the subtle differences in their meanings (遭う、合う etc.) as an MCD? I'd sure love to find out.