Sorry for misleading you, I did learn 1000 words but it was just for a day, it was more like a fun crazy challenge that I made for myself, usually I just learn 430 or 500 so things don't get out of control, even with the best methods we have around 1000 a day would get out of control after 3 days, but would be very well-spent 3 days (hum.. maybe I should try it)

"Are you at a minimum able to recognise the word and recall meaning and pronunciation?"

Yes. I guess that's what most people mean when they say they know a word.

"If you're not using a SRS, what's your routine like and do you keep track of retention?"

Well there's no secret here, I'm using a SRS to learn/remember all that stuff. I don't know how someone could archive that without a SRS, maybe by just reviewing the words with irregular kanji/reading/kunyumi? (hum.. it does't sound like a bad idea)

"how someone could conceivably be at a level where learning to recognise 1,000 words per day would be worth the effort"

Trust me, one thousand is quite a number, regardless of are at your 5k or 15k. After 4 days I learned almost 2000 and could really feel the difference, in fact I'm still feeling it, I can read full wikipedia pages and understand texts that I would not be able to even guess the meaning some days ago.

I'm using core 10k, one thing that I realized is that my progress with less technical material like manga seems a little less drastic, that's because core words are more specific I guess. If you have any big word list, chart or anything that I can turn into a deck (using a program), that contain more varied vocab like common slang and such I would be grateful.

Ps: I just passed 10k! yeahh!! Let's hold a imaginary cup o beer and celebrate *chu chu che che, la la la la la huaaaaaa* did you imagined it? Good

Ps2: I lot of people will say to you that you won't "real and deeply know" words this way, but the truth is that most of words are very simple, it doesn't take incredible amounts of input to understand them, in my case when I wanted to know more about the word I just had to glance the examples in the card "ah so it refers to tribunal afairs" "ah so it refers to a moral condition not a physical one" etc

I am intrigued by your posts on here. I am still a beginner working through rtk (doing the lite version to start) but hope to move on to sentences and vocab soon, and am working my way through tae kim as well. Did u need a foundation of a few thousand words first before you undertook this method? 430 words in a day is huge let alone 1000, so congrats on the effort i hope it pays off in the coming months.

@Livonor
I think for most people there is a difference between reading/understanding a word and learning it, otherwise we'd call understanding learning, and vice versa. Adding cards to your deck isn't really learning, it's starting the learning process. Learning is done when your cards are mature, that's the whole point of a SRS, the long term. Not to mention even if you only do recognition, adding 500 cards a day must give like thousands of daily reviews. You'll understand it's hard to believe you without some kind of evidence like your SRS statistics for example.

I'd say it goes even further than that - there's a lot of nuances and contextual stuff that only comes with a long association with the language. The sort of "metadata" about a word or phrase, where you know what contexts it should be used in, whether it has a positive/negative connotation (or neither), the subtle differences between similar words, and so on - being able to understand all that stuff is one of the end goals of language learning. How long it takes to get there for the majority of the words and phrases in a language is a matter of lots of input. But in the end there just aren't any shortcuts. You can prime words, make them latent knowledge, but they won't be "fully-grown" until you've encountered them over and over again in real contexts. The nice thing about SRS is that you can bootstrap that whole process by mass exposure to many words early on, which you then go on to reinforce through input and exposure. Or, you can take a more traditional approach and focus on slowly building your vocabulary through N+1 and similar graded approaches. But there's no way around simply getting exposure to the thousands upon thousands of words and phrases.

It's kind of like Heisig itself - you can bootstrap a form of early, latent "knowledge" about kanji, but there's no way you can say you "know" all those kanji until you've seen them over and over again in real contexts (and of course, that you can read the words that they appear in).

I guess my point is that I don't feel there's anything necessarily bad in bootstrapping lots of words into your brain - it's just that too often people mislead themselves into thinking that doing only that will constitute real knowledge of the language. Trust me, I'm a big fan of Anki and SRS's in general (25,300 word deck, represent!) - but in the end, no matter what method you use, you just have to be exposed to a vast amount of input before you can reach a high level.

1000 words in a day sounds like BS unless they were a ton of beginner words or Katakana words. Lets say you are just priming them, going through a deck with a 1000 words. Lets say you spend 20 seconds on each word. That's 20k seconds or 5.5 hours to prime 1k words.

Unless you are some kind of savant, no one will be learning these words with the kind of recall most people want. Going over them again and again is about the same affect of using words on a bunch of flashcards and going over them again and again. This is what SRS was created to avoid.

I will also express doubt at these statements. For the majority of people, it's incredibly unrealistic.

I found my limit to be at about 100 cards a day; that's not while holding a job or maintaining a full course load of high level classes either, that was after I quit my job and when I only had two 100 level classes and a 200 level class (not really 200 level, it was only introduction to psychology) to deal with.
I might have been able to squeeze in 20 more, at the most, if I didn't have school, but as it was, I was cheating the SRS system by priming and reviewing between intervals with a list (I had added a 2 hour interval to help with the drop in recall, but it was usually done way later).

So yeah, if that was difficult to maintain, 500+ words a day would be killer, unless you're just priming and don't mind massive amounts of reviews (when I was doing 100 a day, I usually had close to 500 reviews).

If it works for you, great, but don't expect anyone to believe you without some statistics and demonstrable ability in reading Japanese.

Also, 2000-6000 words isn't enough to read Wikipedia without any problems. Maybe it's possible with a dictionary, but every article I've checked has way too many unknown words at 6000.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I presume someone bright enough to be doing what Livonor claims to be doing would realize that, and not bother making the claims without providing the evidence.

So he's very likely lying.

P.S. I say ban him. If he manages to unban himself, then that proves he can't be trusted because he's some kind of witch

Livonor Wrote:I've been learning 400-1000 words a day, if that's not being efficient I don't know what is. Of course, I don't really know them, at least not by many other's people standards, but after a couple of months I will.

If that works for you, that's great. However, one could argue that it is more efficient to do a small chunk each day (100 a day) than to do all 1000 a day.

Livonor Wrote:Trust me, one thousand is quite a number, regardless of are at your 5k or 15k.

I agree. Any milestone is an achievement.

Livonor Wrote:After 4 days I learned almost 2000 and could really feel the difference, in fact I'm still feeling it, I can read full wikipedia pages and understand texts that I would not be able to even guess the meaning some days ago.

I disagree. 2000 is nowhere near enough. Maybe it's enough if you're reading books for kindergarten kids. But definitely not enough for wikipedia articles.

Congratulations on reaching 10,000. If as you say, you will "know" the words in a few months (let's say 3 months) (I will define "know" as in most of your cards will be mature with with barely any fails), then that means you are genius that few of us can match, or you're a liar.

Whatever the case, I wish you luck on your 1,000+ reviews a day (more reviews if you fail any cards).

Livonor Wrote:Well there's no secret here, I'm using a SRS to learn/remember all that stuff. I don't know how someone could archive that without a SRS, maybe by just reviewing the words with irregular kanji/reading/kunyumi? (hum.. it does't sound like a bad idea)

Reading the whole day (with translations) might be a solution,

I understand many of your disbelief, but it is my fault, not yours. I have to make clear that am not a raw beginner, when I started doing core I already have about 6000 words mined from real life, a good grammar understanding, was able do read kana and kanji fast as well as knowing the meanings and readings of most of them like the back of my hand, so those number are really way less impressive than it appears to be, I was just spending my brain cells on those few words that had kun-yumi.

And remember, my pace is around 400, 1000 is just something that I did for a day.

I'm sure if I was just steeping out of RTK 60 a day would be already too much, but that's not the case.

Ps: Due to my personal experience I don't judge cards by they maturity, because in my sentence deck there're old cards that I know badly, and new ones that I know well (despite getting the answer right). Maybe I should set a time limit in my reviews so just the really good ones get mature, that seems like another good idea.

And last but not least, I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here, I'm just trying to roughly replicate what the OP from this old thread did: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7097&page=1

So basically you're saying you already knew most of the words in core? If so, again, that's not learning since you already knew them, it's just adding them to your deck. If not, I commend how quickly you seem to be able to parse words.

And I don't think your replicating the "how do to rep fast" OP, you're just saying you do rep fast.

By the way, how long did it take to mine those 6000 words? Did you do that in the last 12 months? I'm asking because I still haven't seen your take on learning 10 000 words a year, since this is what the thread is about. In hindsight your original post looks like an off-topic necro.

@Livonor: I'd assumed you were already using some kind of timer, but if that's not the case you might be interested in athread I started a while ago. http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=10828

P.s. I believe you.

"that's not learning since you already knew them"

I don't review them, if there's a word that I already know I suspend it.

"how long did it take to mine those 6000 words?"

about one year, I'm in my second year. I didn't learn 10k words in a year, that's what I'm trying to do now

"In hindsight your original post just looks like an off-topic necro"

Yeah it was, sorry about that, I won't make those jokes anymore

@Splatted I checked my Anki and there's about 2000 reviews. I guess it's a good time to try it out.

I'm starting to use the 35 new words/day approach now with the Core 2k/6k Optimized deck. So far, I've had the deck set as a recognition deck, with the Japanese word and example sentence showing and me just trying to give the meaning of the word. I like the speed of this method; however, I was wondering how exactly others have gone about memorizing new words when they come up on a card.

Do you spend a couple of minutes with it trying to come up with a mnemonic, etc.? Or do you just quickly check it, repeat the word and definition, and then move on so as not to slow yourself down, which seems to be important when dealing with so many words? Also, in reviewing, do you pass a card if you can figure it out from the kanji or example sentence, even if you couldn't give the meaning just by hearing/seeing the gana for the word?

Sorry for all the questions. I'm just a bit hyped about this approach and want to make sure I'm getting the most out of it.

weatherman Wrote:I'm starting to use the 35 new words/day approach now with the Core 2k/6k Optimized deck. So far, I've had the deck set as a recognition deck, with the Japanese word and example sentence showing and me just trying to give the meaning of the word. I like the speed of this method; however, I was wondering how exactly others have gone about memorizing new words when they come up on a card.

Do you spent a couple of minutes with it trying to come up with a mnemonic, etc.? Or do you just quickly check repeat word and definition and then move on so as not to slow yourself down, which seems to be important when dealing with so many words? Also, in reviewing, do you pass a card if you can figure it out from the kanji or example sentence, even if you couldn't give the meaning just by hearing the word pronounced?

Sorry for all the questions. I'm just a bit hyped about this approach and want to make sure I'm getting the most out of it.

I look at the new word for a bit and try to understand it; study it for a bit and then hit 'again'. It won't stick if you just breeze through it, but I haven't found much use for mnemonics that aren't immediately apparent after doing RTK.

When I was adding a lot of cards, I found it helpful to do all my reviews first and then do the new cards. I also added an extra interval of two hours to get it in there a bit better. Of course, that was when I was doing 60-100 per day, so you may or may not get as much use out of the extra interval as I did, but I found separating new cards from reviews to be useful when I was adding more than 20 cards a day, but I went in intervals of 10, so if I didn't do 20, I did 30; if you're doing 35 though, it should be helpful.

I also use an extra step for new words, but at 30 minutes.

First I check the definition supplied by Core against WWWJDIC as the definitions are frequently lacking. I then amend as necessary. After that I write out new words when I first see them, with furigana. I will write them out the next couple times as well if they are difficult (new kanji / new readings). I also write words every time I fail them. 90-95% retention.

[s0apgun]

weatherman Wrote:I'm starting to use the 35 new words/day approach now with the Core 2k/6k Optimized deck. So far, I've had the deck set as a recognition deck, with the Japanese word and example sentence showing and me just trying to give the meaning of the word. I like the speed of this method; however, I was wondering how exactly others have gone about memorizing new words when they come up on a card.

Do you spend a couple of minutes with it trying to come up with a mnemonic, etc.? Or do you just quickly check it, repeat the word and definition, and then move on so as not to slow yourself down, which seems to be important when dealing with so many words? Also, in reviewing, do you pass a card if you can figure it out from the kanji or example sentence, even if you couldn't give the meaning just by hearing/seeing the gana for the word?

Sorry for all the questions. I'm just a bit hyped about this approach and want to make sure I'm getting the most out of it.

Rinse and repeat for new cards. Eventually they stick and getting the reading down becomes faster as you learn it from other words.

Interesting suggestions, thanks! Separating the new cards from the old does seem like a good idea; I'll give it a try. Like you, I've had limited success with mnemonics for vocabulary but just find it very hard to remember new words in general, especially for Japanese. I don't even remember struggling this way when starting Korean. In any case, I'll try to spend a little more time on each new word and see if that helps--while also just continuing to try to pound it into my brain. It has to stick eventually, right?

Any suggestions in regard to strictness, by the way? Should I even be allowing myself to look at the example sentence?

Look at the sentence, that's what it's there for. When going for recognition, being able to recognize a word in context is more important than learning it in isolation (which will bite you later when you get words that translate into English similarly).

As for strictness, I'm never all that strict with myself; if I draw a complete blank, I hit 'again', but if I get it pretty close (meaning or reading wise, but never both), then I'll just hit 'hard'. Only hit 'good' if you remembered it all and 'easy' should be reserved for words that you already know that just happen to show up in Core as well as obvious katakana words (if they aren't obvious, review them, they may not be English loan words).

While those are the ground rules, final judgement is reserved to how you feel about a card; if you think it was a fluke that you remembered something, hit 'hard'; if you think you should have gotten it right, hit 'hard'; basically, if you can't decide what button to hit, hit 'hard'. At least, that's how I do it.

Many of these words will be prevalent in whatever you read, so perfect recall of them in Anki isn't particularly important. I only really go after a word when I forget it over and over inside and outside of Anki, which isn't that often.

Thanks. I was a bit more lenient with myself when reviewing this morning and found the session went much more smoothly. I also separated the reviews from the new cards and found that that made the whole process much more straightforward for me, especially since I felt free to spend a good amount of time absorbing each new word as it came up (which in the end actually saved me time).

I think that 20.000 words are not enough to be on the same level like a native speaker. To be as distinguished as you'd be in your mother tongue, you need to have the vocab you'd have in your mother tongue, a deep understanding of that vocab, natural grammar, be quick to a point where you don't actively use your head anymore but speak with your gut feeling, and all this doesn't compute with "learn x amount of words in x time".

Also, your foreign language speech center doesn't grow over night. It doesn't grow for 35 words a day in a day and it won't make all those words accessible and active. It will probably not make them passive either when they're not written, but spoken, and it won't make them passive for male speakers when you're used to female speech, or to the speech of toothless people or fast-talkers.

You don't need to LEARN Japanese, you need to GET USED to Japanese.

"Fine, how do I get to understand new words then?"

Maybe telling you that it is comprehensible input that makes you progress sounds too Krashen-ish for you, but it really means what I just wrote. Make a word comprehensible by having it as whatever form of input ONCE (maybe as a flashcard, or a wordlist, or as a text in your target language on one side and a language you're good at on the other side on a bilingual text, there are people who swear that Baby Jesus comes to them every time they read a text in 2 languages or listen to it). Whatever you do, don't cling to some vocab item and hope to drill it in if only you got enough repetitions "based on memory science".

A language is something that has to grow organically, and for that, you need to understand it. You will understand more and more after having made more and more stuff comprehensible with some crutch like a dictionary or Rikaisama or whatever magic you chose to use, and then get more through context, and then encounter the same thing in a different context, and so on.

"Learn 35 words a day to learn 10.000 in a year and BAM you're fluent" won't fly with me.

I'm by no means a lazy guy, and I AJATTed more than Khatzu-fkn-moto, but I didn't do stupid stuff like staring at strings of incomprehensible Kanji or listening to random yadayada on the radio I neither understood, nor really care for. I chatted a lot with people I wanted to understand, then moved to Japan, and now I got the two "magical ingredients for language learning":

WANT+NEED

And that's all there is to it. And it took me 3 years to get here. You won't be faster than me, I can tell you that, unless you're a savant. Every learner who got to a decent level in Japanese will tell you it takes longer.

And I'm still not done.
But I'll not do "35 words a day", because that sounds like Rosetta Stone or taking the blue pill or any other fantasy story.

Language is not mathematics. Mathematics can not be applied to language learning.

ya what he said bichiz...

Excellent critique. Maybe we should be talking about "laying the foundation" for X words a day, just like we add the caveat of having "gotten started" on the kanji after finishing RTK.

That's the point. Expose yourself to a lot of words. You don't have to do them via SRS actually, because what you don't need will be thrown out by your brain anyways, and while it's possible to hammer them in, it's a very slow and painful process.

Since vocab in Japanese with all its compounds etc is pretty logic (not completely logic, but, let's say modular), it gets easier over time. So you learn stuff once, then do some other input, then learn the stuff again and you'll notice that you can delete a substantial part of the cards. You then repeat the process until only the stuff is left you didn't ever encounter.

You can then decide if it's worth your time to drill those with SRS or just ignore it or leave it for another day.

But taking a big pool and drilling it till all of those X000 words are "mature" won't work for comprehension. You'll be horribly disappointed when you "learned 10.000 words" and can't understand most of what some random guy on the street tells you.

Make picking up vocab a part of your schedule and do a lot of other stuff in the hopes you get to see or hear or use what you've learned.

SRS will, frankly, just eat so much time, you won't have enough to develop the knowledge you tried to cement. And without this development, it will be "dead knowledge" or "ANKI game words", but not "real language" yet. Normal, natural input has to play a much bigger role than vocab learning.

People seem to be so horrified to forget, but it's not a bad thing to forget a word. It's how it works. If you see it as "a stadium of growth", it loses its scariness.
If you're into soccer and have a lot of soccer input in Japanese, soccer words will pop up repeatedly, and you'll learn them and remember them and get to use them at some point. You'll also know them in-depth and all their connotations, when and how to use them - variety is king here. And that's something flashcards can't give you.