Acedio Wrote:In my deck I have forward and reverse cards for each of my notes (i.e. Japanese -> English and English -> Japanese). Is this what you mean? It does take a bit longer, but I feel like just doing Japanese -> English is too easy and would make it harder to recall words when attempting to form sentences. Has anyone tried both ways and have any commentary on how each worked for them?
Any links to studies done on this kind of thing?
EDIT: After thinking about it for a bit, I think I might try out recall-only studying. I don't think it will save me a lot of time (the recognition cards are always super quick, anyway), but I might as well save time where I can.
What I mean is that I don't recommend English -> Japanese cards, but, if you do them, then also doing the same fact in a Japanese -> English card is pretty pointless. I'm not asking you to trust me, I have a logical explanation why. Here's my reasoning:
The only splitting up of a fact into two cards that makes sense to me, in Core2K, is Kanji -> Reading and then Audio -> Kanji. I like that because each fact has two cards, but you produce two different things with each (two-carded) fact: Kanji from one, reading from the other, and you also have two different forms of input: reading and listening. That is probably worth the fact that you're doing significantly more reviews.
However, with English -> Japanese, you produce two different things with just this one card: you produce both Kanji and reading (NOTE↓). That's already bad, because it goes against the SRS principle of making answers simple (comprised of one simple piece of information). When you also add a Kanji -> Reading card, you produce a reading again. But you already produced a reading (which is the easiest part of it anyway), so you're wasting time by doubling up on the easiest part of your studies. It makes no sense to me.
In conclusion: doubling up on on each fact, by doing it twice: Kanji -> Reading and Audio -> Kanji covers everything: both types of production, both types of input, and listening comprehension is the cherry on top of this beautiful cake. If completeness is what you're going for, this is the way to go.
The only two alternatives to this that make sense to me are:
1. only doing one or the other (you can even switch periodically, to break up the monotony). This only covers one type of production and one type of input, but saves about 25% to 33% of your time (meaning you get to go through that much more material, but less thoroughly). Like I said, it's a matter of personal preference whether you want to be thorough, or you want volume. Imo, both work fine.
2. If you're doing Anki reviews in conjunction with heavy input (reading and listening to native material), then producing Kanji writings of single words/fact is all you need, as far as Anki is concerned (the way I described it in some of my other recent posts in various threads, by setting the answer as the writing of a word, and the question as a sentence you can easily read, that contains that word - but the word itself is taken out of this question sentence, replaced with its reading, or even a blank for advanced students, instead).
This second alternative is what I've switched to recently. But, for this to work, reading and other forms of input are an important component. Otherwise, you're way too focused on just one aspect of the language (the writing system), at the expense of everything else. It also takes a few minutes/ fact to find the example sentence and add the fact to Anki.
Note: my logic assumes that trying to produce Kanji without first establishing the reading of a word is stupid. I'm hoping this is a self evident statement, since the last thing this post needs is another paragraph to back that up. I've been droning on long enough.
Note2: comparing Japanese sentence reviews to let's say French sentence reviews is a mistake. With Japanese sentence reviews, Japanese to English cards do in fact force you to produce Japanese (either the Kanji, based on Japanese audio, or the reading, based on the Kanji). A French -> English sentence would be pure input, and therefor the usual arguments concerning the pointlessness of drilling input would apply.
Note3: Oups, in Anki 2 facts are actually called notes. So, for the purposes of this post, fact=note. I had a nagging feeling that I'm getting something wrong, through the typing of this whole post.
Edited: 2013-03-08, 3:13 pm
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