I am sure this has been discussed in these forums, probably at length. But I am looking for a bit of clarity.

I have seen it mentioned that the sentence study method of vocab learning, whilst having some obvious benefits of grammar and audio examples is primarily recommended as learning vocab in a sentence is better for retention. Is this incorrect?

I have found it relatively enjoyable to learn vocab on Memrise, which has crowd-sourced mnemonics for at least most beginner low-intermediate vocab.
I believe Memrise is not ideal for sentence learning (all though the site continually grows and changes)
The strong point about using memrise, imvho, is that the amount of vocab one adds is limited only by the amount of time in the day. If I have a whole weekend then adding obscene amounts of Vocab seems to work out fine for learning pronounciation of individual words.

My method in memrise.. learn the reading.. write it out once.. pick a mnemonic or create one.. write it out once.. move on.. review of course.

Lately I have been focused on RTK - Core 2k/6 / Tae Kim Clozed,
As this path has been tread. However, I believe there are some more experienced learners in this forum who probably have a greater perspective on the important end goals.


Has anyone else tried something like this?
Could one acquire this vocab and then practise full sentences in textbooks, or even in a core anki deck to receive the benefits of a sentence?

How strong are the benefits of the sentences in core?

Learning a simple sentence with the word is probably as effective as learning words through mnemonics

As long as you have enough input, either way is fine. Using both [sentences and mnemonics] is better.

seaweedhead Wrote:My method in memrise.. learn the reading.. write it out once.. pick a mnemonic or create one.. write it out once.. move on.. review of course.

What kind of mnemonics?

This is a Japanese word: 検索.

What's an example of a mnemonic that associates that with its reading: けんさく ?

To be honest, I think you're better off SRSing the word/sentence and learning/reinforcing it that way, continue to enjoy native media (depending on the vocab you are SRSing, coming across them again in a range of contexts), and if you want to learn readings, do it separately, after you've already got a grasp of the language (words).

I'm creating a spread sheet with some 6355 kanji, sorted via frequency, listing their 音読み and 訓読み, and going to eventually make an Anki deck out of it. By that time I'll already have been through Core2K/6K, and another vocab deck I'm building (based on 俳句 by 一茶, out of personal interest), plus a host of other randomly found words through native reading. It's really only something I'm doing out of personal interest (and because I'm at least slightly crazy).

Japanese vocab learning/memorizing/whatever done by mnemonic, unless you are efficient at creating them, involve multiple senses, and they are purely for the short term, is probably a lot more work them simply coming across words, entering them into Anki, and getting them into your memory by sheer force.

Basically, the more words you are familiar with, the more you will be able to read easier, and more your going to see many, many words, over and over again, anyways.

Mnemonics for rarer words/kanji, using Japanese, would probably be the better option, in respect to creating connections to the word.

Use mnemonics when everything else fails instead. I remember using it for 両親 to remember the reading. Thinking of some shitty parents that where "råskinn" (though that sounds more like ろうしん) (~rascal, often associated with reckless drivers.)

But I don't need mnemonics for most kanji any more; I have forgotten most of them long ago, and I finished RtK in september.

It's not an either-or question. Some words are easily learned as vocabulary only, because the English meaning matches the Japanese meaning perfectly. Others, and that includes such common words as "面白い", don't overlap perfectly, and you need to map it onto different English words depending on context. For those, you might SRS sentences, and the Core sentences were great for lazy people like me.

At some point, you may find that you can mostly move to vocab SRSing only for those words that don't perfectly map onto an English word, because you get a fair bit of exposure through reading etc. of native material. The sooner you get there, the better, but it depends on how much time and motivation you have.

There probably will be a few words or idiomatic expressions here and there, rare but worth learning, that are best SRSed in context, so you'd again use a sentence.

I prefer learning sentences for the following reasons:

-You get more practice with vocabulary that is somewhere between "totally unknown" and "perfectly known" -- for example, in my current Chinese deck, I added a bunch of sentences from a Magic Tree House book that have an owl in them. So I don't just have one sentence for the Chinese word for owl, I have five or six of them.

-You get more practice with grammar usage and collocations.

-When you do sentence cards the way I do -- taking them from native materials, usually novels/manga/chapter books -- then every sentence is embedded in a context and a narrative that helps me remember each element. (Visualization is incredibly powerful as a memory aid. If you are reading a book and you're visualizing the story in your mind as you read, then that can help you a lot in recalling the vocabulary.)

-Some words have many, many different usages. I remember seeing an essay that said that for Murakami Haruki, a certain number of sales was "katai." I knew perfectly well the meaning of "katai" as in "hard" -- but I didn't know the meaning that translated to "firm, reliable." If I had added that as a single vocabulary item, then after a couple months I would have gone "Sure, sure, it means 'hard,'" so I needed something else -- like the context of the whole sentence -- to cue me to the other meaning.

As some people pointed out you can get away with doing some studying in a simple vocab word fashion. In fact this may be useful for getting yourself up to speed on basic vocab in a language; numbers, simple nouns, adjectives, verbs.

The problem with this method though is figuring out at what point to switch from words to sentences and that will never be really apparent. You can set a solid number before starting, say "At 400 words, we move to sentences." and then do that, but if there's any doubt you might just tell your self "Hey this working fine, I'll go for a bit longer." I would consider doing sentences from the start. Because beore you know it you have gotten most of your deck as words and may not realize the handicap that doing it this way has given you. Fillanzea's katai example is a good one.

I like to use English though to illustrate just how insane it can get with homonyms. Japanese has a lot of homonyms for many words as well though.

What is the meaning of "Run?" Think about it before reading on.


"While running to the stage to give her announcement speech that she is running for office, she snagged a table with water on it and got it all over her causing her makeup to run, and her pantyhose to form a run in them."

"That company provides a service to repair appliances so they run properly again. They run semis between Chicago and Nashville to repair them, and use the highway that runs between the two cities a lot. In one incident a semi was running down a mountain road when its brakes went out and out of nowhere some deer ran into the road from a deer run and caused the truck to almost run off the road. Instead of applying emergency breaks he just continued down the road full speed. Later the driver commented that rashness runs in his family."

Context is everything.

Almost every new card I create is a sentence card (and all self-selected... I didn't quite... okay, I didn't -remotely- follow the 'standard path', but say, post Core-3k, everything is self selected and you're in the ballpark of my learning experience. And yeah, a lot of my early vocab was single words marked as JLPT blah or Grade blah.)

I do this for a -lot- of reasons - first, for what vix86 just said, context is everything. From the other side, basically... '状態・condition' is ... almost meaningless. J->E, E->J, furigana, whatever. I can look at that card a hundred times and it won't help.

Take a sentence from the dictionary...
彼女はとても通学できるような状態ではない
She is in no condition to go to school.

and suddenly, ohh, -now- I know why 'condition' 状態 and 'condition' 条件 aren't synonyms.

(条件, if you don't know, is 'condition' like 'terms'. Conditions that must be met to release the hostages, etc., almost totally unrelated to 状態. The pronunciation similarity in Japanese an unfortunate trap that nastily lines up with the same word multiple meanings of the English, but note the Kanji difference.)

Of course the two can be differentiated by longer definitions, but good luck finding a J->E dictionary that gives long definitions rather than a list of word-equivalents. (Kenkyuusha is your best bet, but even then... ) Maybe you have a mind that can look at a list of cross-language equivalents and understand why the condition in "condition, terms" is different from the condition in "condition, state" and never mix them up... logically, it makes sense, (especially after contrasting 状態 and 条件 directly) but in terms of imprinting meaning in my mind, such a flashcard is essentially useless. Especially in the absence of direct contrasts.

Beyond that, sentence cards give examples of varying grammars, show the most common words and all the particles as surrounding context and so give you more depth on how they are used, and even provide you with common fixed phrases that can be repeated verbatim.

About the only time I create straight vocabulary cards anymore is when I'm creating a card for a 四字熟語 or other long compound that has a clearly fixed meaning, and even then I'll prefer a context if I can get one.

Personally, I like dictionary sentences because they are -not- exactly the context that I first read the word in (ie, the novel/manga/anime/drama that I'm looking the word up for) so now I have at least 2 contexts for the word (original and dictionary), and because dictionary contexts tend to use common words and phrases to a fault -- and if I'm going to read something dozens of times, it had better be something -common-, and because J->E dictionaries obviously have English translations. If dictionaries fail me, I grab sentences from ALC or Tatoeba, and if I have to, I simply take an untranslated sentence from the original work I'm looking up the word for. (Ideally only after fully understanding the line/sentence the word in question appears in.)

If that all sounds very painful and pedantic... yeah, well, that's why at times I just enjoy material and let unknown vocab slide past me and hope to catch it later. Sometimes I add every word, sometimes only words that catch my eye, and sometimes I just let it all go and just enjoy the moment, confusing parts and all.

Having sentences in SRS for the purpose of proving context is not particularly useful. A gloss of a word and understanding of grammar is all what you need to know when you move on to reading the native material. It’s kind of obvious that that material will provide you with more than enough context to allow you to resolve meaning of similar English meanings, like those 状態 and 条件.

From that point of view then, sentences in SRS are redundant. Where having them may come useful, is when you start collecting vocabulary from various sources (songs, articles, books, newspapers, etc.) and the sentences will help you remember what was the source of your vocab. Note however, that you start collecting sentences after you start reading native sources.

Inny Jan Wrote:Having sentences in SRS for the purpose of proving context is not particularly useful. A gloss of a word and understanding of grammar is all what you need to know when you move on to reading the native material. It’s kind of obvious that that material will provide you with more than enough context to allow you to resolve meaning of similar English meanings, like those 状態 and 条件.

From that point of view then, sentences in SRS are redundant. Where having them may come useful, is when you start collecting vocabulary from various sources (songs, articles, books, newspapers, etc.) and the sentences will help you remember what was the source of your vocab. Note however, that you start collecting sentences after you start reading native sources.

Half the posters in this thread, and a bunch in other recent threads (including myself), have given specific reasons as to why SRS-ing sentences IS useful.

Never addressing why that reasoning is wrong, and just stating that sentences are useless, is not particularly useful advice.

Btw, an argument I haven't seen in this thread yet is that SRS-ing simple sentences is EASIER than SRS-ing words, because the unknown word has a context. So what is redundant is making the extra effort it takes to memorize words out of context, by doing vocab.

Inny Jan Wrote:A gloss of a word and understanding of grammar is all what you need to know when you move on to reading the native material.

That maybe so, but having vocabulary words along with a short simple sentence in an SRS environment makes it easier. I've been able to SRS cards from the Core2K/6K deck, then come across them in native media and be able to see how the reading/kanji can be used in different contexts, etc. Coming a term I haven't SRS'd before, however, has been difficult to retain, even after looking up a definition and reading.

So whilst one may not "need" to learn words/revise words, with related sentences, in an SRS environment, it has made the process of reading native material easier, for my personal experience. For someone without a large pool of readings and words to draw from, SRS makes the process faster and easier.

The fact that it works for me and has increased my ability to read "native" materials faster than relying on "native" materials alone, essentially stands contradictory to the point of view in which SRS are redundant.


There are many ways to skin a cat.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Never addressing why that reasoning is wrong, and just stating that sentences are useless, is not particularly useful advice.

what do you mean? he was addressing why the reasoning is wrong. The context from the sentence is not necessary in the SRS because there is always at least some context present when the words are encountered in reality. Also there are a lot words such as simple nouns that are entirely unambiguous without context (bird, refrigerator, tree...).

Stansfield123 Wrote:Btw, an argument I haven't seen in this thread yet is that SRS-ing simple sentences is EASIER than SRS-ing words, because the unknown word has a context. So what is redundant is making the extra effort it takes to memorize words out of context, by doing vocab.

if that were true, and I don't think it is, you still need to balance that against the extra time spent making the card and the time spent reading it during your review. That's the argument for word cards, they are faster to produce and review and the context necessary to really learn words is present in native sources. The SRS is just a way of getting some trace of the gist of a word into your brain.

Just 'a gloss' isn't all that's needed. The whole point of SRS is to reinforce memory of a word at times -other- than when you're reading the native material. For me, the memory of the original context is not likely to be recalled when quizzing a card in Anki, all I have to go by is what's on the card. Even if I recall the original context at 7 days, I'm hardly likely to remember it in 3 months. Other people's memories may work differently, of course, maybe even to be able to quote the sentence they original encountered the word in, but mine doesn't work that way. If I want context when quizzing a card, it has to be on the card.

nadiatims Wrote:if that were true, and I don't think it is,

It may not be true as a general rule, but it's certainly true for me that words out of context are very hard to recall. I'll generally fail them every time they get to a 5-6 month interval, often even if I've just seen them in native material recently. (-after- seeing the answer, I'll remember the word and having read it recently.)

They also don't give me much help when reading - even words that I've been answering correctly every time and recently I still have to rack my brain to try to cough up the English word I've been using as the answer, and then try to see how it fits the sentence, which often it doesn't seem to do, and then I'm looking the word up in the dictionary for more details just as if I'd never studied it...

Again, other people's brains may work differently, but kindly don't suggest that I'm wrong in thinking I need a whole sentence on my card. I've tried simple cards, and they're worthless for my way of learning. I don't get my brain into a 'reading Japanese' mindset with simple cards, and my memory of the card simply has no connection to the part of my mind that actually understands Japanese.

Of course, I'm quite aware that I don't have a very good memory. Then again, that's why I SRS things.

I approve of simple sentences to remember words.

If you ever create production cards, sentences are necessary. For recognition, I find that reading one fully comprehensible sentence is enough to learn a word.

Imo, focusing on the definition is really boring.
I prefer using sentences to "define" words.

Then again, I only ever look at the word, and pass reviews far into the future.

um, am I the only one that sees a compromise here?

front
Word

back
Word with reading
Ex. Sentence
Definition

You can actually set up rikaisama to make these types of cards automatically for you by just pushing one key when you find a word you like in firefox.

...As for me personally, I prefer to also have an audio example in my cards because pronunciation can be tricky as we all know. hence after finishing core10k I'm moving into subs2srs decks again.

dtcamero Wrote:um, am I the only one that sees a compromise here?

That's not a compromise since you still don't know what definition to use. Are you going to sit there and ponder all of those it could be? If you include the audio on the front, then that might solve some of the problem, but that'd be a listening recognition card. The reading comprehension would still need the sentence.

I went from learning sentences, learning words, learning sentences with the word bolded and underlined. I think your Japanese level also matters so you might go back and forth like i did as you go along.

I have other types of card formats too so that's another reason why i changed along the way .
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid88830
and for my say-it deck I actually have another format where i put the word and the definition on the front and blank out a part of the definition and put that on the back. sometimes that format works better than the usualy format with the sentence or word in the front and the definiton on the back.

Regarding the point that reading an example sentence takes too long: so don't read it (although, of course, reading a sentence you know should not take any time, it should be a glance). The question is about the word, not the example sentence. If you can read/produce the word without so much as looking at the sentence, great.

Regarding making the cards: it takes me less than two minutes, and those two minutes aren't busywork: I'm reading example sentences, looking at new Kanji, locating and manipulating words and readings to highlight and replace the Kanji with the reading in the sentence, etc. That time is spent at least as productively as anything else I do in Japanese. I guarantee you that it would take longer than that to make up a mnemonic or try to brute force an out of context word, and you'll have a lot less to show for your efforts.

dtcamero Wrote:um, am I the only one that sees a compromise here?

front
Word

back
Word with reading
Ex. Sentence
Definition

You can actually set up rikaisama to make these types of cards automatically for you by just pushing one key when you find a word you like in firefox.

...As for me personally, I prefer to also have an audio example in my cards because pronunciation can be tricky as we all know. hence after finishing core10k I'm moving into subs2srs decks again.

Why not put that example sentence in the front, with the word? Why put it in the answer, where it doesn't help you? (rikaisama doesn't care where your various fields go)

I also switch the word with its reading, in the front, so that I have to produce the actual kanji, a little bit like in the AJATT MCDs. So my cards look like this:
Front:
[ぜんそくりょく]で走った
Back:
全速力
(n) full speed; (P)
Audio

Audio is auto generated (I auto input the sentences, generate the audio for all sentences I put in that day, then modify the Front part by replacing the word and adding the brackets for each). If the sentence is ambiguous in any way, I take the time to add a translation for it. All this takes me 30 minutes, for about 20 cards. Note that most of that time is spent looking at example sentences, and deciding which one I like. It's not pointless editing time, it's time spent "in Japanese" so to speak. The actual editing takes a few seconds. It's literally just pressing a couple of hotkeys as I select a word with the mouse and click the destination for it. Took me longer to write a couple of posts on this site just now, than it would take to edit hundreds of cards.

When answering, I produce the word. In this case I probably wouldn't (because all three Kanji are very common, but I usually take the time to physically write the answer. As I'm writing out the word, I also shadow the audio that just played. This word is actually from a song, so I even have a little melody to go along with it.

These cards work ridiculously well in helping me learn both the writing and pronunciation of words, without any focused effort on trying to memorize anything. In fact, all the stuff I have to do, both while making the cards and while answering them, helps me avoid trying to force memorization (which doesn't work, and is the number one enemy of learning).

Stansfield123 Wrote:Why not put that example sentence in the front, with the word? Why put it in the answer, where it doesn't help you? (rikaisama doesn't care where your various fields go)

well I prefer it in the answer because it's more like a recognition card, where the game is simply to guess pronounciation and meaning... I can power through these quickly... the sample sentence is just to give context and make sure I understand the usage... it's like hearing audio for a word, after a few times you understand and don't need it anymore.

putting the sentence and hiragana in the question field makes it a production card, requiring you to produce the relevant kanji. these take longer to do... sure several hundred is easy but production cards are harder to scale up into the tens of thousands.

Vix86 Wrote:That's not a compromise since you still don't know what definition to use. Are you going to sit there and ponder all of those it could be?

I don't understand this question. Yes I would look through and choose the right definition. I have 4 kokugo dictionaries loaded into rikaisama, usually with several definitions for each word. From sentence context and a J-E dic lookup I'll get the relevant meaning in this case, then choose the most appropriate kokugo definition. Is this really hard to do?

Stansfield123 Wrote:In fact, all the stuff I have to do, both while making the cards and while answering them, helps me avoid trying to force memorization (which doesn't work, and is the number one enemy of learning).

I'm a bit ambivalent about this. on the one hand the antimoon guys always say you should use an srs to study, not to learn...(your input method basically is the study portion) and that is reasonable. However in my experience, if the thing you're learning is just brute force raw data... like I recently used anki to memorize prices and dates for artworks... picture -> numbers... it is super efficient. difficult at first, but super efficient.

I basically do recognition cards this way, without studying... and using the srs algorithm, you can really scale up your study if the answer is a simple enough unit. Couldn't really do this with sentences I think, as it would be overwhelming.

dtcamero Wrote:

Vix86 Wrote:That's not a compromise since you still don't know what definition to use. Are you going to sit there and ponder all of those it could be?

I don't understand this question. Yes I would look through and choose the right definition. I have 4 kokugo dictionaries loaded into rikaisama, usually with several definitions for each word. From sentence context and a J-E dic lookup I'll get the relevant meaning in this case, then choose the most appropriate kokugo definition. Is this really hard to do?

The problem is, suppose you have two cards, with example sentences on the back:

暴動を治める
suppress [put down] a riot

国を［家を］治める
「rule a country [manage a household]


If the front of both cards just says '治める', you have to recall both definitions to be sure to pass the card. And おさめる is nice enough to separate its definitions with different kanji spellings, unlike some other words where you might have 5 distinct meanings.

I know people have solutions to these problems... notes on which definition or kanji a card -isn't-, or some sort of hint, or even simply accepting that the most correct answer is to list all of the definitions and list them all on the back. But it's not a problem at all for me since I put my example sentences on the front.

Trying to quiz vocabulary -without- kanji would be kind of a nightmare... かける immediately springs to mind; and I make a kana card for every new vocabulary word (in order to get used to going from reading to recalling the kanji, to get used to reading the word in its kana form - which also helps with listening comprehension when you're less dependent on kanji.)

I don't put sound clips on my sentences for a lot of reasons, although one of those was that it was too much trouble under Anki-1. I may make a separate sub-deck with sound-clip words later.

Also - I'm not interested in compromises. It's great for those of you with good memorization abilities that you can whip through tens of thousands of cards with minimal information on both sides and have that actually result in working ability to use the word. If it works for you, then I wouldn't expect you to waste time adding sentences. But for those of us with poor memorization abilities... we have to do what we can.

ya I would in that case do
治める　(暴動関係）on the front...
or 治める (ｘ家庭関係）
kinda like you described. There really aren't THAT many words like that though... most of the problematic vocab will be 2-4 kanji compounds.

I guess the reason I think this is valuable is that I think the ability to deal with large numbers of vocab more quickly beats the depth of better context. This is because in my view Anki really won't give you a solid understanding of that word... it's more like a foundation... you learn the word's subtleties through reading/listening later.

it's kind of similar to how RTK gave you a basic foundation for the meaning of the characters, but their actual usage is only fleshed out later through examples...

dtcamero Wrote:I guess the reason I think this is valuable is that I think the ability to deal with large numbers of vocab more quickly beats the depth of better context. This is because in my view Anki really won't give you a solid understanding of that word... it's more like a foundation... you learn the word's subtleties through reading/listening later.

Only if it works. I usually won't even recognize a word I study with such a card when I find it in context. If I do recognize it, perhaps after a minute or so of staring if I have the feeling I ought to know it, then I might recall the meaning or the reading but rarely both. Almost always I'll need to look it up in the dictionary anyway. And while the cards may be quick, I'll fail them much more often and so need to review them much more often.

There's simply something completely different (for me) between reading a word, even in a banal dictionary sentence, and recognizing an isolated word. The one doesn't help much with the other (in both directions!).

I have no idea how much that generalizes into sentence cards helping everyone; certainly I'm not a typical learner, but I also doubt that my brain is -that- different from everyone else's. I think people that use sentence cards are internalizing quite a bit of useful cues and patterns, and practicing 'reading' rather than 'recognition'.

In any case, I certainly think that people who think "flash cards don't work" or something after using simple gloss cards should definitely try sentence cards, they may have a similar learning pattern to mine.

^I too feel that words have very little meaning in isolation.

While building a foundation in the language, dictionary definitions should primarily be used to add meaning to sentences.

I just have a vocab deck and then read a couple pages of a book every day. It's hard enough going through 400+ cards daily when it's just vocab, much less if they were sentences.