I've been through RTK1+3, doing Core2k6k now to get me some basic vocab before learning by immersion.
First thing I noticed is.. the words I "already" knew from my years of anime watching stick immediately, I know a word, I can 'connect' the kanji to the word and I remember it.
For the "new" words, however, I know what it 'means' because I recognize the kanji, but then I'm stuck trying to stick some arbitrary hiragana to it. And that, well, doesn't stick.

Would it be a better idea to learn the "words" first? By audio, perhaps, or plain hiragana, and -then- connect the dots (kanji) to the words I know and learned?
Did anyone have similar problems, or would you strongly suggest against doing this? Let me know!

It's exactly the same for me. I'm doing Core6k right now and from time to time those anime-words you recognise show up and basically becomes free (yakusoku turned up today for example) unlike the new words which require much more work. I don't really have an answer to your questions, just wanted to post that it's the same for me.

Write down the sentences from each new card you add, it helps me quite a lot. Also if you don't know how to read/write the word in question, try to at least write/read it, but still mark it as wrong answer. Make sure that you're doing this deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1102215805

Dont get discouraged, it may take dozens of times until you remember some words the first day you add them. At the same time that you learn vocab, you learn readings for the kanji and the more you know, the easier it gets, since the same kanji and readings for them appear in other new words you learn.

You're not the only one that has had this problem, no.

Every time I add a word that has a kanji spelling, I create two cards, one that quizzes me with the word in kana on the front, kanji on the back, and one that shows the kanji on the front, takes a typed answer, furigana on the back.

I ought to also involve sound somehow, but I haven't been that motivated yet, mostly because sound cards would need to be in a separate deck since I can't always be listening to the audio when I'm using AnkiMobile.

Fair enough, I did indeed notice I guessed some words I've never seen before correctly. 電話, for example. Thing is, even though I can 'guess' the reading of a word like that, I don't learn it well enough to recognize it when I hear it.

I could guess how to pronounce 決める, but when I hear "kimeru" somewhere, I'd have no idea what it means. The "きめ" part has no connection to the idea of 'deciding' to me, whatsoever.

Taelia Wrote:Would it be a better idea to learn the "words" first? By audio, perhaps, or plain hiragana, and -then- connect the dots (kanji) to the words I know and learned?

That might be helpful -- you definitely do not want to get into the practice of associating kanji compounds directly to English words with no Japanese. This will slow your reading speed and hurt your oral comprehension. If the only way you can do this is to completely ignore the kanji for a while then so be it, but I think as long as you're careful you can use the kanji you know as well.

I got inspired by the 'multiple decks' idea. I now copied my core2k6k deck twice.

In the first deck, I have the Kana of the word and the Clozed sentence in which to "place" the word, and on the back I have the proper kanji and the meaning of the word/sentence. This so I can learn the 'words'.

And then a second deck where I have on the front the kanji, and on the back the reading and that's it.



Tomorrow I'll try and see if this works for me. Any more advice is still highly welcome<3

That's a quick an easy way to do it for a pre-existing deck, so I don't suppose there's a reason -not- to. However, I didn't actually copy my deck, I create multiple cards on the same note.

It's one of the powers of Anki to use templates to make multiple cards from the same set of information (now called a 'note', previously called a 'fact'.)

Doesn't matter for core (or any pre-made deck), I should expect, but when you're adding your -own- cards it saves the trouble of entering the data twice or explicitly copying the data.

Wow, I never figured out that multiple card from one note thing. Thanks for the heads up, it's pretty amazing.

Taelia Wrote:I've been through RTK1+3, doing Core2k6k now to get me some basic vocab before learning by immersion.
First thing I noticed is.. the words I "already" knew from my years of anime watching stick immediately, I know a word, I can 'connect' the kanji to the word and I remember it.
For the "new" words, however, I know what it 'means' because I recognize the kanji, but then I'm stuck trying to stick some arbitrary hiragana to it. And that, well, doesn't stick.

Would it be a better idea to learn the "words" first? By audio, perhaps, or plain hiragana, and -then- connect the dots (kanji) to the words I know and learned?
Did anyone have similar problems, or would you strongly suggest against doing this? Let me know!

It wouldn't be better to learn the words with hiragana first. It would be much harder, actually, and then you'd still have the Kanji.

What would help, however, is to SRS new words as a part of meaningful sentences, with audio to go along with them. (Core sentences have quality audio provided by the authors, you can auto generate audio for your own sentences with Google, or you can use Subs2Srs to grab audio from a fun source that you can also listen to separately, on your mp3 player - thus learning the readings in two different ways).

Stansfield123 Wrote:It wouldn't be better to learn the words with hiragana first. It would be much harder ... What would help, however, is to SRS new words as a part of meaningful sentences, with audio

Hmmn, agree or disagree...

I learn new words hiragana first as I said. I also learn them in the context of a sentence. Of course, the OP is using Core so a sentence is in fact a given in that case. I'm not a supporter at -all- of learning words without sentences, preferably full context from some native-oriented material or correspondence from a native. However, there's nothing wrong with learning words from dictionary or textbook example sentences either.

Assuming you don't neglect a certain amount of listening practice to stay in touch with reality, kana should convey relatively correctly the pronunciation. It shouldn't be necessary to have the audio for every single new word as long as you're not neglecting audio so far as to have no idea of pronunciation patterns.

I do think it's better to learn pronunciation and meaning first, and then associate it with kanji. Kanji are great for distinguishing homonyms, but for non-native speakers of Japanese when learning words kanji-first it's far too easy to connect kanji->one's own native language->japanese pronunciation and slow everything down. Enough L-R will fix that, but not many people actively practice L-R techniques and I don't know that enough straight up reading will change the habit. In the privacy of one's own head it's easy to read a kanji word as a word in one's own native language and not bother with the Japanese pronunciation at all, so no matter how much you read there's no reason to fix that, leaving phonetic vocabulary to be picked up later if it wasn't picked up earlier.

So ultimately, I agree with your focus on context-sentences but disagree that learning kana first is somehow 'worse' or 'more difficult' than learning 'kanji first'. Kana represent pronunciation, and if you listen to enough, then reading kana should be essentially the same as listening. If it isn't, you should do more listening or better yet do some L-R practice.

Interesting discussion right here. I'm pretty immersed in japanese audio, so I think that part will be fine. After playing around a bit with the "making multiple cards" part, I now have the following setup for my core2k6k deck:
-One card with kanji + full sentence on front, and the reading+translation on back. Requires me to read the full sentence and speak it out loud. Teaches me the vocab.
-One card with reading and a clozed furigana sentence, requires me to figure out which kanji to put on the deleted spot. Teaches me to write.
-And one card with the english definition, clozed sentence with translation, and requires me to fully type out the sentence in japanese. To practice my (currently non-existant) speaking skills.


It boosted up my total amount of cards to nearly 20k, so I think I'll have a lot of work to do here.. but no doubt marathonning a language is the best way to go anyway. Perhaps down the road I'll decide one of these types of cards is redundant, but so far so good.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Hmmn, agree or disagree...

I learn new words hiragana first as I said. I also learn them in the context of a sentence. Of course, the OP is using Core so a sentence is in fact a given in that case. I'm not a supporter at -all- of learning words without sentences, preferably full context from some native-oriented material or correspondence from a native. However, there's nothing wrong with learning words from dictionary or textbook example sentences either.

Assuming you don't neglect a certain amount of listening practice to stay in touch with reality, kana should convey relatively correctly the pronunciation. It shouldn't be necessary to have the audio for every single new word as long as you're not neglecting audio so far as to have no idea of pronunciation patterns.

I do think it's better to learn pronunciation and meaning first, and then associate it with kanji. Kanji are great for distinguishing homonyms, but for non-native speakers of Japanese when learning words kanji-first it's far too easy to connect kanji->one's own native language->japanese pronunciation and slow everything down. Enough L-R will fix that, but not many people actively practice L-R techniques and I don't know that enough straight up reading will change the habit. In the privacy of one's own head it's easy to read a kanji word as a word in one's own native language and not bother with the Japanese pronunciation at all, so no matter how much you read there's no reason to fix that, leaving phonetic vocabulary to be picked up later if it wasn't picked up earlier.

So ultimately, I agree with your focus on context-sentences but disagree that learning kana first is somehow 'worse' or 'more difficult' than learning 'kanji first'. Kana represent pronunciation, and if you listen to enough, then reading kana should be essentially the same as listening. If it isn't, you should do more listening or better yet do some L-R practice.

Well, my options are agree or disagree, so I have to go with disagree. But, more importantly, I have some arguments too:

1. Kanji aren't just there to help with homonyms. Kanji have only a few readings (and it's usually pretty clear which one applies). They tell you how to read them. After a while, it gradually becomes less and less necessary to memorize the readings of words, you'll know the readings based just on the Kanji.

2. In my experience, listening helps memorize sentences. Audio has extra context the written language doesn't ( a sentence can be read many ways, the particular way in which it is read, where the accent falls, how the sentence flows - even just by a piece of software - is a lot of extra context).

3. Incorrect pronunciation comes from trying to speak/read without listening. For pronunciation, it helps to listen to EVERYTHING that's new, rather than try and read it. This of course contradicts me aggressively militating for learning by reading: yes, if one learns by reading (and no audio is available, as it probably isn't, in Japanese), one must pay special attention to pronunciation. The reason why I'm a fan of reading anyway is because pronunciation, if studied correctly, is by orders of magnitude easier to learn than vocab and grammar. So I'd rather pick the best way for learning vocab and grammar, and work on pronunciation separately. But why do that if there's quality audio, or if generating it is as easy as a few clicks?

Taelia Wrote:Interesting discussion right here. I'm pretty immersed in japanese audio, so I think that part will be fine. After playing around a bit with the "making multiple cards" part, I now have the following setup for my core2k6k deck:
-One card with kanji + full sentence on front, and the reading+translation on back. Requires me to read the full sentence and speak it out loud. Teaches me the vocab.
-One card with reading and a clozed furigana sentence, requires me to figure out which kanji to put on the deleted spot. Teaches me to write.
-And one card with the english definition, clozed sentence with translation, and requires me to fully type out the sentence in japanese. To practice my (currently non-existant) speaking skills.


It boosted up my total amount of cards to nearly 20k, so I think I'll have a lot of work to do here.. but no doubt marathonning a language is the best way to go anyway. Perhaps down the road I'll decide one of these types of cards is redundant, but so far so good.

I see nothing wrong with your approach. I imagine it comes down to very small margins whether it's more efficient to learn this way or the way I do it:

I pick one card, from between version 1 and version 2 (I never have English -> Japanese). I try to pick between the two in a way that makes all the cards relatively the same difficulty (meaning that if the reading of a Kanji is especially easy, then I go hiragana -> kanji; if a Kanji compound is especially hard, I go Kanji -> hiragana; if the reading is especially hard, again, I go hiragana -> Kanji; and, of course, I flip them whenever I run into trouble remembering an answer: this helps more often than not).

But I have no arguments against your method. Your method means extra volume, mine means higher failure rate, so it evens out. I suspect it all comes down to the time spent reviewing anyway.

I tried it for a few days, and I actually scrapped the hiragana>kanji card. I suspected it would be the english > japanese card to go, but it's helping me more than I expected.

I now have:
-One card with English word and japanese Clozed, requires me to speak out loud the kana and visualize/write the kanji.
-One card with the kanji and japanese sentence, also requires me to speak out loud the kana, and visualize the meaning.



Regarding pronunciation, I prefer to do that through immersion, outside of Anki. By listening to music/anime for example.
Thanks for the lots of advice here!