If a person learning Japanese has just finished RTK and is going in to sentences, it seems like learning many sentences a day would be difficult. Seeing as each word would be new at first, until you reach a certain threshold, and slowly the number of new words would decrease.

Did most of you start out with only a few sentences a day and build up? Or did you just jump right in head first and pick a number and just learn that many a day every day?

I started with plain vocabulary since I didn't have any idea how to learn vocabulary systematically at that point.

I think it'd be best if you do something like the optimized Core deck; where you have a specific word you're focusing on, but with a sentence for context. I edited it to have recognition cards, but leaving it as a production deck isn't a terrible way to go either, if you like it.

Like you said though, there's a lot of words you won't understand in the beginning, but as you learn more and more, you'll be able to understand more of what you read or hear. As you learn more, it actually becomes easier to learn new vocabulary and phrases.

As for how many, I say to just do what's comfortable. I try to add thirty cards a day, but between work and school, I don't always have the energy or time to do so. Usually, the least I'll add is twenty, but any progress counts. I stick to multiples of ten though, because it's easier to keep track of my progress that way.
To begin with, twenty should be good if you use Core or another shared deck (which is the best way to start). It might seem like a large number, but it's really not that much, especially if the words are grouped by kanji, as they are in this deck.

Maybe 10-15 max just to start off. That's what I did. Sentences can be a little weird at first. I chose a low number just to get use to them and get use to reading and seeing kanji in full sentences. Then when you full comfortable you should go ahead and move up the number. Its a slow process don't get slap happy like I did and forget about RTK reviews and try and blast through sentences.When building a wall you build it brick by brick. cheers

danatoth Wrote:Did most of you start out with only a few sentences a day and build up? Or did you just jump right in head first and pick a number and just learn that many a day every day?

When I started out, I read through a few grammar books and then moved on from there.

For those who wish to implement goal-setting:

Dalton and Spiller Wrote:The authors’ third study also showed that participants could benefit from implemental plans if they were helped to view their goals as relatively easy to execute.

Link

danatoth Wrote:Did most of you start out with only a few sentences a day and build up? Or did you just jump right in head first and pick a number and just learn that many a day every day?

Be it sentences or vocab, the # you will do a given day will naturally vary. For one, you just don't always feel up to handling the same load every day. For two, the difficulty and complexity of sentences/words/kanji will vary from day to day. Basically, don't get married to a specific number.

Do as many as you feel like doing a particular day. Just keep going til you get tired. I usually do close to 15-20 words a day, but today I knocked out 49. Sometimes you feel good and just keep knockin em out.

[Zgarbas]

I started with vocabulary and only added sentences around the 6k mark. I just added how many words I felt like doing that day (being on iknow made it easier to do as many reviews as I felt like instead of thinking about how many words to add). I got an average of 30/day for the whole set, but I had days with 0-5 new terms, and days with 50+.

Then I was adding 10-60 sentences per day, depending on difficulty. Start slowly(5-15/day) and see where your limit (of patience, time and burnout) is; it's better to keep to your own pace than to force yourself to some limits based on other people's experience.

[RawToast]

If you want to experiment with what feels good for you, setup Anki so that to give you a high amount of new cards (50?) but to only do new cards once all your reviews are done.

This way you can call it a day at a lower amount of new cards without impacting on your future reviews.

I started Core as single item with 15 words a day, then at around 500 words I reduced the rate to 10. Currently I add between 6-12 cards a day, depending on how many items from iknow I pull into my Anki deck.

Here's what I did:

Post-RTK/some Tae Kim's grammar under my belt, start up Core6k. First thousand-1500 words are rought but then the difficulty eases a fair bit.

Simultaneously buy Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, and download the corresponding deck (I dl'd the original bare edition deck but uisukii's version is so much better, consider yourself lucky). As I went through the book I learned new sentences on the deck little by little. The Basic edition of the deck has like 2000+ sentences, and the vocab is quite easy and can for the most part be tackled with like 1000-2000 words in Core (which it should be, as you'll be learning *grammar* patterns through the sentences). As a plus side there are many common Japanese names in the DoBJG deck that you can learn at the same time, but that don't significantly stress you out while trying to decipher the grammar. Since I had read the book itself I could take maybe 50 new sentences a day without the reviews taking too long, so I finished fast.

Studying like this has given me great results so far. I started inserting sentences from Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar but after 2500 or so words studied in Core the vocab on those sentences is quite taxing for me, which made deciphering the grammar points harder. However, fortunately the core vocab and DoIJG vocab seem to overlap quite a bit since I've learned most of the vocab in DoIJG sentences from the Core deck's 2500-4500 stage (where I'm at right now).

Do not think that you are forced to study pre-made sentences at that point however, as that is totally unnecessary. I only do it to gain some exposure to less common yet still useful grammar patterns while at the same time exposing myself to native materials.

-----------------

Lastly I want to mention that Imabi's website has some great sentences to mine if you want to complement the DoJG decks. The grammar books don't quite cover everything I'd wish for but it seems Imabi's grammar guide has a ton of examples to mine if you want exposure to things like different meanings of kakaru/kakeru, idioms and such.

I don't know whether this method of learning vocab is effective in the long term (I am regularly changing little things about the way I learn), so I think I'll leave a note here to come back to in 4 months. I've just started focusing on grammar and vocab.

Current learning history:

- Kana done and dusted
- Finished "RTK 1 & 3 w/ joyo kanji" deck, daily review count now in the low 100s
- Read half-way through Tae Kim's guide (quite a while ago, but many essentials sticked) and learnt everything on his Numbers and Counting page
- Very early into uisukii's DoBJG deck
- Can recognise verb and adjective conjugations

What I've done recently/am doing now/about to do:

-Learning vocabulary readings on an android application (heh, already made changes) by deleting all except the "Production" cards on the "Japanese Core 2000 Step __" decks.
-I write mnemonics for vocabulary readings and use Japanese voice-to-text* to input the reading, whether they're heavily homonym-ified or not. If they are (I look up each new word as I go), then I make notes of them.
-Downloaded the audio + .doc files for Core 2000 and 6000 from buonaparte's thread
-Had the Core 2000 document printed and wiro-bound (after removing the hyperlinks from the documents and making sure no sentences were cut mid-way at the bottom of each page -- see pics) to use the Listening-Reading method over SRS.
-Intend to L-R through 30 sentences per day (i.e. one playlist), sentence-mining and looking up unfarmiliar grammar.

Why:

-Learning vocabulary without sentences makes writing mnemonics easier.
-I think the Optimized core deck starts a bit too slow, making it hard to learn the days of the week/month, counters and other numerical irregularities by having them separated into individual cards.
-Using core2k to improve listening and reading comprehension makes better use of all those sentences. Doing it this way means I'm not using core to primarily to learn readings. Instead, it does the opposite: lets me discover kanji behind readings I learn beforehand (which is much easier because with RTK knowledge, I can successfully guess most of them).
-There are 10 'steps' to core2k, with seven 30-sentence playlists in each step, so going at a pace of one playlist/day means I can complete the whole of core 2000 and give it a once-over at double the pace in 4 months.

*somehow, the knowledge that my pronunciation is important (I'm being recorded) makes it easier to recall readings. Still, no doubt my accent is off, and the intonation of my speech is absolutely appauling unless I'm carefully shadowing the core sentences.

Pics
The printed core2k document




Example mnemonics

@Animosophy

Postage stamp is　切手（きって）

Merci

I think I'm going to be approaching this a bit differently. I just tried to start the optimized Core deck on Anki yesterday and got slammed with numbers, which I've been neglecting. I know the number kanji, but I haven't bothered to memorize all the counting rules until now.

So, I ended up studying Japanese grammar rules, especially in regards to counting. I feel like it's a better approach to understand the rules and have the Anki sentences as examples and memory aids, rather than just memorizing random sentences without understanding how they work.

Although I think that learning to actually think in Japanese is much better than learning how to translate the Japanese we read into English in our heads, we're not as stupid as 5 year olds. We don't always need to blindly poke our way through the grammar.

I find sentences (subs2srs) to be an excellent way of studying both vocabulary and grammar. I find that for me - reading about grammar is inefficient until I already know the rule itself pretty decently anyway just from exposure. Once I have a feel for what's going on, or even if I just know there's something that's going on but I don't know what it is - then if I read an explanation for it, it sticks.

I don't think you need to understand everything in a sentence before you SRS it - so long as there's not too much unknown vocabulary and you have some kind of idea what's going on. It will come clear as you add more stuff with similar structures.

Freely delete sentences above your level and you'll be fine with whatever number you decide to set for yourself.

Aikynaro Wrote:I find that for me - reading about grammar is inefficient until I already know the rule itself pretty decently anyway just from exposure. Once I have a feel for what's going on, or even if I just know there's something that's going on but I don't know what it is - then if I read an explanation for it, it sticks.

So how did you manage to get a feel for the insanely elaborate counting rules in Japanese?

@Silty, I experienced the exact same thing with the numbers/counting.

The only problem is that virtually all things to do with numbers, time and counters involve irregular readings, but they're pretty much uniform irregularities. I'd visit Tae Kim's page, read it through and practice writing/pronouncing everything every day. You'll have it all in less than a week.

@Aikynaro, that's also how I think about vocabulary and grammar in the sense that we can only pick up so much information about new words at one time, especially with Japanese. Naturally, better understanding of grammatical concepts happens with exposure to additional information. A possible drawback to core through anki is that the information we're expected to remember may be a little too much to extract the most out of the sentences and may even detract from remembering the reading. I figured learning them sequentially (readings first, kanji soon after) might make things easier. How much easier? I'll have to see for myself.

Animosophy Wrote:@Silty, I experienced the exact same thing with the numbers/counting.

The only problem is that virtually all things to do with numbers, time and counters involve irregular readings, but they're pretty much uniform irregularities. I'd visit Tae Kim's page, read it through and practice writing/pronouncing everything every day. You'll have it all in less than a week.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing. Tae Kim has the best resource I've found about counting, especially since I'm going out of my way to avoid guides with romaji, so I'm just memorizing the readings on his pages. After that, Anki seems like it would help more.

Silty Wrote:<snip>

If you are interested in Anki, in respect to this approach, I'm not sure how useful it would be but I've just recently modified the Core10k deck into respective thematic groups (counters, education, employment, flora and fauna, etc.) and semantic groups for the verbals (okurigana) to avoid confusing a verbal with a word with a similar English description. if this is something you'd like to use. It is pretty bare bones, as based on a spreadsheet wherein I removed the sentences and audio links.

There are actually two decks created from this: Group description + English - kanji (or reverse) and Group description + English to kana (or reverse). Though it would take me a minute to create an Group description + English - kanji/kana (or reverse) deck, if something like this is of any interest. The words are tagged as it is designed to be able to selectively study a related vocabulary group. This is my vocabulary study preference. The original core deck is something I use more for listening/reading/production purposes, aside native material.

To Dana, that depends on how difficult the sentences are. You should try to choose sentences in which there is exactly one new word. Sure, this seems difficult when you're starting out, but it's not impossible. You can study numbers, days, months, counters, common expressions (i.e. greetings) separately, before you even begin drilling sentences. That gives you a bunch of words, with relatively little effort. Then there's all the katakana words that come from English. Most of those should count as known as well.

Adding sentences with more than one completely unknown word is a bad idea.

To Silty, there is an Anki deck which contains all the Tae Kim example sentences. It has a clozed deleted field, but you don't have to use it, you can just set the full sentence as the question (personally, I didn't like the clozed deleted version).