I did Core 10,000 studying in two parts, I first did the core 6000 on iKnow and the later 3600 or so on Anki. I finished the latter 3600 about a month ago but I am not happy with my stats on the deck. I have 2434 cards mature and 1147 Young+Learn. However my correct young is at 89.5% and correct mature is a a low 85.98%. I am worried about my mature rate. The problem is that these 3600 words consists of a lot of kunyomi that can be pretty long and confusing. I can miss a word by thinging a "ka" should be a "ko" and so forth in a long KUN. I had wanted to review this deck for a while before starting on my book vocabulary deck which I compiled via yomichan. My review count is stuck at around 200 cards per day.

I was wondering if anyone else had problems with these words and had any thought on how to improve or words of encouragement? Or should I just start adding my book vocabulary already?

SRS alone is insufficient for learning words to maturity.

There is no exact answer to help increase your retention rate. I can, however, hint at the general path to fluency by saying that contextual learning is different from knowing readings and translations from memory.

I didn't answer your question, but to be direct, SRS is not the answer--just the backbone to your studies.

About core--85% is an impressive retention rate for 10,000 words.


"Memory seems to operate as a chain of associations"
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_(psychology)

That doesn't really sound very low to me, but... to echo Aspiring: maybe coming across these words more outside of an SRS would help increase your understanding.

With long kun-yomi's I often come up with a quick mneumonic. It's somewhat helpful. Just think of what the word sounds like and how to relate that to some english words and tie it in with the meaning. But to be honest, from those numbers I wouldn't even worry about it. Those numbers are pretty impressive.

[s0apgun]

85% is pretty good! I would let it go and focus on reading lots of native materials at that point. Its not worth worrying about it so just have fun instead!

Thanks for the encouragement! I thought anything less than 90% was considered low. I'll continue reading the light novels. I've gone through about 4 so far.

PotbellyPig Wrote:Thanks for the encouragement! I thought anything less than 90% was considered low. I'll continue reading the light novels. I've gone through about 4 so far.

Wah, no way man. Someone will (hopefully) correct this, but I'm pretty sure that 90% was roughly the ideal upper limit, wherein anything over 90% would be an indication that you could be adding more facts/words to the SRS to get a better items:retention ratio.

Something like it's better to have 6000 cards with a retention rate of 80～90% than 4000 cards with a retention rate of 95～98%.

[RawToast]

On the anki manual 90% seems to the the mature card goal. But, I am sure I saw this as 85% before the site rework.

Quote:For moderately difficult material, the average user should find they remember approximately 90% of mature cards that come up for review.

You probably need some more exposure to the vocab outside of Anki. Still that can be difficult if you want to specifically target that set of words (whether you should be doing that is up for debate).

You can increase your exposure within Anki and improve your other abilities if you wish. You could create a second note type for your cards and do something other than recognition (just presuming you are doing production, as it seems to be the most popular method.) It's pretty easy to create cards for production, listening (single word), and sentences from the core deck.

Wow, great stats! I probably need a few more weeks to be able to get to your percentage. I agree with you, you do need to keep on using your vocabs to keep your current maturity level and retain everything you have studied.
Which light novels have you finished?

sherlock Wrote:Wow, great stats! I probably need a few more weeks to be able to get to your percentage. I agree with you, you do need to keep on using your vocabs to keep your current maturity level and retain everything you have studied.
Which light novels have you finished?

I started with the first Zero no Tsukaima. But it's a little to basic since its almost all dialog but its good for a first light novel. I then went and read the first 3 Madan no Ou light novels. It's a good series and has a lot more description in the text.

^ Thanks! Today I checked my local bookstore to see if they carry any Japanese light novels. And they don't Only manga. I will check these out on Amazon or whatever and see if I can get them shipped here.

You can sometimes find the books in jpg/png format or even txt format around but the images are sometimes blurry and of course its not legal. I have Fuji SnapScan so I can rip the binding off a book and scan the pages. I then use RealReader Lite 8.0 OCR to scan it. You can then load the resulting text file into Rikaisama or Yomichan.

At cdjapan[dot]com you can legally purchase e-books (light novels and stuff). They don't really seem a whole lot cheaper than the physical copies, however since you don't pay the huge shipping costs, it isn't so bad. However I've never actually purchased any digital goods from the site (only physical), so I cannot comment on the quality.

Do Amazon sell Japanese language e-books? If you had an e-reader or android device of some sort, you could read them from that- with the use of some of the great software some of the members of this website have created.

[RawToast]

uisukii Wrote:At cdjapan[dot]com you can legally purchase e-books (light novels and stuff). They don't really seem a whole lot cheaper than the physical copies, however since you don't pay the huge shipping costs, it isn't so bad.

You mean .co.jp right? The .com has nothing hosted on it but "This domain is for sale"

These people "worried" about their high retention rates are fishy to me. Seems like it's always someone who wants recognition after hitting a milestone.

The "Do I look preeeeetty?" kind of thing. I'm not trying to be confrontational, but it's definitely seen a lot. Maybe human psychology.

RawToast Wrote:

uisukii Wrote:At cdjapan[dot]com you can legally purchase e-books (light novels and stuff). They don't really seem a whole lot cheaper than the physical copies, however since you don't pay the huge shipping costs, it isn't so bad.

You mean .co.jp right? The .com has nothing hosted on it but "This domain is for sale"

Ooopps- you're right. .co.jp

ryuudou Wrote:These people "worried" about their high retention rates are fishy to me. Seems like it's always someone who wants recognition after hitting a milestone.

So you mean humans in general, no?

It could also be people reading the oft thrown about suggestion that "above 80%" is what someone ought attain. A lot of people might read these sort of things and get stuck in the mindset that they have to be within said hypothetical upper and lower limits in order to be "doing it right". It might be a bit offensive to some for me to say this, but -it seems- that a lot of people get into self study (Japanese especially/specifically) without really having much of an autodidact drive about them. That is so say, a lot of people still want their hand held along the way and probably aren't really suited to an independent approach.

ryuudou Wrote:These people "worried" about their high retention rates are fishy to me. Seems like it's always someone who wants recognition after hitting a milestone.

The "Do I look preeeeetty?" kind of thing. I'm not trying to be confrontational, but it's definitely seen a lot. Maybe human psychology.

Absolutely not. I never used Anki before so I didn't know what retention rate is good. I used iKnow! for the first 6000 words which doesn't show a retention rate. There is a milestone thread for milestones.

PotbellyPig Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:These people "worried" about their high retention rates are fishy to me. Seems like it's always someone who wants recognition after hitting a milestone.

The "Do I look preeeeetty?" kind of thing. I'm not trying to be confrontational, but it's definitely seen a lot. Maybe human psychology.

Absolutely not. I never used Anki before so I didn't know what retention rate is good. I used iKnow! for the first 6000 words which doesn't show a retention rate. There is a milestone thread for milestones.

Forgive me if this if foolish but does Reviewing the Kanji display retention rate? I can't find it anywhere so I'm assuming that's only visible in Anki?