Hey everyone,

I've finished RTK1+3 a couple of months ago and I spent about 3 months on them. I still review the Kanji daily in Anki.

After that I took Nukemarines guide as a rough reference and worked through the beginner parts of Tae Kim's Grammar Guide and using the Anki deck as well. The grammar sticks pretty well. So far, so good.

My current goal is to work through core6k (with audio and images) in Anki. Right now I write down new sentences completely and kana+kanji for known sentences and also read them aloud, trying to match the japanese speakers speed and pronounciation. I don't have a problem understanding the grammar, sentence structure or meaning of the sentences.

But I'm either doing something wrong or I'm just spoiled by the incredible effectiveness of RTK. It takes a ridiculous amount of repetition to memorize new words. Even when I've heard the sentence 10 times during one learning session, it might take 10 more repetitions until I remember the word and forget it the next day. Some stick eventually, but my retention is just ridiculously low. This had an impact on my motivation and I took a few weeks off learning anything or repeating anything but my RTK stuff.


So I'm wondering: Can I do anything to improve the process? Or does it get better with time? I'm worried about my overall learning speed. While RTK was fast and easy, I don't see how I can keep up a solid pace right now. I'd like to get to the point where I can learn 30-40 new words a day.

Is this a normal issue at the beginning of learning vocabulary?

Vocabulary "sticks" at different levels. Usually it takes people years to have a sense of vocabulary they can use as I am using these words right now.

That said, there are many different approaches to exposing yourself to language, and even more methods to train your comprehension of those words.

If you don't mind a personal question: what do you do with your preferred language with derives a sense of pleasure; something you return to over and over again?

uisukii Wrote:If you don't mind a personal question: what do you do with your preferred language with derives a sense of pleasure; something you return to over and over again?

I'm not sure if I understand the question, but I'll try to answer it as best as I can.

I suppose by "preferred language" you're talking about the language I use the most for my daily activities and especially in my free time.

I play video games, watch movies, read a lot of books, listen to audiobooks, podcasts and music etc.
That's what I'm trying to accomplish with Japanese as well. I'm working on my immersion environment, switching to Japanese content whenever feasible.

For some things it's easy, like music. I listen to japanese podcasts almost all day, even though I don't understand anything yet. I figure the more exposition to the language I get, the better.

But I can't do it everywhere, yet. For example: I love reading books and role playing games, but with barely any vocabulary, I can't put my collection of japanese RPGs to use. I don't mind not understanding everything perfectly, in fact I believe consuming material that's just slightly out of my comfort zone will yield the best results.


But in order for all that to work, I need at least some basic vocabulary, but building that is a little bit frustrating at the moment.

I believe that once I start understanding more it'll all go faster, because more exposition to the language will lead to a better understanding and more natural way of using the language.

This is pretty much how I learned english, but after acquiring the basics, I didn't put any effort into actually learning english. I just gradually switched everything I did to english and I became more and more proficient in it. But that took about a decade, because I didn't study a single second. The whole process happened totally by accident, I just realized one day that my english had improved significantly without even trying.

I want to apply this to Japanese as well, but with the added benefit of actually studying in addition to being immersed in the language, because I don't want to spend another decade on this.




Ugh, this has become way too long.
TLDR: I want to speed up the learning process by incorporating Japanese into my daily life, but I can't do that yet, because I can't seem to remember the vocabulary.

I'm just wondering if it's normal for vocabulary to take such a long time to actually stick, especially in the beginning.

Edit: Should I just stay the course and keep at it until I reach a point where it gets easier? Or does that point not exist?

.

I don't think that I'll magically know Japanese by listening to it when not understanding a single word, that's quite silly.
However, I do believe that listening to a language, even without the ability to understand anything or a lot, will improve overall listening comprehension and familiarity with the language. Constantly hearing the speed, pronounciation, pitch, flow of a language should give you a feeling of what sounds right and what doesn't.
Of course the benefit isn't as great as if I understood something, but I strongly believe that listening to spoken Japanese has a positive effect, even if I don't know what people talk about.

I write sentences down ONCE when first encountering a new word. I write down the kanji each time I review it while repeating the sentence/word. By doing this, I spend more time with the word instead of just glancing over it. Plus my ability to write kanji and kana, which is something I'd like to be able to do without any effort, also drastically improves that way.
Because I write while I repeat and listen, I won't really save much time. If you can write the kanji quickly, it'll take a few seconds at most.


Besides that, do you have any constructive feedback regarding these flaws or input on my original question if the retention will eventually go up?

I think you are doing the right things. It is a bit tough in the beginning. People get lulled into a false sense of security after doing RTK and get a bit shocked when they first learn the words and have to deal with the various compounds with their kunyomi and onyomi, etc.. This is why I usually tell people to skip over RTK 3 and get a head start on vocabulary studying since RTK 3 doesn't add much value. But since you did it already, it doesn't matter. Just keep at it. Writing down the word is good practice when going through the cards.

There are mnemonics for learning vocab.

But I haven't really gotten around to using them (immersion, at this point, is working too well to bother), so I can't point you in the right direction. Search around the forum and the web for various suggestions.

Mystery Wrote:He or I'm just spoiled by the incredible effectiveness of RTK.

That's part of it. As you already have admitted, learning a language is not so easily systematically plannable like the kanji writings is in RTK. You might want to try some shadowing http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowing with Assimil, and/or Pimsleur's and/or Michel Thomas and there's even a book called Shadowing that's really just okay.
The book Japanese Step by Step was written for American IBM employees spending time working in Japan. It's organized as much as possible in a way that those mathematically minded people would be able to understand and quickly establish a foundation in how the language works. It's all romaji, so that might piss you off but it won't hurt you if you're still doing your Anki reviews (and why not read Yotsubato! to make up the difference, you will notice how little yotsuba's speech bubbles have the words in hiragana and the adults have the words in kanji!*). I think it helps to read more than just Tae Kim because you're really reading different authors' attempts at explaining the language system, which is basically impossible; at least it's impossible to do to the extent that it will lead to aural and reading recognition let alone oral and written production.
Are you able to hang out with any Japanese people or other Japanese learners? Some people encourage a 'silent period' of input only as per Stephen Krashen, but it has been disproven that making mistakes in a language will ingrain bad habits--mistakes are learning opportunities! My thinking here is just that different contexts will give you varied meaningful exposure, even if you just try out one or two sentences with some real folks or discuss what you're learning with another learner or even not (though they'll get tired of hearing about Japanese, as has been discussed on this forum).

You have to see the forest for the trees to some extent. This means that in addition to immersion input and all that, you want to engage up-close and personal with some bite-size chunks of the language and make them feel familiar to you.
Once you've done some of these things (all the while carrying on with Anki RTK and Core) you might want to take some of that immersion (if it's a dorama or anime) and put it into Subs2SRS. I've just recently been noticing how words that I learned from Subs2SRS and then talked about to Japanese persons and then encountered in new contexts are starting to solidify and become available for production even if I'm just talking to myself. Actually, talking to myself in Japanese is a new thing, I just couldn't force it before, so that's fun. Enjoy your journey!

*is this common in manga

[rant]

As a minor point of interest, I own every volume, in Japanese: Yotuba's speech is in both hiragana, katakana, and sometimes in kanji. Not really sure why people seem to say that the character only speaks in hiragana, when Yotuba's fifth "speech bubble" of the first page of chapter one contains kanji. The other two younger girls of the female cast also "speak" in kanji, just like the adults do.

[/rant]

uisukii Wrote:[rant]

[/rant]

go read mnukemarine's guide to beginners.

PotbellyPig:
That sounds promising, I guess I'll just keep going then.
I didn't do all of RTK3, I just did a few hundred sorted by frequency and ditched the rest.

Stansfield123:
You mention that immersion is working very well for you. Did that also affect the beginning stages? Or did you have to overcome a certain hurdle until immersion really made an impact?

tashippy:
Thanks for the detailed information. I've heard of shadowing, but haven't read about it in detail. I try to read all sentences aloud, mimicing the native speaker as good as I can until I can read the sentence alongside the core6k audio sample.

I don't have the opportunity to talk to Japanese people right now, but I've absolutely got it on my radar. I totally agree that the input should be as varied as possible and I intend to incorporate that into my learning routine, already having prepared quite a lot of material (novels, manga, games, tv series etc.).
However, without a certain basic vocabulary many of these are just out of reach and building these basics is what I'm struggling with at the moment.

But it seems as if that's quite normal. I haven't actively learned a language for over a decade now, and I barely remember struggling with english vocabulary.


howtwosavealif3:
If you had bothered to read past the first sentence of my posting, you would've realized that I did in fact read through nuke's beginner guide and took advice from it.

tashippy Wrote:

uisukii Wrote:[rant]

[/rant]

Doesn't change that the statement thrown around that "Yotuba only speaks in hiragana, so it's easy for beginners", is a misleading statement presented as fact, disproved by reading the very first page of the manga.

I didn't say the manga or that character only use hiragana or that it's easy for beginners who just finished RTK because of the lack of kanji.
I'll amend my originally just tangential statement: there are some frames in the manga where the younger characters use hiragana and the older characters use kanji for the same word and I just think it's interesting.
I didn't know that's an observation that gets "thrown around" because I've never seen or heard anyone else say that. Maybe you've had enough uisukii.

[s0apgun]

Core gets easier as you get a couple hundred cards under your belt. It takes awhile for your mind to process something new but you'll find yourself being able to remember new vocab on the fly once you've learned the readings of so many kanji.

In my opinion you should scrap writing and speaking aloud. Both are exercises in muscle memory, and wont really help your vocab. Just focus on getting the main elements of the card: kanji keywords, meaning, reading. If you're doing production, consider switching to recognition because it is easier. If you're already doing recognition, at least make sure that you can recall the kanji keywords in the vocab word because that helps you and is often easy to gloss over by just looking at the general 'shape' of the kanji.
Another thing, having 10 failures in a row indicates to me that you aren't learning the vocab adequately before you press 'again'. When you have failed to recognize a card, don't just read the back and move on-- consider testing yourself again. Put your hand over the answer and make sure you can recall it. It's something you should do if the whole 'relearning' process for a vocab item takes you more than a few seconds. I do it for my more difficult cards in anki.
Another reason you could be failing is that you're not visualizing the meaning of a word well enough. A lot of the time, you're given something generic for the definition of a word, like 'establish', and its dull as can be. The brain turns off at this point. Try to make it more vivid by looking up examples. Ask yourself "What are we 'establishing'?" It's a good exercise to do, and if you find anything interesting you can add it to the definition field so that you don't forget.
If you're still having trouble, use mneumonics. Think up any ole stupid thing that the phonetics of the word remind you of, and then string that together with its meaning through a pseudo-RTK story (don't write it down or anything). I do this with more difficult vocab items. No matter how bad of a pun you make, its usually more memorable than a simple string of sounds.

Mystery Wrote:[...]I'd like to get to the point where I can learn 30-40 new words a day.

Is this a normal issue at the beginning of learning vocabulary?

Yeah, that's normal. Learning the initial basic concepts from n5-n4 is somewhat of a grind, but it gradually gets easier.

Inflection point:
Somewhere between lower to upper intermediate level in Nukemarine's guide.
Somewhere between level 30 and level 40 in jalup's level guide.
[Inflection: Comprehensible input easy to find. i+1 sentences more common. Words learnt quickly. familiarity/adaptation]

btw, learning 30-40 [random] core words will always be difficult. If you do learn 30+ individual words a day they'll probably be from context.

for now focus on adapting to the language through high input (preferably comprehensible/enjoyable context), while learning the initial basic concepts

When I first started vocabulary, I had the same problem. I agree with the others that have said that it just takes some getting used to.

With the Core decks, I suggest using the sentences to learn all the unknowns at the same time. Of course, you should focus on the main word the most, but this way you'll have seen a few more instances of the words before you actually get to their individual cards. If you do this, don't worry too much about how many cards you do each day, since you'll be learning multiple words at a time.
Don't worry about using the sentence as a crutch; it really won't matter after a while and I've always found it easier to remember old vocabulary after I've moved on to knew cards.
I still do this to an extent, but not as much now that I have a few thousand cards under my belt and pick up vocabulary more quickly.

Anyway, try what you want and adjust it to your liking.

A simple and useful advice: just merge all transitive and intransitive verb in a single card. This saves time and you reinforce both forms. They are both the same word just used with different transitivity. If there's like 500 verbs in core10k, probably are 250 meaning-verbs. There are around 200-250 essential transitivity verb pairs in Japanese.
付く・付ける
開く・開ける
消える・消す
立つ・立てる
壊れる・壊す
And on and on.
As for the onomatopoeia part, it tends to be pretty confusing;using images would be good, like some dude irritated meaning いらいら、a heart beating in love guy for どきどき、... For the adjectives and names, watching like 10 dramas in a year can do the job, this words just stick.
If you can't give the translation to the phrases, why not doing the opposite and answering in Japanese for the phrases in English. Use the brain both ways. If only looking to the card and trying to respond doesn't work, make it plurisensorial: write down the word or phrase every time you fail a card, search for the 手話（sign language） of the words or invent your own sign. Make your body memorize it too. Hear the sound, repeat it out loud, associate with an image and do a sign language for the focused word, also associate words with colors. Multisensorial to the next level.
Start replacing the definition for the words you already know with the Japanese equivalent. The fastest you go monolingual the easiest it gets. If you use just english all the way to the 9624th word it will be pretty slow. Switching to J-J speeds it. J-E just for the first 500/1000 words tolerance.
Example:
車
車 くるま (n) car; automobile; vehicle; wheel; (P)
車 ①軸に貫いて回転する仕組みの輪。②現在では自動車を指すことが多い。 I edited from Koujiten dictionary.

立てる for example comes with 彼は棒をまっすぐ立てた。 He stuck the pole straight in the ground. But 立てる　can have according to yahoo dictionary the following meanings:
I
1 〔縦にする〕stand (up); put up
2 〔突き刺す〕
3 〔波・煙などを上げる〕
4 〔しめる〕
II
1 〔設立する〕
2 〔定める，新たに作り示す〕
3 〔ある役目のために引き出す〕
4 〔相手の立場を尊重する〕
5 〔世に広める〕
6 〔音を出す〕
core10k just covers the first meaning. There are 9 others left. No surprise you don't advance in the pace you want to. You MUST add new phrases for the card too, for it to stick. Use yahoo dictionary for this. Choose (和英) copy-paste the focused word and re-copy-paste this time to anki.

Sometimes the word is difficult to memorize because it is kanafied, just kanjify them.
Example: つもり-心算. The kanjified version is way more logic and stickable.

Correct me If I'm making a poor assumption, but wouldn't 「つもり-心算」 be:

つもり-積もり
しんさん- 心算

Haych:
Writing down the kanji is fun for me. It might not be the most efficient thing to do, but I try to make the learning experience as enjoyable as possible for me and writing the kanji helps me to stay motivated, however strange that might sound.

I do agree that I should put more time into my failed vocabulary cards, this is something that I didn't really do.


arnaldosfjunior:
Thanks for all the interesting information, I'll see what I can incorporate into my learning routine.
Right now I'm leaning towards premade material like the core sentence decks. I'd like to switch to J-J at some point. I'm not quite sure how building custom J-J material will impact the time I spend on learning. But I guess gathering sentences and looking up definitions will aid the learning process as well.




Most people seem to agree that the initial stage after finishing RTK can be somewhat uncomfortable. So for now I'll stick with my current method, but with an increased focus on relearning my failed cards. I'll also have a more in depth look at the other suggestions you guys gave me. If I don't see any improvement in the ease/speed of learning new vocabulary after about 1000 cards, I might have to rethink my approach.

Again, thanks everyone for the helpful tips so far!

I would recommend not writing the full sentence down, just say it aloud once and focus on the new word. Say the new word aloud as many times as you wish. You learn best when you learn one thing at once. I started off doing the same thing, writing down the entire sentence etc but it took way too long and I couldn't remember anything.

Now that I just focus on the word, and make sure to write down the kanji for that word each time, I'm speeding through it a lot better and it's actually sticking. The sentences are mainly there for context, you don't need to learn them at this point.

Initially I wrote the sentences for each review, but that did take up way too much time.
Now I just write the sentence once the very first time I encounter it. After that, I always just write the kanji and not the whole sentence.

Writing kanji/kana is fun for me, so I'd like to have at least a little bit of that while learning. But I do realize that it takes up some time, that's why I'm constantly cutting down on it, but I don't want to get rid of it altogether.


But I'm also always torn between just blasting through the due cards and really taking my time. Haven't found an ideal way of dealing with the amount of time I should give myself for remembering a card until I fail it.

uisukii Wrote:Correct me If I'm making a poor assumption, but wouldn't 「つもり-心算」 be:

つもり-積もり
しんさん- 心算

http://www.geocities.jp/bunakobo/kan/ateji.htm

Before asking next time, just type the word and look in the IME　list please.

Mystery Wrote:Initially I wrote the sentences for each review, but that did take up way too much time.
Now I just write the sentence once the very first time I encounter it. After that, I always just write the kanji and not the whole sentence.

Writing kanji/kana is fun for me, so I'd like to have at least a little bit of that while learning. But I do realize that it takes up some time, that's why I'm constantly cutting down on it, but I don't want to get rid of it altogether.


But I'm also always torn between just blasting through the due cards and really taking my time. Haven't found an ideal way of dealing with the amount of time I should give myself for remembering a card until I fail it.

I still write the word itself, but if it's just in kana I tend not to. But if it's a mix, such as 終わる, I make sure it write the whole word and not just the kanji otherwise I might trip up and write 「終る」 or something like that. I definitely wouldn't get rid of writing it down all together, as otherwise you may forget the kanji more easily.