(as opposed to the movie)

As promised, I bring you the Core6k counterpart to the RTK1 threads. It is time to celebrate finishing Core6k and tempt others onwards to join us in this victory! Yay!　＼(^o^)／ Please post here once you finish any Core6k deck to brag and post your general thoughts. (If you want to post retroactively, please tell us the actual date that you finished!)

I'll try to keep my own post short since it's the OP, but today I finally added all 5,999 cards of Core 2k/6k Optimized Japanese Vocabulary (thank you Nukemarine!) to Anki. It's tough to tell you how long it took since I had one false start, migrated from iKnow to Anki, and I eased into the vocabulary acquisition process pretty slowly too, but I'll say it roughly took me 7 months--and 210 hours total on the Anki clock. Recognition style.

(Also can I just post a quick little thank you to Mezbup for this thread? It totally motivated me to quit dilly-dallying and to really put things into gear. I do not regret.)

The last month was a strict 50 words/day sprint to the finish line--culminating in a personal-record-high 692 cards due earlier today--because I wanted to finish on my birthday as a present to myself =D My birthday is tomorrow, so I just barely did it! It feels great to set a goal and see it through. Oh yeahhhhh!

I'm not completely sure what I'm going to do next, but I think I'm going to start making a J-J sentence deck next mined from encountered words in native media. I dunno, though! It's all really exciting, there are so many directions I could go from here! Actually the smartest thing to do is probably take it easy for a while and work on maturing this Core6k deck (only 49% matured! Yikes!) But I'm just.... SOOO pumped and excited now =D I want to keep going forward and dive into some manga ^_^ (Yeah I'm one of those oddballs who did Core6k without using much native media to supplement it, shhhh)

Okay that's enough from me, I said I was going to keep it short, oops heheheh (I really could just keep going on and on). Congratulations to everyone, both retroactively and in advance! Let's do this Japanese thing!

Congratulations!

Keep us informed on how does the jump into native material go!

Huge congratulations!

I am a bit curious, exactly how proficient do you consider yourself at the language now when you are done? What level of media can you understand in terms of reading/listening?

I am also kinda curious how people approach it, do you write each new word down? look up any new kanji on stroke order and such?

I started the deck two days ago but its going slowly frankly, I am kinda slogging through the start and lots of it doesn't really stick, especially these three things, four things etc. I guess I haven't gotten into a comfortable enough process of doing it.

Congrats, zurisu. With that 50% mature rate, it sounds like the end must have been some serious cramming time. It might take a while for them to die down but keep your chin up, eh.

Also, we're really overdue for a thread like this, considering how popular core seems to be these days.

edit: I just finished it recently too, June 3 was the date for me.

Atwadesu Wrote:I started the deck two days ago but its going slowly frankly, I am kinda slogging through the start and lots of it doesn't really stick, especially these three things, four things etc. I guess I haven't gotten into a comfortable enough process of doing it.

Irregular counter readings are the worst.

[RawToast]

Haych Wrote:Also, we're really overdue for a thread like this, considering how popular core seems to be these days.

We probably could do with another checkpoint thread, similar to the 500 and 1k RTK threads. Perhaps we could use just the one thread? I could rename this one to:

"やっと！ I Finished Core2k/6k/10k, the thread"

That way we can keep all the progress/checkpoint posts in one place. Of course, I'd like zurisu's permission before hijacking the thread!

Tae Kim is also pretty popular, alongside core. Though it would be hard to gauge, given previous and outside exposure, it would be interesting to see how people have found Tae Kim's guide+how many words they have covered in any of the popular Core decks, in respect to what they could read, and what their main weaknesses are in respect to the resources used.

Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to draw up a simple list of

[Core deck used]
[stats/maturity percentage/retention rate]
[how it has improved your Japanese]
[primary textbooks/grammar resources used]
[advice/bragging rights]
[future Japanese study plans/goals]

RawToast's idea of 2/4/6/10 sounds like an awesome idea. I'd imagine others would find it motivating to read the progress of others. If you would be cool with that, zurisu.



...and why has it taken so long for this thread to be made? lol

That's a fine idea, RawToast. Hijack away! ^.^

& Thank you everybody for the congratulations!

Atwadesu Wrote:Huge congratulations!

I am a bit curious, exactly how proficient do you consider yourself at the language now when you are done? What level of media can you understand in terms of reading/listening?

I am also kinda curious how people approach it, do you write each new word down? look up any new kanji on stroke order and such?

I started the deck two days ago but its going slowly frankly, I am kinda slogging through the start and lots of it doesn't really stick, especially these three things, four things etc. I guess I haven't gotten into a comfortable enough process of doing it.

I will answer your first paragraph in greater detail sometime soon; I'm too busy today to give a proper response. But I will!

However, no I don't write the words down. My RTK deck is "Keyword to Kanji," so I get my stroke order practice there. For Core, I just look at the vocabulary word and usually say it out loud while thinking of the meaning (either the exact English phrase or a more abstract understanding) in my head, then grade accordingly (getting either the pronunciation or the meaning wrong results in a fail).

For unknown kanji, I usually tended not to worry about them. Before I finished RTK1, I just sorta dealt with them visually and expected to see them in RTK later. But I actually discovered later that some kanji in Core are NOT in RTK1, so when I encountered unfamiliar kanji after I finished RTK, I would simply add it to my RTK deck, because there aren't all that many, and why not?

You know, I'm not sure if I'm an exception or not, but my RTK knowledge almost NEVER directly carried over into Core. (Subconsciously it might have helped a great deal, but I wouldn't know it.) I rarely ever thought, "Oh, this is the kanji for [keyword], and this is the kanji for [other keyword], yeahh, now I remember what this word is!" 99% of the time, I totally disregarded keywords and relied on visual recognition alone, because it was faster and not that difficult for me. (Which, again, might be BECAUSE I did RTK, and I was familiar with all the shapes from writing them. Or it could be because I'm a visual/artistic person. Iunno. ...either way, I WAS able to recognize when a non-RTK1 kanji popped up, so maybe I really was more aware of the keywords than I know.)

But, Atwadesu, I would confidently say that it is totally okay to start out with Core slowly! It is a large undertaking, and pacing yourself is critical. Go as fast as you can, sure, but burn-out is the #1 enemy, so go as slow as you need to as well! Just know that it got loads easier for me as I went on, and I was able to go from hesitantly tackling 100 words in TWO WEEKS, to happily chopping down 100 words in TWO DAYS. (Of course, it took some hard work, but that's always to be expected.)

Atwadesu Wrote:Huge congratulations!

I am a bit curious, exactly how proficient do you consider yourself at the language now when you are done? What level of media can you understand in terms of reading/listening?

I am also kinda curious how people approach it, do you write each new word down? look up any new kanji on stroke order and such?

I started the deck two days ago but its going slowly frankly, I am kinda slogging through the start and lots of it doesn't really stick, especially these three things, four things etc. I guess I haven't gotten into a comfortable enough process of doing it.

I'll give my 2 cents too.

I'm at 4600/6000. I don't write words down. My approach is recognition-only as I am likely to pick up production better once I can get used to understanding native material through massive exposure post-Core and can intuitively know what sounds good and what doesn't.

I have quit the deck twice now. Summers are the worst, but during the rest of the year I pick up from where I left off and beyond. Going steady is obviously the best option because you can't really run out of words in a short time...

Few things I have noticed during the journey: first 1000 words hardly stuck, I had to re-review constantly to make them stick for longer than a week. I couldn't understand the sentences very well. I didn't know any on-readings so it took quite a while for my brains to start seeing patterns on what kind of kanji are used with what kind of words and the common on-readings. After the first 1000 words it has gotten significantly easier to add new words and review them, and I find myself guessing at meaning much more often than reading.

I understand a lot more of native material now. Even though I am much more familiar with the stiff business-style corporation talking to a customer-style talk, I find myself seeing the words I have just learned in the wild a lot these days. It doesn't even matter that I don't know the *exact* reading in the context provided the first time, as it's rather easy to pick up what the word means in the sentence usually. It feels like every new day brings me closer to understanding Japanese better. Seriously, being able to just read native material relatively effortlessly is huge. It convinced me that after core6k I no longer need Anki for my Japanese (unless I want to practice handwriting some day).

The journey thus far has been a great stepping stone to ditching all the unnecessary tools and just exposing yourself to the language instead of books and exercises about the language.

Core 6k is awesome.

zurisu Wrote:I will answer your first paragraph in greater detail sometime soon; I'm too busy today to give a proper response. But I will!

Betelgeuzah Wrote:I'll give my 2 cents too.

I am extremely grateful for the replies, they really gave my motivation a boost! Especially hearing that it started out slow for both of you. I keep looking forward to learning and doing more now. The time commitment is nothing I even feel bad about, I will allow it to take the time it needs because the goal is something I have dreamt of for a long time.

Thanks again!

I didn't do core6k, but I did "mine" a little bit more than 6000 vocabulary cards before giving up Anki, so I guess it is somewhat equivalent. I sort of wish I did Core6k or at least 2k+mining and focused on active skills and listening comprehension instead of mining.

@TS: Mining is fine and not that time consuming, unless you go overboard like I did and add 30-50 sentences every day, which I did during the summer months and it eventually caused me to burn out and as a result, made me delete my Anki decks.

Atwadesu Wrote:Huge congratulations!
I started the deck two days ago but its going slowly frankly, I am kinda slogging through the start and lots of it doesn't really stick, especially these three things, four things etc. I guess I haven't gotten into a comfortable enough process of doing it.

By the way, when you have something where it makes sense to study it in parallel, it is almost always a good idea to do so. Things like antonym pairs or anything that just goes together, put it on the same card. Specifically for those counter readings, make a card where you have to produce the numbers from one to ten. I made one for days and for the generic things counter (ついたち, ふつか, みっか, etc and ひとつ, ふたつ, みっつ, etc). Counting 1 to 10 all at once just makes much more sense than doing it piecemeal. Don't be shy about changing the way core tests you.

(Oh my gosh, long post warning U_U I AM SO SORRY, maybe some people will find this useful though.)

Atwadesu Wrote:I am a bit curious, exactly how proficient do you consider yourself at the language now when you are done? What level of media can you understand in terms of reading/listening?

Okay, this is actually a difficult set of questions for me to answer, because I have not had much interaction with the language outside of Core6k for the past few months. I'll list what I HAVE done this year, for better context, and to show that my exposure to native media has indeed been very low:

READING:
~10 NHK News Easy articles with the assistance of Rikaichan.
~1.5 volumes of 名探偵コナン (Detective Conan) with the assistance of an English fan translation.
~15 cumulative minutes of attempting to read tweets (This always went badly.)

LISTENING:
~55 episodes of anime WITH English subs
~30 episodes of anime WITHOUT any subs (many of these were repeats of the same episodes)
Unknown number of hours of Japanese music, mainly チャットモンチー (Chatmonchy) and Vocaloid songs

This was all over the course of... 7 months? Okay so yeah, LOW exposure. I know some people on here would shake their head so gravely at me that laughing children in Japan would spontaneously start frowning. ごめん

[[To account for it, (not that I need to, I can do whatever I want ) I felt like finishing Core6k as fast as I sanely could and getting it over with first as a priority was better for my personal psychological idiosyncrasies. I get discouraged really easily due to low self-esteem (which Japanese study is helping =D ), so I thought that laying out a wide base of vocabulary BEFORE I ventured into native material (Can I just call this NM?) would prevent me from giving up. I don't think I could read through a text and have to look up every other word without going a bit crazy, which was how it was when I was at the beginning of Core. I found Anki more fun, and man, Anki ain't even that fun.]]

FINALLY getting to your actual question (I type a lot I am so sorry), since I haven't cracked my manga in a couple months, yesterday I did some assorted NM testing of waters, in both reading and listening, but I didn't really do that much becauseee NM still scares me a little bit U_U And also, FOR SCIENCE, I didn't want to remove myself too far from the actual state of "freshly-done-with-Core6k," so I disregarded the importance of a high data pool and kept my experiments short and brief before I typed this report (lol nope I'm just scared.)

Actually, the results were pretty good, though! At least, with 名探偵コナン (Detective Conan). I read about 10 pages, and this manga is pretty dialogue(and therefore text)-heavy, and, well... I DID have a lot of trouble understanding things. Even one important plot-advancing thing. That was the exception though; I could get the basic gist of mostly everything (which I guess isn't that hard because of context and pictures), and there were even whole complete sentences that I understood 100% on my own (such a cool feeling!). Like here were a couple consecutive lines I had no trouble with: こんな大事なこと、忘れたなんて・・・おっ、移動してる・・・雅美さん、まだ生きてるかも・・・位置は、ここから北西４キロ・・・新宿か！！そんなに遠くない！！急げ！！なんとか間に合ってくれ！！よーし、あと１キロ・・・あの角を曲がれば！！

"How could I forget this important thing... Oh! It's moving... Masami-san is still alive possibly... The location is 4 k northwest of here... In Shinjuku?! That's not far!! Hurry!! Must make it in time!! Alright, one kilometer more... if I turn this corner!!"

(I had to look up Shinjuku to make sure it was a place, but that was already sorta obvious from context.)

Without Core6k, I wouldn't have known these words: 大事・忘れる・移動・生きる・位置・北西・遠く・急ぐ・間に合う・角・曲がる and all that Japanese up there would just look like a jumbled mess. The only words up there NOT in Core6k were the two proper nouns and よし, a common interjection (and conjugations/grammar, but technically most of those are in Core, too, in the example sentences.)

Okay, as you can see, the grammar in that example is very simple. And grammar, it turns out, is where the vast majority of the trouble I mentioned above came from. When the grammar became more complex than this, my brain flew out the window and I felt myself just floundering along helplessly.

BUT vocabulary, the PURPOSE of Core, was hardly an issue at all! In fact there were only about 3 times in those 10 pages I saw a word and said, "Huh? I don't know what this means."

金目 - monetary value
指紋 - fingerprint
悲観 - pessimism

(Unless there were more words hidden in hiragana that I mistook for grammar.

Oh and I guess I should include 被害者, "victim", but I already knew that because it's used every other page in Detective Conan. And 以外, "except for", I *think* was not in the optimized Core2k6k deck, but it was on iKnow, and I learned it there before I migrated away. So, it's probably in some Core6k decks?? Maybe??)

ANYWAY, yeah my main problem is now grammar, at least in order to read shounen detective manga. I think. I mean, this is only from a 10-page sample, but I dunno, it went very well for me compared to when I first stared, where I basically had to look up AT LEAST one word per every speech bubble. And nothing made sense *cries at the memory of soul-crushing beginnerhood* Hold fast, new learners, it gets better... ;_;

I also read an NHK News Easy article, and that went significantly less well, but hey, I tried it without Rikaichan and I was able to at least understand what the article was ABOUT. But man the sentences are too long for my grammar-terrible brain X_X Here's the article, maybe it was a bad one to pick? I dunno though, topics like these are common for news. (Oh my goodness forgive the random, arbitrary, extremely small sample size but this post is already getting very long, be happy I'm not doing this completely statistically sound.) Okay let me try and go through this and sort out the words (This is by memory, not computer programming since I'm not good at that sorta stuff like a lot of people here XD So there might be some mistakes but here we go)

From that article... this is how I sorted each word:

IN Core6k:
皮膚 - skin
できる - can do
病気 - illness
たんぱく質 - protein
少なくなる - to lessen (***)
皮膚 - skin
中 - inside
入る - to go in
こと - thing
原因 - cause
考える - consider
なくす - to lose
働き - work
大学 - university
教授 - professor
次 - next
先生 - teacher
研究 - research
グループ - group
物質 - substance
増やす - to increase
見つける - to find
実験 - experiment
飲む - to drink
月 - month (***)
半ば - middle
とても - very
日本 - Japan
人 - person
言う - to say
今 - now
弱める - to weaken
治療 - medical treatment
結果 - result
使う - to use
これから - from now on
新しい - new
薬 - medicine
作る - to make

NOT in Core6k:
アトピー性皮膚炎　- atopic dermatitis (**)
炎症 - inflammation (*)
フィラグリン - filaggrin, a protein (**)
異物 - foreign substance (*)
水分 - fluid
准教授 - associate professor (**)
マウス - mouse (*)
約 - approx
しかし - however

(*) - Was able to figure out via the hover-over J-J definition given by NHK News Easy. Definition most likely contained Core6k words which made this possible.
(**) - I don't even know exactly what this means in English. Articles explain these words in the article itself usually.
(***) - Technically not in Core6k, but a very close word is, which pretty much gives you this word for free.

[Note that I left out proper nouns and words that border as grammar.]

So, excluding the (**) marked words, the ratio of words known to words unknown was 13:2. Vocabulary was relatively easily understood. So my struggle with the article was, again, due to my grammar difficulties and also the tendency for my eyes to glaze over in terror when I am forced to read real Japanese. Haha =P

Okay, to wrap this up, lastly I watched an episode of しろくまカフェ (Polar Bear Cafe, without subs of course) to try and figure out how my listening skills are doing. I'm sure you can imagine. Since my grammar is so poor, and since my precious kanji was absent, everything was hard and I barely understood anything. But hey, it is okay, because Polar Bear Cafe is awesome, and I enjoy it very much even when I have no idea what they're saying.

(Actually, the only time I really remember listening to something and going "OMG I understood that!" [when it wasn't just formula phrases or singular, scattered words] was actually about a week ago. I was listening to Chatmonchy, and a new (to me) song "Haru Natsu Aki" said 「あなたを忘れる時間がない」. It is so simple, yeah, but that is the extent of my listening prowess.)

My final point is just to say, for completeness, that yes, I HAVE studied grammar; I made an Anki deck of Tae Kim's entire grammar guide, actually. However, studying grammar does not automatically let you PROCESS it in raw form; obviously you need a lot of NM exposure to really cement and expand on it.

So here's the final TL;DR:
Reading-wise, I can muddle my way through kids or "easy" stuff fairly well now on the vocabulary front, but my grammar stinks from lack of native media exposure, so figuring out EXACTLY what a sentence says is usually trouble if it gets to be too long. As for listening, I haven't practiced it much at all, so it's obviously far inferior to my reading. Basically useless.

This has all made me realize that making a J-J sentence deck like I had originally thought about in the OP is not the best next step, instead I should make a J-E one and focus on overall understanding of grammar, I think.

zurisu congratulations to your progress. Im just a beginner who knows like 25 Kanji and something like 650 vocab. Just a quick question, after you finished Core6k could you only read the written Kanji, or could you also reproduce the words from English to Japanse?

He4rtl3ss Wrote:zurisu congratulations to your progress. Im just a beginner who knows like 25 Kanji and something like 650 vocab. Just a quick question, after you finished Core6k could you only read the written Kanji, or could you also reproduce the words from English to Japanse?

Generally, if you do recognition (Japanese>English) cards like me, you can expect that production is going to be very difficult until you decide to practice that actively too, at least, that's what reading Koohii all the time has taught me, hehe. Others with better experience could probably elaborate on this a lot more.

That being said, I'll try translating random words from your post into Japanese and see how I do.

Progress: There are about 50 million words for this in Core6k, and I can't think of one, of course. Something 達, right? uhhh
Beginner: 初歩 (beginning steps) came to mind
Knows: 知る, but this is easy =P
Vocabulary: I don't think this word is in Core6k? Unless you count 言葉 (words)
Quick: 速く (quickly) [edit: oh I should have put the adjective form right? 速い oops]
Question: 質問
Finished: 終わり (finish) There's also about a zillion words for "Finished" in Core6k but most of them are eluding me on the spot.
Read: 読む, easy peasy
Written kanji: 書き言葉 (written word)
Reproduce: I can't remember if this is in Core6k, if it is, I don't remember how to say it lol
English: 英語 way easy

So simple words are fairly easy to recall, but for everything else, it's pretty hit-or-miss. At least SOME knowledge is there to work with, so it's not a complete blank slate when you start to practice output.

Thanks for your reply. Thanks to you I may also give RTK and the Core 6k deck a try as you did.
But there's still a question, could you read a text if it is written in Kana only? Or do you need Kanji to understand the vocabulary you learned?

He4rtl3ss Wrote:Thanks for your reply. Thanks to you I may also give RTK and the Core 6k deck a try as you did.
But there's still a question, could you read a text if it is written in Kana only? Or do you need Kanji to understand the vocabulary you learned?

Cool, give it a shot! (^o^)／

Err, gee, I don't think I could read kana-only text very well. I haven't exactly tried, but I'm already having enough trouble as it is with kanji, haha, so I'm pretty sure kana would just make everything impossible for me right now ^.^

Although, if you mean a single word that I learned as kanji appearing in only kana, then that would depend on the case, but actually that happened in the NHK Easy article I linked above. 「たんぱく質」 appeared instead of 「蛋白質」 (how it appears in my Core deck) and it didn't really phase me. In fact, it actually helped a little bit since 蛋白質 is one of the last words I learned, which means I still don't have a very strong grasp on it yet.

Entire kana sentences or paragraphs: No way.
Individual kana words: Depends, but I probably could, especially if it's in the context of something I can understand.

EDIT: Also please remember that this is just my individual experience; it could be totally different for other people who have better developed their reading or listening skills before starting/during Core.

I don't mind the questions, though. I am a good candidate to ask, actually, since I've had little exposure to Japanese outside of RTK/Core6k/Tae Kim, so gauging the effectiveness of Core6k with myself as an example is relatively pure and uncontaminated, at least for the time being. Plus it gives me an excuse to type a lot =P

[RawToast]

Betelgeuzah Wrote:I'm at 4600/6000. I don't write words down. My approach is recognition-only as I am likely to pick up production better once I can get used to understanding native material through massive exposure post-Core and can intuitively know what sounds good and what doesn't.

After the first 1000 words it has gotten significantly easier to add new words and review them, and I find myself guessing at meaning much more often than reading.

Almost there! I felt the same way with you on the readings. I found the first 1000 words hard to get a grip on as well. It feels good when you know the reading or can guess the gist of a word the first time you see it.

My vocab journey took a detour from the core decks (moved on to completing decks for Genki I, JLPT N5 & N4, Yotsubato 1, and various cards from NHK news after the first 500). By the end of this month I'll be at 2k from Core and I'll be sticking with it this time.

Unlike the others posted I do multiple cards per item, in order to keep to the Supermemo idea of '1 unknown per card':

Meaning
Front: Kanji, Kana, Sentence, Sound > Back: Translations
Reading
Front: Kanji, Translation, Sentence, Sound > Back: Kana, Sound
Recognition
Front: Kanji, Sentence > Back: Kana, Sound, Translations
Production
Typical production Native Word -> Japanese Pronounciation

The meaning and reading decks run off ahead of the recognition deck and have increased interval rates. Whilst the production deck runs at half the rate of my recognition deck.

RawToast Wrote:

Betelgeuzah Wrote:I'm at 4600/6000. I don't write words down. My approach is recognition-only as I am likely to pick up production better once I can get used to understanding native material through massive exposure post-Core and can intuitively know what sounds good and what doesn't.

After the first 1000 words it has gotten significantly easier to add new words and review them, and I find myself guessing at meaning much more often than reading.

Almost there! I felt the same way with you on the readings. I found the first 1000 words hard to get a grip on as well. It feels good when you know the reading or can guess the gist of a word the first time you see it.

My vocab journey took a detour from the core decks (moved on to completing decks for Genki I, JLPT N5 & N4, Yotsubato 1, and various cards from NHK news after the first 500). By the end of this month I'll be at 2k from Core and I'll be sticking with it this time.

Unlike the others posted I do multiple cards per item, in order to keep to the Supermemo idea of '1 unknown per card':

Meaning
Front: Kanji, Kana, Sentence, Sound > Back: Translations
Reading
Front: Kanji, Translation, Sentence, Sound > Back: Kana, Sound
Recognition
Front: Kanji, Sentence > Back: Kana, Sound, Translations
Production
Typical production Native Word -> Japanese Pronounciation

The meaning and reading decks run off ahead of the recognition deck and have increased interval rates. Whilst the production deck runs at half the rate of my recognition deck.

Doing all 4 sound a bit time consuming. I one reading cards for that purpose.

Reading
Front: Kanji, Sentence > Back: Kana, Sound, Translations

When I encounter a new word I click on "No" button as long as I'm unable to read it, understand it's meaning. As the time passes by I stop looking at sentence to speed up review. So, after a while I use the cards as you do in the "Production" mode. I don't like the production card in the format that you use, because the reading/meaning sometimes differs depending on how the word is used. That's true just for a small set of words maybe less than 1%.

I could learn 200 words a day. Although I would have to spend 5-10 hours doing reviews daily. So, I decided to go with 100 a day.

In the past I used a true production cards for first 2400 cards in core 2k/6k:
English keyword + closed-delete sentence - > Kanji, Sentence, Kana, Sound, Translations
I was able to learn 25-50 cards a day, but it that type of production was slowing me down with reviews. So, I decided to go with recognition instead.

At this rate I'll be done with Core 6k next month.

Congratulations to everyone who finished IKnow! Its a huge slog but I'm pretty sure its well worth it.

I finished 6k long ago and had been gathering new vocabulary just from reading things ever since. Though I *finally* got hold of the 10k spreadsheet from this board only a week or two back, and I'm plowing through it now adding both the word and sentence for each unknown into my Anki. This was fast at first, I knew about 90% of the words from 6-7k, but now I'm finding I have to add about every 1 in 4 or 5 words. Anyway its still the fastest method I know to hammer new vocabulary in and I think its excellent.

I've been able to add between 100 and 150 Anki cards a day for the last week or so finishing up this deck and its becoming extremely hard work. I only have 606 due for tomorrow though which is relatively good -- means I can add another 150 or so new cards again tonight I think. Ugh.

Its intentional though, I want to blast through this deck and from there on I'll probably stop using Anki nearly as much. Infact I'm planning to only really watch lots of TV, read a lot and speak on Skype as much as possible. I've plowed too many hours into Anki reviews already in my life and I think once you reach this kind of stage its probably less helpful than it used to be.

zurisu Wrote:You know, I'm not sure if I'm an exception or not, but my RTK knowledge almost NEVER directly carried over into Core. (Subconsciously it might have helped a great deal, but I wouldn't know it.) I rarely ever thought, "Oh, this is the kanji for [keyword], and this is the kanji for [other keyword], yeahh, now I remember what this word is!" 99% of the time, I totally disregarded keywords and relied on visual recognition alone, because it was faster and not that difficult for me. (Which, again, might be BECAUSE I did RTK, and I was familiar with all the shapes from writing them. Or it could be because I'm a visual/artistic person. Iunno. ...either way, I WAS able to recognize when a non-RTK1 kanji popped up, so maybe I really was more aware of the keywords than I know.)

Personally my experience was exactly the same as yours and I've never studied RTK either. I've never had any problems with visual recognition and just seeing them in Anki regularly has been more than enough for me. I'm studying Chinese too and I'm exactly the same there, I've never studied any characters individually and its not been any source of trouble to me. I read fine.

How long does it typically take someone to finish core? I know it depends on how many cards to do but I'm still curious. I've been going for a month and I'm only 300 cards in. I feel as if I'm going too slow, and I need to boost the amount of cards I'm doing. The other day I set it to 20 new cards a day, so I'm hoping that will be alright for me.

MelonBerry Wrote:How long does it typically take someone to finish core? I know it depends on how many cards to do but I'm still curious. I've been going for a month and I'm only 300 cards in. I feel as if I'm going too slow, and I need to boost the amount of cards I'm doing. The other day I set it to 20 new cards a day, so I'm hoping that will be alright for me.

Don't worry about the speed. 20 new cards a day is fine. Usually when you start learning a language it takes you more time to learn new words. After doing it for a while you will know most readings and you can speed it up after finishing Core 2k.

In my case I've been doing core about 1.5 month and I'm half into the Core 6k (3400 words). However, now I can study cards much faster, because I already know readings for most new words. xD

NightSky Wrote:Its intentional though, I want to blast through this deck and from there on I'll probably stop using Anki nearly as much. Infact I'm planning to only really watch lots of TV, read a lot and speak on Skype as much as possible. I've plowed too many hours into Anki reviews already in my life and I think once you reach this kind of stage its probably less helpful than it used to be.

I feel exactly the same way, even though I'm just freshly at the 6k mark. Maybe I gave myself Anki-burnout, or maybe this is a healthy state of mind, but I'd really rather just quit adding new cards altogether and study my reading materials (manga) as I go instead, without bothering at all with SRS. So... I think for the rest of the year I'm gonna try that. (Although I'll still do my daily reps of course, just without adding new stuff.) I'll keep you guys updated on my progress, (but I'll try and find a more appropriate thread to do so, since that won't really be about Core6k anymore.)

The way I see it, if Anki is preventing me from spending time consuming COMPREHENSIBLE material (comprehensible thanks to Anki and Core6k in the first place), then Anki is, now, doing me more harm than good. And sucking away all the fun. So I'm just gonna do what I always have and change my study plans up spontaneously and adapt to this 日本語 journey as I go.

I think particularly after 10k and when you have been cramming vocab a while, there aren't any other vocabulary sources out there anymore since everything else is aimed at the less advanced learner. Someone with that level of vocabulary is expected to learn by themselves, as they should be able to do of course. But what I think it also means is that it actually becomes really difficult to spend too much time in Anki anyway, because it actually becomes difficult *finding* enough new vocabulary to cram into it every day to keep your reviews nearly as high. Which is a good thing for sure!

When I'm not working and have time to cram vocab, I feel like I'm able to put in up to 100 new cards a day. Going from a word list like the 10k, I'm able to go at that speed because the word and the example is right there. That and the more Japanese you know, the easier it gets, words stick far easier. I hardly ever fail cards which is why I'm able to keep going so fast (with some annoying exceptions I guess). But I'm also reading 1Q84, and I'd probably need to be reading it all day to even find 100 words I don't know now.

So its probably not worth worrying about Anki too much or Anki burnout, eventually it dies a natural death anyway.