apirx Wrote:You're of course right, I would miss these 10,000 words a lot, and this time was certainly not wasted. But I spent a year of my life being a flashcard robot, and I wouldn't do that again.

Yes, that was not ideal. Anki should be used in conjunction with immersion, not by itself. Most of us who use Anki also listen to music, watch TV and movies, read manga, blogs and news sites, etc. Personally, I have been doing all those things even before I started using Anki.

Perhaps that's why I don't find adding 50 cards/day such a big deal. Immersion goes a long way in making the reviews easier. It really is a nice feeling coming across an intimidating looking 3-4 Kanji compound, having no clue what it is, and then clicking the answer and going: holy s*#t, I heard that word a million times, and this card is as good as learned.

For instance, learning a word like 中途半端 in isolation would be painful. It would take a good dozen reviews to finally get it. But, if you watch Japanese media, you hear it so much that by the time it comes up in Anki, it rolls off your tongue like it's nothing.

Disclaimer:I haven't been adding at the rate of 50+ cards/day for sustained periods of time, because I'm usually also working , but when I do it, it doesn't seem that difficult. (I've only done 50+ cards/day continuously for about two months last year, and a month or so right now, really).

Northern_Lord Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:

Northern_Lord Wrote:Hahaha. NO WAY am I going to do anything close to 700 reviews per day.

Its not that bad if you review at your optimum time of day and do more during the day. Most people have a good time of day to review. Anyway, if you figure your answering time on cards will run 5-20seconds, and take the average 12.5seconds/card. That's only 2.5 hours. If you are OCD-ish about Anki and use the mobile and pc version and sync, that's doable. The way you optimize is by knowing what your average speed on cards is, maturing rate, and number of matures in the review each day. If that's 400 cards of matures, then you will get through them quick probably. If its too much, then you back off on new cards.

Anki has good graphs to help you figure out if you are aiming to end up with too many reviews on your plate.

Edit: Should have added that it also depends on the type of card. If its a reading only card then it can be quick, but if you have to listen then maybe the review time per card goes up.

For someone with a lot of freely disposeable time that might be possible. On my hand, I spend 50% of my waking time on assignments and classes for university, so I would be giving up all free time I have in the course of a day, which I'm not interested in.

My question to anyone with more than 300 reviews/day is
why don't you combine some of the cards? For example production and listening in one. It's time consuming and you can spend your time on something more reinvigorating like delving into native material.

Hey dude, I dont do 300 reviews a day, mine is capped at 200 just so i dont feel bad if i don't finish lol. But you asked about combining cards and that is something I know about. Right now I just have 2 decks. One is the RTK deck (keyword -> kanji), the other deck is cloze delete vocab (今日はいい＿＿です Today is good weather ー＞ 今日はいい天気です。) But what I did do, instead of making reading cards too (天気 -> weather) is added the words from the vocab deck, to my kanji deck.
So for example if I have the word 天気 in my vocab deck, then in the kanji card deck on card 天 - will be a vocab word 天気, and it will also appear on the 気 kanji card. This allows me to slowly stop remembering Kanji in such an abstract way and to remind me of the real japanese words its associated with. It's working great so far.

afterglowefx Wrote:However, because it is standard order, many of the example sentences will have unknown words.

This is the problem I have with the core deck. Does anyone know what order to sort the cards in to get them to be i+1 optimized?

vgambit Wrote:

afterglowefx Wrote:However, because it is standard order, many of the example sentences will have unknown words.

This is the problem I have with the core deck. Does anyone know what order to sort the cards in to get them to be i+1 optimized?

If you find that a big problem then sort the deck by the sentence index instead... but to be honest i just ignore the words i dont know and they come around later...

How can I remove all the furigana in core2k6k optimized? I don't mind seeing it in the answer but I would prefer it not being shown before I click show answer.

learningkanji Wrote:How can I remove all the furigana in core2k6k optimized? I don't mind seeing it in the answer but I would prefer it not being shown before I click show answer.

(I assume you're talking about Anki)
In the card template, under the 'Question' section you should be able to see something like:
{{furiganaentence}}

change it to

{{kanjientence}}

It also depends on the format of the card. I do mcd format with definition and sentence with keyword in. hiragana on the front . The back is the closed part and kanji

I usually close out the an easy arbitrary part of the definition
This format really works for me and its much easier to do than the traditional format of flashcards

worthy7 Wrote:

vgambit Wrote:

afterglowefx Wrote:However, because it is standard order, many of the example sentences will have unknown words.

This is the problem I have with the core deck. Does anyone know what order to sort the cards in to get them to be i+1 optimized?

If you find that a big problem then sort the deck by the sentence index instead... but to be honest i just ignore the words i dont know and they come around later...

I don't see a sentence index in this deck.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/702754122

Am I using the wrong one?

I''m using https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1102215805

If you want to add your own index, maybe my plugin can help:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1139060204

worthy7 Wrote:

learningkanji Wrote:How can I remove all the furigana in core2k6k optimized? I don't mind seeing it in the answer but I would prefer it not being shown before I click show answer.

(I assume you're talking about Anki)
In the card template, under the 'Question' section you should be able to see something like:
{{furiganaentence}}

change it to

{{kanjientence}}

If by question sentence you mean the front part of the card, all I see is:

<span style="font-size: 28px; ">{{Vocabulary-English}}</span> <span style="font-size: 15px; color: #5555ff">{{Vocabulary-Pos}}</span><br>
<span style="font-family: ＭＳ ゴシック; font-size: 32px; ">{{Sentence-Clozed}}</span><br>
{{Caution}}<br>
{{Sentence-Image}}<br>
<span style="font-size: 15px; ">{{Sentence-English}}</span>

Since I finally got an extended holiday I have been getting back into adding new cards to Anki again, esp. the mandarin deck. I've been adding fifty a day, but stories of 700 reviews is a bit bloody scary so we shall see how long that lasts.

Just one thing I have noticed though. I am learning the "core 2000" from iKnow's website (before that I mined zhongwenred/zhongwengreen, daydayup), which come with audio. It makes the whole process go smoother. Having the sound on the front and on the back might be cheating for some, but my goal at this point is really to build passive vocab, and I feel that listening to the sound when seeing the text is helping me build a kind of complementary audio memory and prevents me from developing overly odd pronunciation down the track.

It is a little bit of work copying and saving the files to Anki, but access is totally free to all the material without actually paying anything. Also, you effectively get mandarin 4000 sentences from the iKnow site, as each word comes with two example sentences. Not bad at all.

The only thing I'd make sure to do is add your new cards after all your reviews--that way you won't find yourself getting buried so easily. All the same, though, it's a ton of work and Anki doesn't care about whatever else life throws at you. Anki doesn't care if you're going on vocation in two weeks, it doesn't care if you drank a case of beer last night, and it doesn't care if you've got friends coming over. I've made incredible progress over these past few months, but you've got to be willing to fight for it. It's not the times you want to study that count, it's when studying is the last thing in the world you want to be doing and you God-damned do it anyway.

afterglowefx Wrote:It's not the times you want to study that count, it's when studying is the last thing in the world you want to be doing and you God-damned do it anyway.

This advice applies to almost any endeavor, especially writing and research.

afterglowefx Wrote:It's not the times you want to study that count, it's when studying is the last thing in the world you want to be doing and you God-damned do it anyway.

Beautifully put.

afterglowefx Wrote:It's not the times you want to study that count, it's when studying is the last thing in the world you want to be doing and you God-damned do it anyway.

I don't do that. I've learned from experience that studying when I'm too tired or stressed or preoccupied is just a waste of time. Missing a day isn't a big setback; I just have to work harder the next day. I rarely miss two days in a row, though. But feeling lazy, or just don't feel like it? Those are the times I push myself.

codex Wrote:I don't do that. I've learned from experience that studying when I'm too tired or stressed or preoccupied is just a waste of time.

I agree with you, and I stay away from doing Anki decks when tired too. It just slows me down too much if I can't focus on it fully.

But this doesn't make being tired a good enough reason not to do anything productive, though. It just means you should do something less demanding. In this case, instead of doing Anki reps, maybe pick up a manga, or read the news or a blog in Japanese or something.

Those are all things I can do half asleep just as well as when I'm at my best. And they're just as important to do as the Anki reps.

doing ANKI when you're in a bad shape has the added effect of resetting the timers on the cards you normally have no problem with, leading to unnecessary work.

unless you don't hit "fail", but then there's no meaning to using ANKI.

The thing is, guys, is you seem to have pretty low expectations of yourselves. I don't want to be able to speak Japanese only on the best of days, when it's sunny and the birds are singing and I've had 10 hours of sleep. I also need to be able to speak Japanese when I'm sick, hung over, and hating life. If I have trouble with words I'm supposed to know I evidently didn't know them well enough.

That's a skill that comes with time. It has nothing to do with ANKI reviews. It's not like you'll ever have an active vocabulary of 6000 words anyways. You don't have it in your mother tongue. For a passive vocab, however, it's all right.

I know you haven't much faith in Anki, but honestly it's taken me almost zero to conversational in a period of half a year. I went from living in a world where I got excited to recognize one or two words to understanding the basic content of nearly every conversation I care to listen to. I went from students being shocked when I understood something in Japanese to them being shocked when I don't know something. That was all Anki. Now, who knows, maybe I'd have the same results with another method, and I am sure the determining factor is the amount of work I put in. But I do happen to think that being harsh with the fail button and making damned sure I get my work in regardless of mood has been a big factor in my progress. Hell, lately I've started rescheduling cards (essentially zeroing their progress and restudying them from scratch) that I try and fail to recall in daily life.

I understand that for a lot of people here this sort of self-abuse won't work. But Japanese isn't a hobby for me. I've lived in places for going on three years now where I haven't been able to properly express myself. You start to feel like less than a person--in a sense I study for my own damned identity. When you're hitting the books for personhood things like motivation and burn-out aren't really factors.

My English does happen to be quite good, though, if my GRE scores are anything to go by. And I see no reason why my Japanese shouldn't be good too.

I think you're mixing things up, because you lack something to compare your skills with.
Of course you learned words that are useful and have become active, but the majority of the words have become passive.
The ones that became active did so by being used by you. However, this won't work for all the words, and it sure won't by doing reps on ANKI.

What you can do is, you'll learn more passive vocab and make a fraction of that active.
Sure, that's a good thing, but it also means you don't have to force yourself to drill all 6000 words in that list in your head with perfect recall. Since you're living here, words will pop up again.
Maybe it's not me not trusting ANKI enough, but you trusting ANKI too much and yourself too little. And maybe it's a mix of both.

Telling from experience tho, I got a huge vocab of over 20.000 words. Much of that is medical or health related, since this happens to be my expertise, but I learned a lot not from ANKI, but from other sources.

I don't doubt your Japanese can reach a high level. It might have already. ANKI however will teach you a lot of stuff you won't need, while a lot of the stuff you find might fit you will go unnoticed by spending hours with ANKI instead of, say, reading literature that interests you. What do you think how I learned words like 膀胱、尿管、腎臓、太陽神経叢、栄養失調、点滴、症候群 and so on? Not from ANKI. I put words that bugged me on a list, looked them up later, then drilled them on Quizlet, then read again. You could put them in ANKI too, sure, but in my experience, a first proper drill and then having them pop up at some point somewhere does the trick just fine, given you expose yourself to that sort of (natural native) stuff.

I actually think we're broadly agreed on this. You've got a nice-sized passive vocabulary so for you reading is a great way to go.

I don't. Eighty percent or more of my vocab has a production card somewhere in the deck, and I would say a lot of those words are fairly active. Certainly not all eighty percent, but by no means a small fraction. That said, I'd only guess there's something like 6,000 words there.

I'm not good yet. But I agree with you that the way to get good is reading--I learned my own mother tongue that way. But before I can comfortably sit down to a book I feel the most effective way to absorb a ton of new vocab is with Anki. You're putting in your initial drills and then hoping the word pops up later. I'm putting in my initial drills and guaranteeing it pops up later. I agree that seeing the word in fresh context every time is better overall, but until I get my vocabulary built up to the level that I feel more comfortable reading books, it's Anki for me.

Once I finish Core6k I should have something around 8000-9000 words if it keeps going the way it does. I think I'll transition to books then. Even though I'm sure Core10k will be calling my name.

EDIT: Jesus, speaking of unneeded words, how the hell did chrysanthemum and tuberculosis make it into Core6k? It hasn't even taught me the word for bush or forehead or pan and we're talking about two words I may have never even said in my own mother language.

chrysanthemum is a national symbol so it gets used fairly often as flowers go in japan.
As for TB, well I've heard the word once or twice in movies or books or something.

core10k is pretty basic vocab. reading books would be hard without it. you could and should be reading manga, but novels, especially good ones, would be best after 10k I think. murakami books are pretty easy to read then. they would be a good place to start at that point in my opinion.

@dtcamero
You might be a bit optimistic with those 10k – my (limited but nevertheless) experience is that Murakami uses words well from outside a set of the 10k most frequently occurring words.

@andikaze
A few years back, Wired featured an [1]article on SuperMemo and an interview with Piotr Wozniak – the author of SuperMemo. That article was titled “Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm”. Unfortunately, the original seems to be gone from Wired but I managed to find its copy [2]here. Have a read and maybe you will “Surrender to This Algorithm” yourself...

[1] http://www.wired.com/search?gs=supermemo...9&ie=UTF-8
[2] http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2008-May/002978.html

Mm, the Core word selection sounds rather unimpressive. They may be 'common' words, but it seems to include a lot of words that aren't common in a context that someone building their vocabulary from scratch would care about. It's a shame there doesn't seem to be other well organised shared decks with vocabulary aimed at getting through normal everyday life first.

I don't think there's a reason you couldn't start reading after Core6k and do Core10k as well. Just ease off on adding cards a bit - I think it would be well worth it.