So I've already completed RTK and Core6K, though honestly I have stopped reviewing Core because I find it too boring and too English. I'm looking for something more native, while still making progress.

Currently I read my texts on the iPad and switch to the Japanese dictionary app to quickly look up any unknown words. This works but I feel I can do better. I don't mind learning vocab separated from context (as with Anki) but it needs to be more native than Core's "English -> Japanese" approach and also a bit more fun.

I've heard of AJATT's cloze deletion method and sentence mining. I was thinking something along the lines of that. What are you guys using to learn vocab in a more native way?

Any suggestions are much appreciated!

I'm mining about 10 to 25 sentences a day from native material. I've got a core deck, but it's not as high a priority as my primary sentence deck (I mostly use core for the oral comprehension side).

I just get them from sources I enjoy reading, like script from video games / anime, mangas, contemporary literature, news websites (yes, I enjoy reading the news :>) and such.

For sources such as video games / anime / manga, I usually look up the "official" translation and put it in the answer section of the card. Even if it's not a perfect translation, it's a good way to get a global understanding of what is said. I also put down the translation of any individual word I don't know very well, if at all, as well as a brief description of unfamiliar particles.

If the source does not have a translation handy, then I do without if the sentence is simple enough. I never translate it myself, but when I have a pretty good idea of what the sentence is about, I include it in my deck anyways. I sometimes use cloze deletion if I'm only interested in part of the sentence, but I usually prefer not to for some reasons. Just personal preferences I guess. I also bother a japanese friend of mine to proof read a few of the sentences I'm most unsure about.

For sources, well, it boils down to what you enjoy ; for instance, I'm currently replaying persona 4 golden on the PS vita, and I'm mining the game like crazy using the bilingual script available here http://apps.lushu.org/persona/script.html#q=140 . If you enjoy video games, scripts are a great source of mining. It's usually pretty easy to find the english / japanese script, so you can just copy & paste away.

Bottom line is, find stuff you enjoy, have a good dictionary handy (http://jisho.org/ comes to mind) and mine away.

Use tools like rikaisama and yomichan that adds the word plus the sentence it is enclosed in to your Anki deck. The books you are reading have to be in txt format. I did Core 10k and have since added about another 10k words using those tools on native texts.

There are tons of variations on learning vocab. The cool thing is - you can mix & match all you want.

ColdCore Wrote:So I've already completed RTK and Core6K, though honestly I have stopped reviewing Core because I find it too boring and too English.

Maybe add Japanese definitions & just show those?

ColdCore Wrote:it needs to be more native than Core's "English -> Japanese" approach

You know you can configure Anki to just do Japanese->English (or Japanese->Japanese) if you want?

ColdCore Wrote:I've heard of AJATT's cloze deletion method and sentence mining. I was thinking something along the lines of that.

Sure, go for it!

ColdCore Wrote:What are you guys using to learn vocab in a more native way?

Right now I'm using premade sources to bulk up my passive vocab, reading novels & news, looking up unknowns with popup dictionaries but not bothering to mine them or anything.

My Japanese teacher was pretty good at explaining new vocab in easy-to-understand Japanese. Personally, I like this method the best - it's fun & it really cemented the vocab in my brain - but it requires a teacher's time & isn't super efficient.

ColdCore Wrote:Any suggestions are much appreciated!

subs2srs? You can use it on any video or audio that you have a script for.

also lang-8: writing helps you realize which words you don't know.

@Linval: Game scripts sounds like an excellent option for me! I'm usually playing on PC but also got a PSP and PS3 handy. Any recommendations for those platforms? (I'm running out of eroge to play lol...!) Been enjoying FFX HD lately, I should check if a script exists for it too!

As for dictionary choice: any reason you picked Jisho.org? I'm using Jiten.net, it allows faster searching (only 1 input field) but I think they're pretty much the same other than that.

@PotbellyPig: Thanks for mentioning yomichan! Looks like a great way to get into Anki again!

What format of cards are you using for it? I can do Front:[word] and Back:[reading, glossary] but maybe you can recommend a better format?

@anritsi: I know I can switch them in Anki's card setup but they just sound English, I don't know, maybe I'm picky or something... hah, but at any rate, if it ain't fun... you know!

A teacher would of course be great but I'm afraid it is not an option for me. On the other hand: I will be in Japan for several months next year so that will surely give a great boost to my vocab! Just trying to prepare for the adventure now

Cheers for mentioning subs2srs, I kind of forgot it still existed! I will put it on the list!

Regarding Lang-8, I'm not sure: do Japanese people actually use it that much?

For FFX : http://unyuu.s151.xrea.com/game/ff10p-ve...-index.htm (jp) http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps2/197344-final...faqs/43142 (en)

I've been mining this one quite a bit recently as well :p

For PC, well, Japan isn't very big on PC gaming, so I can't think of many interesting japanese games there. There might be a few 同人ゲーム lying around, but I don't know much about those. You can emulate like crazy though, it's easy to get by japanese roms & iso.

As for the ps3, you could try checking out the disgaea series if you're into tactical j-rpg. Ni No Kuni is good from what I've heard - and there's the metal gear series as well, the HD collection might be worth getting if you've never played them (though I'm afraid the dialogues will be hard to follow, the series is famous for its fairly... complex scenarios). On the PSP there's tons of great games like ff tactics, tactics ogre, valkyria chronicles, ff 6 through 9, as well as disgaea 1 & 2, on top of my head, plus tons of oldies like old psx castlevania & co. The PSP & PS3s are region-free (God Bless Sony for this), so it might be worth digging into their catalog and getting a few imported games.

As for jisho, I don't know, I just like it. The kanji stroke order diagram were very handy when I was going through RTK, and they sometimes have a few good example sentences. Mostly force of habit though, pick one you're comfortable with.

Thanks for the script and recommendations! Anything fancy you have to do to find these scripts or just google them?

Google's probably the best, try searching for something like '[game title] セリフ集　（or 全セリフ集）', or taking a line from the game and searching for that. The less iconic the more likely you are to find a full(er) script. (So for FFX, searching for the big lines like 最後かもしれないだろ？ だから全部話しておきたいんだ will probably get you a lot of 名セリフ (famous/memorable lines) results, but if you were to search for lines from smaller scenes would have a better chance of finding scripts instead.)

A Japanese Playstation Plus subscription might be something to look into as well. For about 5000 yen a year you can get dozens of free games. They have started putting more PSVita titles on than PSP ones, but they still do some of those too. And unlike other region's Plus schemes, the Japanese one gives you a large number of Game Archive/PS1 games for free that you can play on the PSP as well if you want to. Over the time I've had it they've offered a number of text-heavy RPG/visual novels. Disgaea 3 for the Vita, Sora no Kiseki for the PSP, Chaos;Head for the PSP, Time Travellers (PSP and Vita), Shin Megami Tensei 1, 2, and if..., I think all the Arc the Lad series, plus so many others I have lost count. I think the total for a year is something like 100+ (123?).

ColdCore Wrote:So I've already completed RTK and Core6K, though honestly I have stopped reviewing Core because I find it too boring and too English.

You don't have to review Core with the English translations, if you don't want to. You can edit your card template, and take them out.

In my deck, the English translations of vocab are removed completely, and the sentence is only there in the background color, at the bottom. I can only see it if I select it with the mouse. I almost never do.

@albion: Thanks for the tips! I'll have a look and see what I can find!

@Stansfield123: I know; I probably haven't been too clear about this but it's really the deck that I'm starting to find too dull and boring. It's not that I don't want to change the template, but rather that I can't be bothered with those sentences any more.

Which is why I'm now going to try to do some sentence mining and reading with yomichan + those game scripts suggested above. But thanks for your tip regardless!

ColdCore Wrote:@albion: Thanks for the tips! I'll have a look and see what I can find!

@Stansfield123: I know; I probably haven't been too clear about this but it's really the deck that I'm starting to find too dull and boring. It's not that I don't want to change the template, but rather that I can't be bothered with those sentences any more.

Which is why I'm now going to try to do some sentence mining and reading with yomichan + those game scripts suggested above. But thanks for your tip regardless!

NP. How are you with grammar? There's also a great deck around (somewhere on this forum) that has the examples from the beginner's grammar book Japanese the Manga Way (it's well made, has all the pictures from the book, plus the examples with furigana, and the English translations).

I actually was familiar with a lot of the patterns already (from doing Tae Kim), but went through the deck anyway for the sake of getting used to them more, and the occasional new vocab they have. It's about 500 cards.

That sounds like a great deck

Stansfield123 Wrote:NP. How are you with grammar? There's also a great deck around (somewhere on this forum) that has the examples from the beginner's grammar book Japanese the Manga Way (it's well made, has all the pictures from the book, plus the examples with furigana, and the English translations).

I actually was familiar with a lot of the patterns already (from doing Tae Kim), but went through the deck anyway for the sake of getting used to them more, and the occasional new vocab they have. It's about 500 cards.

I've been using that deck. Japanese the Manga Way is excellent, and certainly goes into things in more detail than Tae Kim. The examples being from manga, they are also native, which is a plus, and you get some cultural explanations on top of that (it's also rewarding thinking you can understand some actual Japanese, and the choice of manga is, I think, very good for a grammar book - unlike Japanese in Mangaland).
While the deck is useful, spaces are missing before kanji and their furigana, so they are misaligned most of the time. There are some typos too (the worst one I've seen so far being "さんあ"　for "そんな"). Beginners should be especially careful. It's easy to check everything as you can just look at the picture, though.

learn it natively? Now I still continue my Janpanese-learning books. Maybe end of the half year, then can learn words myslf. musics of MOMOE, from it, to learn words, and things around can help to learn. If see "ears", write the word of what had been seen down into notebook, and memory.... This way maybe slow, but if can't comprehand the things around, that's really too bad.. Others, see TVplay, movies, ect.. It's fun. Or see Jananese blog? But I don't learn words in it. One stay at a time, so,nothing but go. No distant targets.

I am playing FFXIV:ARR in Japanese at the moment. The English vocab is quite advanced and while I can't say for sure whether the Japanese version is the same way, I would guess so. However there are common patterns and vocab that come up often which makes it easier to follow the dialogue and text.

I think this is the best way I could ever learn Japanese post-canned material phase. I'm not sure if I'm ready to talk with other Japanese and join a guild but I'm learning so much new stuff by reading and entering the new (common) words I come across to Anki and then reviewing them. Rikaisama has a nice feature that tells you how common a word is so I don't end up adding words that are obscure and that I will see once every 1 million words or something.

The game gets new content every 3 months so I can just keep playing it for years while being in a totally Japanese environment (excluding the katakana-english direct translations that just make my brain hurt). Maybe when I find a good guild I can join them in TeamSpeak or something and train my listening and speaking comprehension too.

How are you using Rikaisama with ARR? There's no way to copy or manipulate any of the dialogue.

ryuudou Wrote:How are you using Rikaisama with ARR? There's no way to copy or manipulate any of the dialogue.

I had some problems with it initially, but the dialogue can be copied to the browser to be parsed with Rikaisama. All I have to do is copy the first text into notepad, then it allows me to copy the text into the browser as well (so you only need to use the notepad for the first copy/paste). All things considered I think it works fantastically and there's just so much good vocab in the game I'll be set for a long time.

You don't mean just random chat box stuff do you? Do you actually mean quest dialogue/story dialogue/NPC dialogue?

I have it set so the quest/NPC dialogue goes to the chat box too, so that I can copy it.

I'm also playing FFXIV:ARR and had a separate chat tab setup for NPC dialogue. I was also copying the text and pasting it to a word document and then looking up the information with an online dictionary, and then manually adding or importing into Anki.

Thank you for recommending Rikaisama! Now I just paste the text into a site with just a blank text box (http://www.blanktextbox.com/) and hover over the target word and press "r" and all the work is done for me! I just need to have Anki opened up to the appropriate deck. It's pretty easy to setup to take the source sentence as well. Thank you :-)

By the way, for those that are playing FFXIV:ARR, how is your comprehension of the content? At this time, I'm only playing when I'm in an "intensive" study mood and actively looking up material, internalizing, and making Anki cards. Otherwise, I'm playing in English because I still really enjoy the game and, well, playing it in Japanese is next to impossible without getting frustrated.

*A personal note on "immersion even when you don't understand it"*
I've played through 4 or 5 Final Fantasy titles with the philosophy of "just do it even if you don't understand" and that has yielded me such minimal return on investment. It was so frustrating to play, and maybe I recognize only a handful of words from those games that I made an educated "guess" as to their meanings. When I say frustrating, I don't mean that it wasn't *fun* at times because those games are fun even if you are just making guesses as to what you have to do but, it was frustrating because I really felt like I was getting hardly anything out of it while making the conscious effort to play it in another language.

I *do* learn words incidentally, but that is usually only when there is human interaction... when I'm talking with native speakers. Maybe it's just me.

Was just curious if others out there are playing the game in a more "extensive reading" type of style... not looking things up. And I was wondering how you were doing if your comprehension is less than 90%? (I guess technically that shouldn't be called "extensive reading" style.) Do you find yourself getting something out of it? 90% seems to be the magic number, but I haven't really reached that with native material outside of graded readers or children's stories. So after many attempts at other titles that were way beyond my level, I've decided not to torture myself anymore and go at my own pace. I try to play in JP from time to time but if there are 5 to 10 words in a paragraph of dialogue that have me baffled, I read it super slow, and I don't have a clear picture of whats going on... it's back to English.

kazuki Wrote:*A personal note on "immersion even when you don't understand it"*
I've played through 4 or 5 Final Fantasy titles with the philosophy of "just do it even if you don't understand" and that has yielded me such minimal return on investment. It was so frustrating to play, and maybe I recognize only a handful of words from those games that I made an educated "guess" as to their meanings. When I say frustrating, I don't mean that it wasn't *fun* at times because those games are fun even if you are just making guesses as to what you have to do but, it was frustrating because I really felt like I was getting hardly anything out of it while making the conscious effort to play it in another language.

For me, I've found that immersion just reinforces what I know, but more importantly shows me what I need to know. I'll see certain grammar patterns and words being used often, and that usually controls what direction I go into next.

Passive immersion is something that you should do when you're done studying or doing active immersion imo because yea, you won't learn much from hearing a bunch of crap you don't understand, but there are benefits.

kazuki Wrote:I *do* learn words incidentally, but that is usually only when there is human interaction... when I'm talking with native speakers. Maybe it's just me.

It's not just you. The brain seems to be remarkably efficient at tuning out things it perceives of as noise.

Living in Japan, watching Japanese TV, and working in a Japanese environment for several years, I can't even guess how many hours' worth of Japanese I've been exposed to. Like a billion hours. Anyway, it's a freaking lot though, I'll tell you. And from that I've learned about, oh, twelve words.

On the other hand, I've found that when you've got somebody in your face, and especially if they're trying to speak clearly, then it's pretty easy to learn new words.

I've seen a few people who were more skilled at learning from immersion (some musicians, some bilingual. I think they're just better at listening.) But those people must be few and far between. Otherwise we'd all be speaking Japanese.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:

kazuki Wrote:I *do* learn words incidentally, but that is usually only when there is human interaction... when I'm talking with native speakers. Maybe it's just me.

It's not just you. The brain seems to be remarkably efficient at tuning out things it perceives of as noise.

Living in Japan, watching Japanese TV, and working in a Japanese environment for several years, I can't even guess how many hours' worth of Japanese I've been exposed to. Like a billion hours. Anyway, it's a freaking lot though, I'll tell you. And from that I've learned about, oh, twelve words.

On the other hand, I've found that when you've got somebody in your face, and especially if they're trying to speak clearly, then it's pretty easy to learn new words.

I've seen a few people who were more skilled at learning from immersion (some musicians, some bilingual. I think they're just better at listening.) But those people must be few and far between. Otherwise we'd all be speaking Japanese.

That's right..Comunication in native Janpanese circumstances, will be really helpful..For keeping states/levels... Games are too fun to enjoy.. But learning words in a random dialogue is not so good to memory/review. Previousely I did in this way, now have already gave up..

kazuki Wrote:By the way, for those that are playing FFXIV:ARR, how is your comprehension of the content? At this time, I'm only playing when I'm in an "intensive" study mood and actively looking up material, internalizing, and making Anki cards. Otherwise, I'm playing in English because I still really enjoy the game and, well, playing it in Japanese is next to impossible without getting frustrated.

*A personal note on "immersion even when you don't understand it"*
I've played through 4 or 5 Final Fantasy titles with the philosophy of "just do it even if you don't understand" and that has yielded me such minimal return on investment. It was so frustrating to play, and maybe I recognize only a handful of words from those games that I made an educated "guess" as to their meanings. When I say frustrating, I don't mean that it wasn't *fun* at times because those games are fun even if you are just making guesses as to what you have to do but, it was frustrating because I really felt like I was getting hardly anything out of it while making the conscious effort to play it in another language.

I *do* learn words incidentally, but that is usually only when there is human interaction... when I'm talking with native speakers. Maybe it's just me.

Was just curious if others out there are playing the game in a more "extensive reading" type of style... not looking things up. And I was wondering how you were doing if your comprehension is less than 90%? (I guess technically that shouldn't be called "extensive reading" style.) Do you find yourself getting something out of it? 90% seems to be the magic number, but I haven't really reached that with native material outside of graded readers or children's stories. So after many attempts at other titles that were way beyond my level, I've decided not to torture myself anymore and go at my own pace. I try to play in JP from time to time but if there are 5 to 10 words in a paragraph of dialogue that have me baffled, I read it super slow, and I don't have a clear picture of whats going on... it's back to English.

I think both have their benefits, and for FF14:ARR the good thing is that you can really go at your own pace if you're doing it the intensive reading way. Personally I do a middle-ground between intensive and extensive. I recently resubbed and, for example, won't spend time looking up every vocab in the help tips that pop up, and sometimes some quests are just too long-winded text wise.

I'm curious how far have you gotten looking up everything?