I started iknow a little over 20 days ago(i'm about three-quarters of the way through core1000) and I find it a bit annoying that I seem to almost always forget the vocabulary by the time the first review comes along. Is this normal? I usually don't have any issues after encountering it a few times and this is just a minor inconvience, so if anything i'd like to know if anybody has had the same problem.

I thought about entering everything into Anki, but the whole reason i'm using iknow to begin with is to save myself the time of doing that. Perhaps I should be hitting the review button on each word during production at least once to compensate for my shitty memory?

If the reason you are doing iknow is to save time from entering the items into anki, well, there are the pre-made decks where it's already entered in, and it's free :p

The reason I use iknow is that I find I learn the vocab better on that platform than just trying to remember it and then use anki, since iknow tests you in different ways.

I have had some of the same issues sometimes with vocab at first, often times in the iknow program, I will preview the new items first so that I can look up any context etc. kind of get to know what I'm up against, and then start the session.

I've found this has increased my retention at first a bit, but some are still far easier to remember than others, and the exposure in different ways that I keep getting from iknow's testing tends to help reinforce the more difficult ones over time, even if it's a little frustrating initially.

I've just learned to trust the system.

Anecdotally, as I finish steps in iknow, I unsuspend the corresponding entries in my anki core deck.

Dmitrei Wrote:I started iknow a little over 20 days ago(i'm about three-quarters of the way through core1000) and I find it a bit annoying that I seem to almost always forget the vocabulary by the time the first review comes along. Is this normal? I usually don't have any issues after encountering it a few times and this is just a minor inconvience, so if anything i'd like to know if anybody has had the same problem.

Yes it's supposed to happen for a decent number of your reviews. SRS operates on the assumption that it's bringing the word right around when you 'ought' to be forgetting it so you shouldn't be troubled if you in fact do forget. It'll stick eventually - as you've found.

I use Anki, so I don't really know the differences between it and iknow (if any), but I've had words that just get failed again and again, and then one day (or time) it just magically sticks in there. On Anki at least you can suspend those that you keep failing and review them when you want. But in the end the words will generally stick

As a side note, I actually review vocabulary I learn in my classes differently than how I do it in Anki. The textbook we use in class has a big list of the chapter's vocabulary, and before vocab quizzes I just look/repeat the words in the list over and over until they stick. It feels a bit inefficient, but I also can recall almost all of the words on the quiz fairly easily (although maintaining this list of words is a different issue). I'm curious, how much do you study the words before your program shows them to you?

Can I ask what do you find more difficult to stick? Reading or meaning of the vocab? (Sorry for the lame question but I'm about to start core so every info is useful for me )

mc962 Wrote:I use Anki, so I don't really know the differences between it and iknow (if any), but I've had words that just get failed again and again, and then one day (or time) it just magically sticks in there. On Anki at least you can suspend those that you keep failing and review them when you want. But in the end the words will generally stick

As a side note, I actually review vocabulary I learn in my classes differently than how I do it in Anki. The textbook we use in class has a big list of the chapter's vocabulary, and before vocab quizzes I just look/repeat the words in the list over and over until they stick. It feels a bit inefficient, but I also can recall almost all of the words on the quiz fairly easily (although maintaining this list of words is a different issue). I'm curious, how much do you study the words before your program shows them to you?

I've had that a lot too! Believe it or not there are some that I still fail when I do Kanji--> Reading and Meaning but I can be sitting there one night and the reading and meaning that I couldn't get pops up.

For some reason I had major problems with 厳しい, honestly I didn't even know what it meant until one night I couldn't sleep and the kanji and it's reading flashed into my head.One day they will stick and once the patterns of the readings for individual kanji stick, you'll fly.

cophnia61 Wrote:Can I ask what do you find more difficult to stick? Reading or meaning of the vocab? (Sorry for the lame question but I'm about to start core so every info is useful for me )

Personally I find the readings more difficult.

That being said, how it's testing you can make a huge difference, I find it a lot easier to go kanji to reading, than to go reading to kanji or meaning at first.

Misau Wrote:

mc962 Wrote:I use Anki, so I don't really know the differences between it and iknow (if any), but I've had words that just get failed again and again, and then one day (or time) it just magically sticks in there. On Anki at least you can suspend those that you keep failing and review them when you want. But in the end the words will generally stick

As a side note, I actually review vocabulary I learn in my classes differently than how I do it in Anki. The textbook we use in class has a big list of the chapter's vocabulary, and before vocab quizzes I just look/repeat the words in the list over and over until they stick. It feels a bit inefficient, but I also can recall almost all of the words on the quiz fairly easily (although maintaining this list of words is a different issue). I'm curious, how much do you study the words before your program shows them to you?

I've had that a lot too! Believe it or not there are some that I still fail when I do Kanji--> Reading and Meaning but I can be sitting there one night and the reading and meaning that I couldn't get pops up.

For some reason I had major problems with 厳しい, honestly I didn't even know what it meant until one night I couldn't sleep and the kanji and it's reading flashed into my head.One day they will stick and once the patterns of the readings for individual kanji stick, you'll fly.

I've paid less attention to the kanji (I probably shouldn't do that, but oh well, it will probably bite me later), and focused more on getting the meaning of the vocab. I generally have a good idea of what the kanji is or actually know what it is as I have gone through most of Heisig, but I don't care as much about understanding the kanji. Also my card gives me the english vocab word first, which I then recite in japanese (hopefully correctly). I also glance at the kanji and if I recognize it/it helps my understanding then I use that to help me. But I'll probably go back later and make a separate deck for words where I both know the individual kanji and know the vocabulary, but haven't connectd the two.

mc962 Wrote:Also my card gives me the english vocab word first, which I then recite in japanese (hopefully correctly).

Does this work well for you? I would think that you would run into a lot of situations where you are correct - but not the right correct for that card due to the vagaries of English-Japanese conversion. The one I always think of is 'management' where you've got 取り締り,取り扱い,制御,主管,管理,運営 (heck, マネージメント) that all mean, among other things, something that is covered by the english word 'management.' Worst, they aren't interchangeable!

With disambiguations I guess it wouldn't be that bad (management of a business as the Front would remove a lot of the possibilities) but I still think it would confuse me a lot more than the J-E cards I've been doing. What's been your experience, and have you tried it the other way?

edit:

cophnia61 Wrote:Can I ask what do you find more difficult to stick? Reading or meaning of the vocab? (Sorry for the lame question but I'm about to start core so every info is useful for me )

Looking at my most failed cards, my main thing usually is just mixing something up for a totally different word. Until I sat down and looked at them side by side, I kept reading 濡れる as 漏れる. So the reading has stuck somewhere and I know what that reading denotes, but the kanji trips me up sometimes and after that all bets are off.

There is a really interesting page on the SuperMemo wiki explaining how your overall retention amount will significantly drop if you don't let words be suspended when they are too hard (i.e. if you don't suspend leeches).

This is completely from memory, but I think the statistic was that if you suspend the hardest 10% of your material, your studying efficiency will shoot up 300%.

So lets say in 1 year you can normally memorize 3000 cards without suspending any. If you were to take out the hardest 10% (i.e. the 10% that you would fail the most), you would be able to do 9000 cards in 1 year.

I feel like this is quite a remarkable statistic.

Unfortunately I can't find the link right now, so if anyone knows the page I'm talking about...


edit: This relates to the oft-quoted ajatt advice to actively delete cards that you see too often.

Sauzer Wrote:

mc962 Wrote:Also my card gives me the english vocab word first, which I then recite in japanese (hopefully correctly).

Does this work well for you? I would think that you would run into a lot of situations where you are correct - but not the right correct for that card due to the vagaries of English-Japanese conversion. The one I always think of is 'management' where you've got 取り締り,取り扱い,制御,主管,管理,運営 (heck, マネージメント) that all mean, among other things, something that is covered by the english word 'management.' Worst, they aren't interchangeable!

With disambiguations I guess it wouldn't be that bad (management of a business as the Front would remove a lot of the possibilities) but I still think it would confuse me a lot more than the J-E cards I've been doing. What's been your experience, and have you tried it the other way?

I'm a bit more lenient with some of the ambiguous cards after a little while. The first few times I try to be strict, but when you have words like しんせつ(な）and やさしい which in my head feel like fairly similar words, after a while I can be a bit more lenient assuming I had the right idea. I also knew these words before I downloaded this deck, so I KNOW that I know these words, I just thought of a different one than they did. Because of that I don't feel bad passing them. Every now and then I might stick it in the hard or failed pile just to get it to pop up again sooner, but overall, as long as I feel like I KNOW the words, then that is more important to me.

*It also makes me a little happy that I actually know enough words to have this issue

**I do, however, fail ones that arent really interchangeable. But at the moment I think I've had less of these

I find when I do iKnow, the short term retention is worse than Anki. I'm constantly forgetting things early on. However I find that the long term retention is better.

If you start a new course, I suggest doing it in 10 item batches for the first learning sessions (where you have all or mostly new items) and until you're reviews are coming in in lower chunk numbers around the 20 reviews for the course mark. At that point, I find I can do 20 item batches in the course and have good retention.

Thanks for the replies.

I decided that my preferred mode of action is to just type out each day's vocab into notepad as I do production, review them the next morning(definition->vocab), then subsequently erase them. I'm not sure how this will effect the spaced repetition system iKnow employs, but I don't see how it could make it any harder for me.

The reason why I didn't use the smart.fm decks is because I got some coupons for iKnow from reddit and decided I may as well give it a shot. I don't regret it, I just wish there was a little more customization as far as item spacing is concerned.