kameden Wrote:

Aikynaro Wrote:Anyway, looking up most things you come across in a dictionary is a waste of time, which I think you've discovered. Even if you look up every word, they don't stick, so you might as well just keep reading. Words will stick if they're important or interesting or just the author's favourite word or just because - and the more you read (and less time spent in a dictionary) the more of those words you'll hit upon.

What about the idea of just adding the words you look up to an Anki deck so you do remember them. Then you just invest an hour or two a day and not have to keep relearning the word over and over again. Wouldn't this be more efficient in the long run?

I'm not really sure what the point of adding words from books that you're reading is. I mean, I guess it's as good a source of words as any other, but unless you're working on some specific topic or plan on reading a long series based around the same stuff you might as well Anki anything else because it has probably the same chance of showing up as whatever vocabulary you pull from the book.

Keeping reading and studying separate is important to me, because reading is fun and studying is not and if I mix the two than I won't want to read. I have other stuff I can Anki.

and if I looked something up, it's because I already know the word and just want its official meaning. Ankiing those words would be redundant.

Aikynaro Wrote:

kameden Wrote:

Aikynaro Wrote:Anyway, looking up most things you come across in a dictionary is a waste of time, which I think you've discovered. Even if you look up every word, they don't stick, so you might as well just keep reading. Words will stick if they're important or interesting or just the author's favourite word or just because - and the more you read (and less time spent in a dictionary) the more of those words you'll hit upon.

What about the idea of just adding the words you look up to an Anki deck so you do remember them. Then you just invest an hour or two a day and not have to keep relearning the word over and over again. Wouldn't this be more efficient in the long run?

I'm not really sure what the point of adding words from books that you're reading is. I mean, I guess it's as good a source of words as any other, but unless you're working on some specific topic or plan on reading a long series based around the same stuff you might as well Anki anything else because it has probably the same chance of showing up as whatever vocabulary you pull from the book.

Keeping reading and studying separate is important to me, because reading is fun and studying is not and if I mix the two than I won't want to read. I have other stuff I can Anki.

and if I looked something up, it's because I already know the word and just want its official meaning. Ankiing those words would be redundant.

Are you we talking about 2 different things as in you're going for 70% comprehension and picking up whatever nouns/adjectives/verbs that show up a lot in the book to get a gist while I'm talking about almost 100% comprehension of the book by looking up stuff. You said the chances the vocab showing up in another source besides books doesn't really hold true because the words aren't that common but that doesn't automatically render them useless. Nowadays when I look up words from reading a book if I didn't look up anything it would be 90% and I'm sure most of the words that I look up wont have a huge impact on my understanding of the story but I like to get something out of reading so I look up and add the words I don't know. Well I guess you could say I'm at a level where the words I learn aren't common so it's gonna be difficult to encounter it that many times compared more common words but they're still useful words and necessary for fluency...

I agree with not adding common japanese to anki... It's just gonna show up again anywhere and everywhere
I never look up while I read so studying doesnt interfere with my reading.. I do it afterwards

Aikynaro Wrote:I'm not really sure what the point of adding words from books that you're reading is. I mean, I guess it's as good a source of words as any other, but unless you're working on some specific topic or plan on reading a long series based around the same stuff you might as well Anki anything else because it has probably the same chance of showing up as whatever vocabulary you pull from the book.

The exact opposite of this is true. Even if you never repeat the same author and only read short things that aren't worth anki-ing for their own sake, if you keep adding vocab from sources that interest you you'll still be building a lexicon relevant to your specific interests.

That doesn't mean it's worth spoiling something you enjoy doing in Japanese though, so I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong.

kameden Wrote:

Aikynaro Wrote:Anyway, looking up most things you come across in a dictionary is a waste of time, which I think you've discovered. Even if you look up every word, they don't stick, so you might as well just keep reading. Words will stick if they're important or interesting or just the author's favourite word or just because - and the more you read (and less time spent in a dictionary) the more of those words you'll hit upon.

What about the idea of just adding the words you look up to an Anki deck so you do remember them. Then you just invest an hour or two a day and not have to keep relearning the word over and over again. Wouldn't this be more efficient in the long run?

That's more or less what some have suggested. Instead of just saying that you need 40k words, you just learn the ones that actually show up in what you are doing. But unless it's key to understanding the sentence/paragraph/story you are reading I would just keep Sticky-Notes handy and just throw one in every time you see an unfamiliar word (maybe write the word on there or underline it in the page so you don't forget what you found). Then after you finish reading for the day, dump it all into Anki at once

It's hard to say where the percents are, but I'd say I'm aiming for 90%+ comprehension (well, aiming is the wrong word - I only keep reading a book if I can understand it decently).
My point isn't so much that the chances of a word showing up in another source are good, but that learning the word in the book and learning some other word are of equal value so there's no particular need to take it from a book rather than from, say, a shared vocabulary deck or subs2srs or whatever. I guess if your vocabulary is very strong and you've exhausted those sources it might be different.

Anyway, I have no problem with the way you do things - it sounds reasonable. My purpose is to encourage people to read stuff at their reading level rather than thwacking through things with dictionaries. I'm not sure if that's what OP is doing, but it's a pretty common bit of masochism that language learners seem to get into and most of the time it's a waste of time. Of course if you pair it with Anki you get something out of it, but reading as a source for finding words to Anki isn't why people go around advocating reading.

There seems to be a lot of people advocating things like sticky notes, taking pictures, etc. Is it because you guys read from physical books? Is that why you advice against looking things up in a dictionary? I read digitally, so it only takes a couple seconds with rikai / kanjitomo. I don't own a single Japanese book, and I don't really ever plan too. They are too inconvenient.

Aikynaro Wrote:It's hard to say where the percents are, but I'd say I'm aiming for 90%+ comprehension (well, aiming is the wrong word - I only keep reading a book if I can understand it decently).
My point isn't so much that the chances of a word showing up in another source are good, but that learning the word in the book and learning some other word are of equal value so there's no particular need to take it from a book rather than from, say, a shared vocabulary deck or subs2srs or whatever. I guess if your vocabulary is very strong and you've exhausted those sources it might be different.

Anyway, I have no problem with the way you do things - it sounds reasonable. My purpose is to encourage people to read stuff at their reading level rather than thwacking through things with dictionaries. I'm not sure if that's what OP is doing, but it's a pretty common bit of masochism that language learners seem to get into and most of the time it's a waste of time. Of course if you pair it with Anki you get something out of it, but reading as a source for finding words to Anki isn't why people go around advocating reading.

I don't read things that are way outside of my level, I generally try to read things that I have about 90% comprehension with. That sounds nice in theory, but 90% just means not knowing every 20th word. 90% comprehension is not my goal, my goal is 99%+ (not knowing less than 1 word per 100).

That isn't the point of this thread through, the point was that reading doesn't seem to get me closer to that point (at least not very quickly) compared to Anki.

kameden Wrote:There seems to be a lot of people advocating things like sticky notes, taking pictures, etc. Is it because you guys read from physical books? Is that why you advice against looking things up in a dictionary? I read digitally, so it only takes a couple seconds with rikai / kanjitomo. I don't own a single Japanese book, and I don't really ever plan too. They are too inconvenient.

Aikynaro Wrote:It's hard to say where the percents are, but I'd say I'm aiming for 90%+ comprehension (well, aiming is the wrong word - I only keep reading a book if I can understand it decently).
My point isn't so much that the chances of a word showing up in another source are good, but that learning the word in the book and learning some other word are of equal value so there's no particular need to take it from a book rather than from, say, a shared vocabulary deck or subs2srs or whatever. I guess if your vocabulary is very strong and you've exhausted those sources it might be different.

Anyway, I have no problem with the way you do things - it sounds reasonable. My purpose is to encourage people to read stuff at their reading level rather than thwacking through things with dictionaries. I'm not sure if that's what OP is doing, but it's a pretty common bit of masochism that language learners seem to get into and most of the time it's a waste of time. Of course if you pair it with Anki you get something out of it, but reading as a source for finding words to Anki isn't why people go around advocating reading.

I don't read things that are way outside of my level, I generally try to read things that I have about 90% comprehension with. That sounds nice in theory, but 90% just means not knowing every 20th word. 90% comprehension is not my goal, my goal is 99%+ (not knowing less than 1 word per 100).

That isn't the point of this thread through, the point was that reading doesn't seem to get me closer to that point (at least not very quickly) compared to Anki.

Yes for me. I look up stuff right away if I'm on a comp. Im on the other spectrum and I can't imagine you'd never want a physical book. My eyes tire easily. Definitely check if there's a bookoff near you though never mind since you're into anki with all that efficiency talk

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Yes for me. I look up stuff right away if I'm on a comp. Im on the other spectrum and I can't imagine you'd never want a physical book. My eyes tire easily. Definitely check if there's a bookoff near you though never mind since you're into anki with all that efficiency talk

It's not just that, I get a headache reading from a book. Plus I have no money and only leave my house a few times per year so even obtaining a book to begin with would be an ordeal.

kameden Wrote:Today I've been reading One Piece, and I probably use the dictionary 10 times per chapter. What are you reading that you never have to use the dictionary?

For curiosity I just went and read some random chapter (685 to be exact) of One Piece as iirc it should be quite easy for me. Sure enough on the first page there was a word I didn't know - よだれ, in the sentence "よだれを止めろ！". What could it possibly mean? Look no further than that head shot of Luffy drooling.

In then end something like 5-6 new words which I just completely skipped over. None of them really impeded my understanding of the rest of the sentences without them. I would say just lose the dictionary lookup at least on these easy stuff and you know read much much faster to increase reading volume.

In reading volume matters. Join the tadoku contest and read as much as possible!

I find One piece and other shonen manga much harder to read than seinen... waaay too much teenage slang, colloquialisms and made-up vocabulary to be a comfortable read for beginner IMHO.

Seinen tend to use a much more common vocabulary, and the lack of furigana is hardly a problem if you have a decent kanji knowledge. Not to mention that the stories are usually more interesting. The learning curve might be a bit steeper at first, but it's not so bad really.

I read from physical books. I kind-of doubt that any of the books I've read have even been digitised - reading only what's available in digital format seems awfully limiting.

Quote:I don't read things that are way outside of my level, I generally try to read things that I have about 90% comprehension with. That sounds nice in theory, but 90% just means not knowing every 20th word. 90% comprehension is not my goal, my goal is 99%+ (not knowing less than 1 word per 100).

After a certain point though you can fill in the gaps. If you know 90% of the words before you start, you can probably fill in the meanings of at least 5% of the rest from context - which is where the learning happens.
Although yeah - 90% isn't really enough to be comfortable. I've heard that 98% is where learning from context pays off properly.

Quote:That isn't the point of this thread through, the point was that reading doesn't seem to get me closer to that point (at least not very quickly) compared to Anki.

Okay, well, fair enough. I don't think anyone on this forum denies that Anki is an efficient way of learning words.

However, reading does work.

And actually ... why are you so sure that it isn't working? How are you testing yourself? You say that reading isn't helping with your vocabulary but I'm not sure why you think it isn't.

I find it odd that everyone seems to think it has to be one or the other - reading or vocab acquisition. I suspect that a blend of might be optimal.

ご無沙汰しております.
It's been a while. I've been in tokyo for the last month. Things have changed, I'll try to keep this short.

I came back from a short trip to Beijing recently and it was pretty rough, but eye-opening, and I think this is the place to write about it because I have been thinking about the topic of this thread for about a year now.
After passing JLPT1 last winter I've been reading novels and studying vocab like a good boy... but after core10k the rate at which you see those newly studied words popping up again dramatically drops. Now I'm just studying random infrequently used words.

I have decided to stop actively studying Japanese for 2 reasons. (will continue reviewing my anki cards just not add any longer)

1. I am at a point now where I can read contemporary japanese at the highest difficulty, with the help of a dictionary (+_2/pg), context, and critical thinking. I also have many japanese friends and a gf, with whom I am in contact constantly.
It has become apparent to me that reading books and talking to people are infinitely more effective for this last stage of the game than active study. In the energy it takes to study 1 random new word, I could have a shallow comprehension of 10 more useful words, plus a greater overall language knowledge. The latter becomes increasingly important as you try to weave a long story together and the sentences need to flow... active study gives zero assistance to flow (fluency in the literal sense).

Also active study is a lot of work, and ought be used as efficiently as possible. One thing it is very effective at is memorizing the building blocks of a language, and core vocabulary, which leads me to...

2. I am beginning chinese.

It is the bloody wild west over there and, especially for someone working in the arts, a damned interesting place. Not sure I would ever want to live there permanently (the internet situation is actually my biggest gripe... almost no US or JP websites are viewable) but spending months there at a time would be possible.

The beginning will be a lot of basic anki memorization, during which I will still be only reading japanese. But after doing Simplified RtH and some vocab and sentences, I look forward to spending a summer in Shanghai maybe, and seeing what trouble I can get into.

The Japanese have a crush on americans, especially tall white men... but it seems like that affinity might be even stronger with the Chinese. Just a hunch.

Anyway I have returned from Beijing to Tokyo and walking around I am able to communicate with immigration officers and ask inventory questions in the supermarket and overall talk to people effortlessly. It's not always perfect, but it is effortless.
The energy required to get from here to the point where the language is totally transparent will be huge. And take a lot of time. And the payoff is good but not amazing.
Using that energy to get to a point in Chinese equivalent to where I am now would have exponentially large rewards.

Of course it's not the rewards that get you there, but the interest. Having come back totally overstimulated, I feel now that I have the interest.

This is my answer and not for everyone, but if you are wondering how to proceed now, which is the topic of this thread, maybe try going on a trip to China?

yeah, but to do that you first have to be white and tall american or otherwise you won't feel like special snowflake in japan and china. too bad

For what it's worth, I've been tracking stats of my dictionary usage and here's some chart porn. The numbers themselves are not very important but the trend lines are interesting. It may be difficult to understand what's going on here but I'll try to explain.

The bottom numbers are how many words I have added to my vocab list. I try to add every new word I encounter to my vocab list. When the word is new I mark it blue. When I look up a word in the dictionary and it's already marked blue, that means I hit it a second time, so I mark it pink, etc. Thus:

Blue: new words looked up for the first time in the dictionary.
Pink: words encountered for the 2nd time.
Yellow: words encountered for the 3rd time.
Green: words encountered for the 4th time or more.

The percentages on the left side of the chart represent how much work I do for each dictionary lookup for each category. So, in the beginning of the chart you can see that about 55% of my dictionary lookups resulted in adding new words (blue). And only about 10% of the lookups were green words.

I started charting when my vocab list already had 5351 words, otherwise the left side of the chart would have new words starting at 100% and the rest at 0% since all lookups were initially new words. When I started coloring my dictionary lookups I already knew maybe about 8k words (just a wild guess). So the current number of 19279 words is not that interesting as it doesn't really represent my entire vocab experience from the beginning.

The trend lines, on the other hand, are interesting because they show how my experience with dictionary lookups is changing over time. I'm currently at a point where brand new words are getting down to about 25% of my dictionary lookups, the rest are words I've already encountered. Obviously, over time I do less dictionary lookups and this chart won't tell you how that's been changing. This shows specifically the proportion of new vs already encountered words and how that's been changing over time. What will it look like after a while, I wonder? I suppose the new words are soon going to constitute the smallest part of my lookups, if the blue trend line is any indication.

Very interesting Shinsen. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing shinsen. I'd say your data is mildly encouraging as the blue line slowly decreases. So maybe there is something vaguely resembling an end after all!

May I ask how you've kept track of your lookups? I'd be interested in keeping track of my lookups in order to determine which words are worth memorizing. Upon first encounter it's usually hard to tell if the word is worth memorizing. Keeping track of the lookups and then learning it upon 2nd/3rd encounter seems like a suitable strategy.

hyvel Wrote:I'd say your data is mildly encouraging as the blue line slowly decreases. So maybe there is something vaguely resembling an end after all!

Yep, that's why I've been doing it. It helps me visualize the process in a way that's encouraging psychologically. Sometimes it feels like Japanese is bottomless and never runs out of new words but this helps me see that that changes are happening as I continue.

hyvel Wrote:May I ask how you've kept track of your lookups?

To track my stats I've been using Wakan (the newer version that is being developed at https://code.google.com/p/wakan/ ).

With Wakan you can track clipboard, add words to custom vocab lists, mark words with colors, keep custom categories of vocab, export to CSV format, etc. So, for example, you can generate a list of words that you've looked up a certain number of times and import it into Anki.

To enable stat tracking, in the program menu go to Database - Settings - General and tick the box "Save statistics to disk". The stats will be saved to a file each time you click Database - Statistics in the menu.

So, couple of things, (all of this is based on citable research in language acquisition)

First off, fluency is a matter of being able to use what you know *at high speed*. You can have a small vocabulary but be fluent in it. And you can have a large vocabulary with no fluency. It generally takes special practice and is normally about 25% of a language course. To improve fluency you use very simple language material that you have almost perfect knowledge of and try to get faster. For reading, a reasonable goal is about 250 words per minute. If you aren't reading at above 200 words per minute, reading gets harder because you can't hold the sentences and clauses in your head as efficiently and you can't infer meaning from context as well.

Second, in order to read smoothly and effectively learn from context, you need 98% vocabulary coverage (1 unknown word in 50). So building your vocabulary to that point is what your goal should be.

The issue is that as discussed over here, the Core 10k word list isn't all that well designed and could be significantly improved upon. One thing you could try would be getting the 15k CorePLUS Anki deck, sorting by frequency, and then learning the vocab that are below some cut-off. This would patch any holes in your knowledge and might help things. OTOH, going by lemmas (which is what the word-frequency lists we have use) you need around 55k lemmas to read smoothly. Pessimistically assuming a word distribution from English, 40% of the lemmas are eliminated when you count by word families. So that would imply ~33k families. But a good portion of those are going to be proper nouns, transparent compounds, etc. So an efficient vocab list could probably get you to 98% coverage with 15k-20k families on the high end. But we don't have such a vocab list ready to use. What we have instead is the lemmas...

What exactly is a lemma?

I agree thought that it would be nice if we had an edited vocabulary list beyond 6k. The core lists beyond that are junk, filled with names and obscure words and kanji.

A lemma is the form of a word, which you will find in the dictionary. So you will find "house" in the dictionary and not "houses" and "find" instead of "found".

I'm not sure if it will be really worth it to get some sort of optimal word list. Suppose the list is of around 6k-10k words. It will be still be extremely insufficent for reading anything without frequent look ups. I think after doing something like Core 6k-10k you should read the genre you are most interested in and add words from there. The fact that there are some some called "rare" words in the Core series doesn't mean much in the long run. I went through Core 10k and just finished going through around 10k additional words read from light novels. I have about 20k words now gone through (I have about 21k in my decks) With 20k words under my belt the last few books I have read have average about a little under a new word per light novel page. I think the last 260 page light novel I read, I added about 200 words or so. I'm aiming to get to around 30k words or so and hopefully I'll encounter a new word every 2 or 3 pages or less.

PotbellyPig Wrote:I'm not sure if it will be really worth it to get some sort of optimal word list. Suppose the list is of around 6k-10k words. It will be still be extremely insufficent for reading anything without frequent look ups. I think after doing something like Core 6k-10k you should read the genre you are most interested in and add words from there. The fact that there are some some called "rare" words in the Core series doesn't mean much in the long run. I went through Core 10k and just finished going through around 10k additional words read from light novels. I have about 20k words now gone through (I have about 21k in my decks) With 20k words under my belt the last few books I have read have average about a little under a new word per light novel page. I think the last 260 page light novel I read, I added about 200 words or so. I'm aiming to get to around 30k words or so and hopefully I'll encounter a new word every 2 or 3 pages or less.

I was talking more about the 25k rather then the 10k. 6-10k isn't too bad, but it's still worse than the original 6k. 10-25k is just bad though, you can tell it's just generated from some list without any sort of editing at all.

I agree that 10k words isn't all that much. I wanted some sort of edited list of 30-40k words, not just 10k. You say you only got 200 words from an entire light novel, but how long did it take you to read it? If you were going from a word list you have the option of padding your reading words if you don't feel like you've gotten enough for the day. That will ultimately help you out in future reading.

kameden Wrote:You say you only got 200 words from an entire light novel, but how long did it take you to read it? If you were going from a word list you have the option of padding your reading words if you don't feel like you've gotten enough for the day. That will ultimately help you out in future reading.

I do anki at 33 new words per day. I was so backlogged until recently that I never even had to think about adding words outside of the ones I found in the books. I think when I started reading light novels at around the end of Core 10k, I easily added 800+ words per light novel. Before I knew it, I had like 5000 words after a couple of novels. I'm just now catching up in anki. I think I'm at around 20,200 words out of about 21,000. So yes, I guess you are right that as the new words slow down, I may not have enough words to make up the 33 per day unless I use one of those 25k lists you mentioned to add some more. Or else, I could just read some random things like Amazon reviews with rikaisama and try to pad it some more. I guess I'll think about it when it happens. But you don't really have to think too much about it right when you finish one of the 6k or 10k lists since you'll have plenty of new words in the beginning to study from.

PotbellyPig Wrote:

kameden Wrote:You say you only got 200 words from an entire light novel, but how long did it take you to read it? If you were going from a word list you have the option of padding your reading words if you don't feel like you've gotten enough for the day. That will ultimately help you out in future reading.

I do anki at 33 new words per day. I was so backlogged until recently that I never even had to think about adding words outside of the ones I found in the books. I think when I started reading light novels at around the end of Core 10k, I easily added 800+ words per light novel. Before I knew it, I had like 5000 words after a couple of novels. I'm just now catching up in anki. I think I'm at around 20,200 words out of about 21,000. So yes, I guess you are right that as the new words slow down, I may not have enough words to make up the 33 per day unless I use one of those 25k lists you mentioned to add some more. Or else, I could just read some random things like Amazon reviews with rikaisama and try to pad it some more. I guess I'll think about it when it happens. But you don't really have to think too much about it right when you finish one of the 6k or 10k lists since you'll have plenty of new words in the beginning to study from.

Why do you wait to add words? Why not just add everything you got from reading as soon as you get it?