And things are starting to get really tricky. There are so many similar English words with similar sounding Japanese words that I can't keep track of all the little differences. Those of you who have finished core2k/6k, how did you deal with this? I try my best to remember the Japanese word and when I produce it I realize I got it wrong because I said another Japanese word that pretty much means the same thing.

The words have no feeling and are just random sounds. I may succeed in getting them right a few times but a week or 2 later, I will have gotten it wrong or confused it with another similar word.

This is why I always recommend going recognition first, output later. Core is not very good by default for output precisely because of this issue. When learning the words in JP>EN order you can use similar English translations for many Japanese words, as the little differences don't really matter at this stage.

Yeah, production from English to Japanese is not recommended with core. I'm doing kana to kanji production with it, but I remember a thread where Nukemarine said it's still inferior to close-delete if you really want to get in production.

In general E->J studying is a bad idea in my opinion, though some people think it has merits in the beginning. But at some point you need to switch to J->E. Language's simply don't translate 1-to-1 which is why its better to call 'translating' 'interpreting' because there is more that goes into explaining the meaning of something in one language, in another. Switch to J->E, and eventually J->J when you get better, you'll thank yourself.

Ok so what should I do in this case? I'm learning production with core2k/6k and I'm learning recognition/hearing/etc with the sentence packs and am at almost 2000 words there. The thing is that since I'm learning more than just production with those packs it takes a bit longer to learn new words since there are about 4-5 cards per word.

I'm gonna continue with the packs as planned but in terms of core 2k/6k should I stop it right where I am? Should I do something else with it? What's the best course of action?

Well first of all I don't have the sentence packs like you do. I have 3 different core decks (2K, 6K and 10K obviously) and they're all set the same (with two cards per note), and I use them for both production (kana > kanji)(which I write down) and recognition (kanji > kana).

Now I do think E > J has value, it's really what's get you to start thinking in Japanese imo (you have to switch J vocab around in your head, even if you do it wrong, before you can develop a feel for the language). So my advice would be keep going, but don't be rigid in how you rate your cards, like, pass them even if you give a close but wrong word, and use easy when it's the exact same. Maybe you can keep going until you finish 6k, if that doesn't feel unefficient at some point, and if you don't feel like switching to other types of production. You don't seem to be using the context of your cards, and that's what is done in close delete, so you make less mistakes. There's probably a close-delete core deck somewhere, you might want to try that too.

Could try what I do. I've gone back and forth with the core 2k/6k deck, trying to figure out how best to work through it. Right now I'm about 2000 words in and everything is recognition based except that I pass each card based on how well I can recall the word/kanji. Looks like this:



The audio of the sentence is also on the front, so you know how the missing word sounds and what it means in context a lot of the time. I remember the readings of words pretty well by the time they become mature. If you just think about a particular word or even the image from a certain card(s), most of the time you can recite the sentences they're used in.

Eventually I'll get to these words that I'm having trouble with in my sentence pack and I'll learn recognition and listening. I'm just wondering if I should persist with core2k/6k production and just get it over with. At the rate I'm going, it should take about 4 months.

Why don't you just create a "notes" field that appears next to the word and write i.e. "not [word that you are likely to mix it up with]".
I found myself saying しばしば for しょっちゅう and vice versa, so I wrote "not しょっちゅう" on the card for しばしば and the other way around.
Or I make a small hint, for example "one syllable" or "two syllables".
This was my way around this problem.

I on my hand have difficulties recognizing on-reading words in isolation. I can produce a word like 宝石 or 高度、高等 fine, but hearing them in isolation is no good for me. My head freezes like a block of ice. But I don't think this is a real problem as words are most likely to appear in a context.

Northern_Lord Wrote:Why don't you just create a "notes" field that appears next to the word and write i.e. "not [word that you are likely to mix it up with]".
I found myself saying しばしば for しょっちゅう and vice versa, so I wrote "not しょっちゅう" on the card for しばしば and the other way around.
Or I make a small hint, for example "one syllable" or "two syllables".
This was my way around this problem.

This is exactly what I have done, and it started with disambiguating a lot of the rtk characters with similar keywords. It really sucks when I knew it's X or Y but didn't know which, and could draw both from memory :p

To help retention, prime words (write them out, think about their meaning). To differentiate between similar words, you could add cues (kanji meaning, mnemonic, etc).

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:

Northern_Lord Wrote:[Snip]

This is exactly what I have done, and it started with disambiguating a lot of the rtk characters with similar keywords. It really sucks when I knew it's X or Y but didn't know which, and could draw both from memory :p

That sucks. And it's frustrating when you just blurt out the first word that comes to mind, which turns out to be wrong. And then you can't decide whether or not to fail the card you just did because you have no idea whether or not you could actually had rememered it if you did it slower.

@learningkanji

In my opinion you should continue with production if you think it works for you. I think it has it's benefits.
But if I were you I would do sentence recognition as well.

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:It really sucks when I knew it's X or Y but didn't know which, and could draw both from memory :p

I usually don't even worry about this. If I come up with 2 answers and only one of them is the correct answer, that's huge considering the 1000s of words that I've eliminated. Especially considering that the J and E words aren't exactly equal anyway. Eventually I just end up remembering the correct answer after another month or two and I don't have to do anything special.

EratiK Wrote:Yeah, production from English to Japanese is not recommended with core. I'm doing kana to kanji production with it, but I remember a thread where Nukemarine said it's still inferior to close-delete if you really want to get in production.

^ I agree with this ^