I downloaded the anki software and installed it on my laptop. I then imported the core 2k/6k deck.

I tried going through the cards a few times but I don't think this works for me. I can't learn this way. The words being tested on the cards just don't stick without mnemonics. Plus it's boring as hell.

I think learn vocabulary best by seeing the new words used in a connected reading passage (and using mnemonics).

I did try creating a deck for Old English by importing a text file and making a deck of cards, but when I study the cards it's boring and most don't even stick.

Are other people this way?

(by the way, in the Subject header I had to space out the letters in "anki" or else some autobot wouldn't let me post this).

Many/Some people would argue that Anki isn't used for learning (not that I believe this), it's used for maintaining and reviewing what you have encountered.

Make cards with sentences, not single words.

I think the more recommended core decks come with the words in sentences.
However, Anki, in my opinion, isnt really meant for learning (even though I'm lazy and do it this way anyway). You could try finding these words in passages, but that would take a fair amount of time. The core decks do offer sentences as well as pictures and audio.

For me at least, I think that mnemonics take up too much time for vocabulary so I'm not a fan of it for most words. But my methods of vocabulary acquisition often rely on just memorizing word lists, so while that may work for me it might not for you.

If you download stuff, you might try subs2srs. From what I understand (I've never used it), it can extract from the subtitles text file as well as a picture (or maybe video, I've never tried it). Might be more interesting.

But my point is, find whatever way you like best to LEARN the words (there should be a spreadsheet for all the core words floating around somewhere), and then use Anki to TEST the words. But the learning shouldnt come from Anki, unless you are lazy like me and just learn from Anki anyway. I don't do that many new cards per day at the moment, so I don't care as much if I use Anki for learning, but for a lot of new cards it might get tedious.
For me, the idea behind core is to give you several thousand fairly useful words (even if it might not seem like they are useful at the time), and get you to quickly and efficiently build a solid vocab. base. For example: すっぱい-sour ; I have never needed to use this word yet, but I know that it's a fairly useful one. Only a few words I've seen I wouldn't rate as useful, and even that might change as I learn more Japanese

You can always study old-school style with paper and pencil/pen. I dropped Anki years ago and haven't missed it. I am sure I am not that efficient, but I enjoy studying which is what matters to me.

http://imgur.com/gallery/Xxg2FMY

john555 Wrote:I downloaded the anki software and installed it on my laptop. I then imported the core 2k/6k deck.

I tried going through the cards a few times but I don't think this works for me. I can't learn this way. The words being tested on the cards just don't stick without mnemonics. Plus it's boring as hell.

I think learn vocabulary best by seeing the new words used in a connected reading passage (and using mnemonics).

I did try creating a deck for Old English by importing a text file and making a deck of cards, but when I study the cards it's boring and most don't even stick.

Are other people this way?

(by the way, in the Subject header I had to space out the letters in "anki" or else some autobot wouldn't let me post this).

Anki is as good as you make it to be. I'm not a big fan of the core decks because they are, as you said, very very boring. Their sentences are as generic as generic gets, and frankly not very exciting. But they do have audio included, which is a very definite plus.
That being said, Core xK is still a low priority deck to me. A good backup plan when I feel lazy.

I think anki is best used with decks you make yourself.

My main deck is full of sentences and paragraphs I mined from sources I enjoy (books, movies, mangas, newspapers...), so I'm actually interested in learning what's on them. It's a great complement to actually reading stuff in Japanese. And if a card becomes too much of a bore to review, then I simply delete it. I'm adding about 10 or 15 cards a day, so I'm not running short on fresh material to review anyways, and it keeps the whole process bore-free.

Why don't you try making your own decks, complete with mnemonics, since you seem to learn best with them ?

I can understand why some people don't like SRS however, it can quickly become a very mind-numbing exercise. If you don't like it / don't find it efficient, then don't sweat it and keep doing what works for you.

Like others said youre using anki wrong since you're trying to Learn from it. The stuff youre writing is "no duh youre not supposed to useit liket that." So make your judgement of anki after you use try to use it to maintain knowledge

I think I've seen you being negative about Anki/SRS before, so I imagine that your problem is your preconceptions. Going through some cards 'a few times' isn't going to tell you anything. It's a tool for long term revision.

Maybe it doesn't work for you, but I don't think you've used it enough to be able to come to that conclusion.

I've never really thought of anki as a learning tool, it's more like a tool to remember things. If you write down the new vocab and study the words inside and out and then review them in anki, the whole process will be much more efficient.

Core is not the most enjoyable way to learn basic vocab but it is pretty efficient. To learn 35 new words it takes me roughly an hour and a half. If I tried mining and creating that many cards it would probably take double the amount of time. But hey everyone has different ways of reaching their goals, it's just finding what works for you and keeps you motivated.

Anki is a tool for optimizing the frequency with which individual items in your chosen study material are repeated, for the purpose of helping commit them to long term memory efficiently (with minimal repetition). That is the one and only thing it does, and the one and only thing it is claimed to do.

It does not make that material more exciting, it does not change users' psychology or work ethic to allow them to better tolerate repetition, it does not improve users' memory to be able to memorize difficult materials, it does not improve the quality of your study materials, etc.

As far as your complaints:

1. If you don't want to use repetition, then Anki is not for you. Anki makes studying word or sentence lists less repetitive, not more, but studying word or sentence lists is an inherently repetitive process. Anki is not meant to eliminate repetition.

My guess is, if you're bored studying a word or sentence list with Anki, you'd be even more bored studying it without Anki. It's up to you to choose materials that aren't too easy or too difficult, are formatted in an engaging way, etc. It's also up to you to learn to keep you attention on repetitive tasks (according to psychologists, boredom proneness stems from problems with attention). It's fine to be bored if a task isn't challenging, but when you're bored despite studying challenging material, then that's because you're having trouble staying focused.

2. There's nothing about Anki that prevents you from using mnemonics to remember difficult words. Personally, I would recommend relying mostly on immersion to make words easier to remember (a word you've heard a lot before, even without knowing what it means, is much easier to remember than one you haven't), but you can use mnemonics as well.

I found it impossible to learn new Japanese words using just the Core deck and Anki - they just wouldn't stick. Tai Kim's grammar sentences worked better, but that's because I was more relaxed on the readings.

Better to use the Core sentence deck as an example reference only, e.g. find a word in the real world you want to remember, then un-suspend a sentence containing that word to see it in context.

other than that, don't bother; too boring and grammar's not varied enough.

rokudo Wrote:I've never really thought of anki as a learning tool, it's more like a tool to remember things. If you write down the new vocab and study the words inside and out and then review them in anki, the whole process will be much more efficient.

Core is not the most enjoyable way to learn basic vocab but it is pretty efficient. To learn 35 new words it takes me roughly an hour and a half. If I tried mining and creating that many cards it would probably take double the amount of time. But hey everyone has different ways of reaching their goals, it's just finding what works for you and keeps you motivated.

Mining is effortless to me almost because I can take screenshots and just paste into anki if its a tv show and there's so many ways to look up the words and the context is gold compared to bland textbook sentences. Also I saw the word beig used so i know it's useful and I have a reference to a specific situation it's used in and audio makes anything more memorable.

For tv shows i keep the show playing as I look up stuff and add to my anki because its not that hard to follow as I watch. Enjoyment is key IMO.

john555 Wrote:I think learn vocabulary best by seeing the new words used in a connected reading passage (and using mnemonics).

Why don't you switch to sentence cards? Sounds pretty much like what you say works best for you... And/or you could add the sentence to a vocab card for context(which is how I do).

I know sentence cards are better because context is important.
I like word cards however, because:
1) Some words have only one meaning. Word cards are GREAT for these words. I don't think it applies to most words however. The more meanings, the worse a word card is and the less the better.
2) More words have a meaning that's more common than the other meanings of that word. Word cards are good in this case, but it won't apply all the time.
3) Word cards can help with reading, because reading is rote memorization. 熱血 always equals ねっけつ and it's not variant based on the context for this and additionally most Japanese words. However, like most words, its meaning will change depending on the context.
4) It's much faster to make word cards. Around 4 times faster for me.

My strategy is to put cloze delete sentence cards when a known word comes up that I can't understand; and in every other case word cards. I'm not fluent yet though.

I think I found an approach that works for me.

I make a separate deck for each reading selection of the reader I'm working through.

So tonight, after reviewing Chapter 13 one last time, I uploaded all the new words in Chapter 13 in a separate deck and I went through just that deck a few times.

Then after, I will re-read Chapter 13, then maybe the next day review the Chapter 13 anki deck.

[RawToast]

aphasiac Wrote:other than that, don't bother; too boring and grammar's not varied enough.

Last year I considered switching my Core deck to sentences -- until I actually paid attention to the sentences. There's barely anything above N5 in the grammar.

If you've started out with single item vocab (I still do this for imported words from rikaisama) and want to study sentences then I'd consider doing a decent 'beginner' grammar deck (JtMW, JSPfEC, DoJG) in "recognition" mode and sort the cards using MorphMan.

Quote:4) It's much faster to make word cards. Around 4 times faster for me.

Same reason I stick to them for rikaisama imported words. If you find a word doesn't stick then simply make a few sentence cards to help out.

RawToast Wrote:Last year I considered switching my Core deck to sentences -- until I actually paid attention to the sentences. There's barely anything above N5 in the grammar.

Just to note about the Core deck. The fact that the sentences are base grammar/N5 is completely intentional. The focus of the Core deck is on vocabulary building, so the sentences have the smallest amount of material possible to carry the meaning of the word with some context. Core was never meant to be grammar + vocab.

Any good decks for grammar? I'm doing the Tae Kim deck and it's really good. I'm also about to finish JtMW but there's no way to review anything from there. The sentences in the core decks I'm doing are pretty simple so what's a good way to expose myself to more complex sentences and grammar?

learningkanji Wrote:Any good decks for grammar? I'm doing the Tae Kim deck and it's really good. I'm also about to finish JtMW but there's no way to review anything from there.

If you mean that there's no JtMW deck, actually, there's a very good one. It has the pictures, and the dialogue in text form:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid180277

While the materials themselves (Tae Kim and JtMW) are both excellent quality, and it's hard to recommend one over the other, the JtMW Anki deck is definitely better than the Tae Kim deck, imo. (because of the great context the pictures provide, right there in the deck; with the Tae Kim deck, you tend to forget whatever context was provided in the original material, and there's nothing in the deck to remind you).

Thanks. I'll download and check it out when I get home. Btw is there somewhere I can see what grammar is what level? Maybe a site that has something like N5 grammar: (insert N5 grammar), N4 grammer: (insert N4 grammar) etc.

http://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/skills/grammar/

You have to *learn* the vocab via some other means. (That's my experience and it's what Anki is designed for b/c that's what the theory behind it says.) But once you have done the initial learning, Anki forces you to *recall* the information at calculated intervals so that the information stays in short term memory and eventually migrates to long-term memory. So Anki keeps you from having to *relearn* material. But it doesn't help you learn it in the first place.

vix86 Wrote:Make cards with sentences, not single words.

This.

My deck is a combination of subs2srs imports form my favorite shows, sentences w/ unknown words or vocab (some culled using Rikaisama, some input manually), and corrected sentences from my iTalki sessions. I go through the sentence cards and specifically highlight in bold the component of that sentence that I'm studying. This allows me to rush through it if I know it already, but also gives me the additional context so that I can see how the word is actually used.

Experiment and build your own deck. If it still doesn't work for you, find something that does.

learningkanji Wrote:Thanks. I'll download and check it out when I get home. Btw is there somewhere I can see what grammar is what level? Maybe a site that has something like N5 grammar: (insert N5 grammar), N4 grammer: (insert N4 grammar) etc.

The Kanzen Master grammar books (or any similar JLPT prep book) will give you this.

Using Anki to study vocab you're seeing for the first time can be a struggle (at least for me). So I do try to avoid it as much as possible, by looking for materials that are of a more moderate difficulty for my Anki deck: stuff I've seen before, but couldn't actually understand by hearing or reading it.

But unknown words do sneak in (especially since I always study sentences, not single words), and if you struggle through them by failing them a few times, you do eventually learn them. So I wouldn't say it's impossible to learn new words with Anki, just that it should be avoided to the extent less tedious methods are available for an initial encounter with new words.

Some such methods: watching stuff with English subs first, then without a few times (I used to also just rip the audio and listen to it repeatedly), reading manga while using a translated version as a reading aid, going through song lyrics, reading stuff online with Rikaisama, going through various other types of study materials/resources online or in textbooks. After that initial encounter with the words in those materials, Anki becomes a very effective tool for studying them further.