JimmySeal Wrote:

TsugiAshi Wrote:Waffles fish train station.

I'll leave it to others to fill in the grammar points and context.

Sorry, what point are you trying to make with this? Having three random nouns is very different from knowing all or most of the words in a sentence, but not the grammar.

There wasn't any real point to it other than just being goofy.

I know there's a difference between one and the other, but at the same time if someone knows all or most words in a sentence, then it stands to reason that they might have come across some basic grammar along the way while learning those 10,000-20,000 words.

I'd also say that it depends on the level of conversation, too, in regards to whether someone could truly follow what was being said if all they knew were 75% of the vocabulary, but 0-1.3% of the grammar.

It'd be like removing the "is", "who," "of," "from," "with," the question mark, and a whole slew of other English grammar points from a conversation, and all your left with is a series of mostly out of place words.

Basically though, the three words I posted earlier would come out as "There are waffles and fish in the train station." It adds a lot more context after the grammar, too.

I don't think this will work b/c of how vocabulary learning works. Anki works by forcing you to recall information from your short term memory often enough that it migrates into your long term memory. But while you are learning the vocab, it has to take up space in your short term memory. (In order to learn it, you have to be able to recall it). And there's a limited amount of space available, so trying to cram more than you can hold is just going to be self defeating. People vary, but a good rule of thumb is that you should shoot for a 90% successful recall rate on your reviews. If you are more successful than this, you can handle learning more words. If you are less successful, you should learn fewer words at a time because you aren't keeping them in short-term memory and are thus wasting effort.

Furthermore, learning large numbers of words at once increases the odds of semantic interference (e.g. trying to learn several colors at once, or opposites like "long" and "short", or related words like "long" and "tall", etc.) Having semantic interference in the learning set halves the amount of vocabulary you can learn.

The way around these limits is to learn different kinds of things. E.g. if you do some RTK, some vocab, and some grammar, you should be able to do more total cards per day than if you did all of one thing. Similarly, recognition generally comes before production, but they are separate skills. So if you start with recognition cards and then unsuspend the production ones as the recognition ones mature, you should be able to cover more ground than just starting with production or by doing them in a sequence.

Finally, the general recommendation in the language learning research is that you should spend about 25% of your time on language-directed study like grammar and vocabulary, 25% of your time on meaning-focused input, 25% on meaning-focused output, and 25% on fluency building. For the input and output strands, you need to know at least 95% and ideally 98% of the words involved. For the fluency part, you need to understand 100% of the words and focus simply on increasing the speed with which you can use them. (Graded readers are good for this. Too bad there are so few available.)

Please post you're Anki graph daily until you give up because I think this is an interesting experiment and I would like to see the results daily.

yudantaiteki Wrote:This is not true. Without the grammar knowledge, all you can do is string together the vocabulary in some way you hope fits the context. But it's amazing how wrong you can be and still think you understand the sentence because you're vaguely following the story. I've seen countless fansubs and manga scanlations where people clearly had no idea what the grammar was doing and were just creating a sentence with all the vocab.

Could you give an example?

markcat Wrote:I guess 500 new words per day wouldn't work, for the main reason that I will burn myself out. That's why I decided to change it to a 100 words per day. 100 words per day is more doable, more possible, and by the end of the week I would have learned 700 words.

You won't know 700 words. One week of SRS-ing 700 words is only a tiny fraction of the work required to learning them.

You'll keep failing and re-learning those words for weeks before you even know them in the context of Anki. Then, you'll come across them in text or in audio, and have to spend time thinking what they mean or even look them up again because the context changed. Eventually, after doing that several times, in different contexts, you will begin to know them. And even then, it will still take many more encounters to become comfortable with them.

100 words/day, without seeing those words in other contexts as well, is also way too much to SRS for any length of time.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:This is not true. Without the grammar knowledge, all you can do is string together the vocabulary in some way you hope fits the context. But it's amazing how wrong you can be and still think you understand the sentence because you're vaguely following the story. I've seen countless fansubs and manga scanlations where people clearly had no idea what the grammar was doing and were just creating a sentence with all the vocab.

Could you give an example?

I gave one example above; I can post more later. Maybe I should use my own attempts at translations from way back to avoid unfairly criticizing that guy who did the Onigokko scanlation, but I'm not sure I can find the raws for those.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:This is not true. Without the grammar knowledge, all you can do is string together the vocabulary in some way you hope fits the context. But it's amazing how wrong you can be and still think you understand the sentence because you're vaguely following the story. I've seen countless fansubs and manga scanlations where people clearly had no idea what the grammar was doing and were just creating a sentence with all the vocab.

Could you give an example?

I gave one example above; I can post more later. Maybe I should use my own attempts at translations from way back to avoid unfairly criticizing that guy who did the Onigokko scanlation, but I'm not sure I can find the raws for those.

The original argument was that, without studying grammar, "at least you have a good idea of what's going on". Not that you always get it right. So a single counter-example doesn't make your case. What would be more interesting is looking at the whole manga, and seeing what percentage a translator who knows all the words, but hasn't studied grammar or has only studied the very basics, gets right anyway. I bet it would be a pretty high percentage.

When studying a language, most of us are looking for the easiest road there is. We aren't looking to continue doing Anki reviews and studying grammar books until we know everything a person needs to know about Japanese. We just need studying to get to a level where we have a good idea of what's going on, because we know that at that point, vast amounts of comprehensible input in the form of entertainment, social interaction, etc. are sufficient to get us to fluency.

I'm not saying grammar isn't helpful in getting us there. I do think that the question is more "how much grammar should you study" rather than "should you study grammar at all". But the goal of studying, for most people, is to have a good idea of what's going on, not to study until you know everything.

So I don't think I should be studying grammar until I can recognize the structure of every sentence I encounter. If I can recognize most, by learning the basic rules, I can figure out the rest over time, without learning the rules explicitly. I know this for a fact. I've done it before, with other languages.

When I was making those kinds of mistakes, the kinds of mistakes where you know every word in a sentence but can't get it to resolve into a sensible meaning, what solved it wasn't explicit grammar study, mostly. It was experience. (It was enough experience to let my mind build up a decent model of the grammar.)

I wouldn't have gotten enough experience to make that work if I'd been trying to memorize some large arbitrary number of words.

yudantaiteki Wrote:ま　寝てるだけだし　いいよね translated as "I'll rest a bit anyway."

I don't think this is a very good example. It's hard to say anything about the merits of this translation without seeing it in context, but it looks like it could easily be a case of someone who understood the sentence, but didn't convey it well in the translation.

There definitely exist translations of the sort that you describe. I've seen them. But all that proves is that someone with limited Japanese knowledge can produce a bad translation. It doesn't prove anything about humans' ability (or lack thereof) to learn language without studying grammar. Any three-year-old is a perfect showcase of humans' ability to learn language without studying grammar.

Obviously, someone who learns language without studying grammar will make some wrong assumptions, but if they are paying attention, most of them will get corrected over time. There is certainly merit in learning grammar at some point to smooth over these rough edges, but I assert that everything except the most basic stuff can (and usually should) be put off until the learner has gained a considerable amount of vocabulary and familiarity with the language. Grammar "rules" are more helful and memorable once you are already familiar with the language and the stuff that the rules are referring to.

And for that matter, how would one go about studying all the of the grammar needed to correctly interpret "ま　寝てるだけだし　いいよね"? That seems to me to be a perfect example of something that most people would learn to understand through real-world exposure to the language, and not from a textbook.

Have fun not remembering anything. As if 500 words a day wasn't ridiculous enough, you think you're going to get any benefit from SRS when your maximum review a day is only twice what you're adding. This is preposterous on so many levels it's actually annoying to me.

I don't know why people are so quick to ditch grammar study ("because it can be picked up through immersion") when they want to cram 500 words a day instead. The are far more words out there than grammar points, why exclude the smaller group completely?

For number of words per day, if working on it full time you can hammer out a good number but not as many as 500. I was aiming for 130 words a day when I wasn't working a few months back (100 in Japanese, 30 Chinese words) and reviews would take up my entire morning and it would be hard to do more after. Plus the act of just finding that many words is time consuming too.

NightSky Wrote:I don't know why people are so quick to ditch grammar study ("because it can be picked up through immersion") when they want to cram 500 words a day instead. The are far more words out there than grammar points, why exclude the smaller group completely?

Can I ask how much grammar do you think is good to cover first, in term of jlpt?

cophnia61 Wrote:

NightSky Wrote:I don't know why people are so quick to ditch grammar study ("because it can be picked up through immersion") when they want to cram 500 words a day instead. The are far more words out there than grammar points, why exclude the smaller group completely?

Can I ask how much grammar do you think is good to cover first, in term of jlpt?

The more the better, probably. If measuring by JLPT, I think people should aim to get to the point where they understand up to N2 grammar points quickly (because lots of them come up all the time). N1 grammar points can be left a bit later if you really don't like studying grammar (though it wouldn't hurt).

I remember ages ago hearing something like "if its a choice between learning a new noun or adjective, learn the adjective. If its a choice between learning a new adjective or a new verb, learn the new verb. If its a choice between learning a new verb or a new grammar point, learn the new grammar point".

Makes sense to me.

Kanzen Master N2 + N1 has < 400 grammar points. I'd say if you've got the dedication to go through Core 6k/10k then it's very very much worth while just to get those over with.

NightSky Wrote:I remember ages ago hearing something like "if its a choice between learning a new noun or adjective, learn the adjective. If its a choice between learning a new adjective or a new verb, learn the new verb. If its a choice between learning a new verb or a new grammar point, learn the new grammar point".

Makes sense to me.

It does? You realize that the logical equivalent of that statement is "Only study grammar points, nothing else, until you run out."?

Sure, you'll be able to do 500 per day for the first week or two until your reviews get into the 1000s. Since you've set your max reviews to 1000, you won't be repeating your reviews very often so you'll forget everything you learned.

If you haven't gotten it yet from what others have said, you really need to set some reasonable goals. About 5-10 new cards per day turns into an hour of reviewing. So 50/day is about the MAXIMUM you'll be able to sustain for more than a few weeks at a time if you are studying 40-50 hours/week.

And there's no reason to limit your reviews. Anki should disable this feature. Anki's algorithm does a pretty good job of scheduling cards for optimal recall. Limiting the amount of reviews is an easy way to make things sub-optimal and decrease your accuracy. Limit your reviews by not adding too many new cards every day.

yogert909 Wrote:Sure, you'll be able to do 500 per day for the first week or two until your reviews get into the 1000s. Since you've set your max reviews to 1000, you won't be repeating your reviews very often so you'll forget everything you learned.

If you haven't gotten it yet from what others have said, you really need to set some reasonable goals. About 5-10 new cards per day turns into an hour of reviewing. So 50/day is about the MAXIMUM you'll be able to sustain for more than a few weeks at a time if you are studying 40-50 hours/week.

And there's no reason to limit your reviews. Anki should disable this feature. Anki's algorithm does a pretty good job of scheduling cards for optimal recall. Limiting the amount of reviews is an easy way to make things sub-optimal and decrease your accuracy. Limit your reviews by not adding too many new cards every day.

5-10 words does not mean 1 hour of reviewing. 60-70 words is about 1 hour or review in my experience. 50 words a day would be an hour including adding and going through new words too. And yes, you can sustain more than 50 a day for more than a few weeks. I did 100 a day for 1.5 months before. Just because you're placing an arbitrary limit on yourself doesn't mean you should advice others to do so as well.

kameden Wrote:60-70 words is about 1 hour or review in my experience.

I suspect you mean something other than ADDING 60-70 words for every hour of study. For reference, I add on average 7.2 cards per hour of study, my accuracy is 82% and I average 11.2 sec for each card. Unless you are doing something extraordinary like averaging 1 second per card or getting greater than 99% accuracy, I can't imagine you can ADD 10 times the amount of cards in the same amount of time. It's not an arbitrary limit, it is mathematics.

yogert909 Wrote:

kameden Wrote:60-70 words is about 1 hour or review in my experience.

I suspect you mean something other than ADDING 60-70 words for every hour of study. For reference, I add on average 7.2 cards per hour of study, my accuracy is 82% and I average 11.2 sec for each card. Unless you are doing something extraordinary like averaging 1 second per card or getting greater than 99% accuracy, I can't imagine you can ADD 10 times the amount of cards in the same amount of time. It's not an arbitrary limit, it is mathematics.

60-70 cards with 90% accuracy and probably around 7 seconds average for me. Doesn't take more than an hour.

This is with adding. Reviews by themselves take around an hour total. I've also been adding closer to 100 recently so it's a little inflated from that as well.

kameden Wrote:

yogert909 Wrote:

kameden Wrote:60-70 words is about 1 hour or review in my experience.

I suspect you mean something other than ADDING 60-70 words for every hour of study. For reference, I add on average 7.2 cards per hour of study, my accuracy is 82% and I average 11.2 sec for each card. Unless you are doing something extraordinary like averaging 1 second per card or getting greater than 99% accuracy, I can't imagine you can ADD 10 times the amount of cards in the same amount of time. It's not an arbitrary limit, it is mathematics.

60-70 cards with 90% accuracy and probably around 7 seconds average for me. Doesn't take more than an hour.
http://i.imgur.com/v1zw4e9.png
This is with adding. Reviews by themselves take around an hour total. I've also been adding closer to 100 recently so it's a little inflated from that as well.

In another thread, you told us that you speak and read Japanese (including the Kanji), and that you're doing RtK anyway. So, if that's true (I have no idea at this point), you just proved that you can review something you already know really fast.

Congratulations, you spent 94 minutes wasting your time today, and all you got for it was this post bragging about how awesome you are.

But for people who are learning new information, the timeframe is more like what everyone else in this thread is saying, not what you're saying.

Quote:For reference, I add on average 7.2 cards per hour of study, my accuracy is 82% and I average 11.2 sec for each card.

That 44.6 reviews per card added, which is an order of magnitude more than expected.

I have ~90% accuracy (might be as low as 86%: Anki conflates learn and relearn here, and my relearn accuracy is probably very close to 100%), 2.6 seconds per review (for new cards; my average time across all reviews is 2.8 seconds). 364 cards added per hour. Doesn't include the time it takes to look up the word in a dictionary and make the card, though.

Total time spent studying 2185 cards: 21 hours. 2046 mature cards.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

NightSky Wrote:I remember ages ago hearing something like "if its a choice between learning a new noun or adjective, learn the adjective. If its a choice between learning a new adjective or a new verb, learn the new verb. If its a choice between learning a new verb or a new grammar point, learn the new grammar point".

Makes sense to me.

It does? You realize that the logical equivalent of that statement is "Only study grammar points, nothing else, until you run out."?

Yes, I do realise that.

I just wrote it that way because that's how it was originally written. Obviously you are never really in a situation where a grammar point is "unavailable" as such. Its just meant to highlight that you get more value out of studying a grammar point than any other singular word (and of those words, verbs have more value than nouns etc).

Anyway, I don't really care enough about the subject to enter into any deep debate about it, I just think ignoring grammar in favour of vocabulary is a pretty stupid goal. There is always a balance.

Stansfield123 Wrote:In another thread, you told us that you speak and read Japanese (including the Kanji), and that you're doing RtK anyway. So, if that's true (I have no idea at this point), you just proved that you can review something you already know really fast.

Congratulations, you spent 94 minutes wasting your time today, and all you got for it was this post bragging about how awesome you are.

But for people who are learning new information, the timeframe is more like what everyone else in this thread is saying, not what you're saying.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't speak Japanese, I think that is a waste of time and I have never claimed to do so. I read Japanese sure, but I'm definitely not advanced. I still add new words every day. All I claimed in that other thread was being able to recognize 2500 kanji. I still learn new things every single day. I only know around 16,000 words at this point so I'm no where near finished.

If you know 16,000 words you should be advanced as far as reading goes. If your're not, I think you need to consider what you mean by the word "know."

RandomQuotes Wrote:If you know 16,000 words you should be advanced as far as reading goes. If your're not, I think you need to consider what you mean by the word "know."

Even if you do know 16000 words inside out you'll still constantly come across words you've never seen before. I'm not sure what you mean by advanced, but I'd consider native level advanced, as in maybe seeing a few new words per book. At 16000 you'd be seeing new words every few pages.