Learning minimum vocabulary is not effective. We must learn all that we can NOW! It is a waste that you do not learn quickly enough through immersion because you're lacking vocabulary. Sure grammar is important, but vocabularies are more important. I'm sure grammar can be learned through immersion. That's how you learned your language. You started noticing patterns in the sentences being used by your parents as a child and adapted that grammar pattern. But if you don't know the words, but know the grammar, and know the grammar very very well, you wouldn't still understand anything. Contrary to that, if you do know your vocabularies, but not your grammar, at least you have a good idea of what's going on. And if immersion is repeated and repeated you might figure out the grammar pattern and even understand it. However, even if you hear a word multiple times and don't know it, you still wouldn't know it even if you hear a million times. Why learn vocabularies through immersion when it is near unlimited, and several words still make it in daily conversations and yet they aren't even in top 10000 common Japanese (or whatever language) words? Grammar should be the one that is learned through immersion since it is limited, and the one commonly used are even more limited. That is why you must learn the vocabulary. And to maximize learning, you must learn 500 new words per day. But the question is, can Anki do it? And if Anki can, will we be able to do it? If it is possible and you do it with immersion to all sort of native materials, you will be unstoppable. You will reach fluency or at least a very very high level in you language. You will learn Japanese (or whatever language you want to learn) in no time.

I haven't tried out myself yet, but I will, after I get your opinion. What I will do is I will change the settings to 500 new card per day and maximum of 1000 cards for review. Of course, the deck will only have pure vocabulary and will be in order of the most common words to the less come words (Japanese to English). But in order for me not to burnout when reviewing, due to the extreme number of cards which is 500, I will spread my reviews throughout the day, doing a few reviews per hour. So if I am awake for 16 hours a day, that makes 500 words per 16 hours (500 wrd/16 hr) which is 31.25 or 32 cards per hour. So after every hour, I'll have my alarm set, then I'll do those 32 cards during that hour. Since I will only do 32 cards, I can finish that around 10 minutes. So that's 10 minutes used, and you still have 50 more minutes. Once I'm done, I'll continue my review the next hour, and so forth. Thus, in a week, I would have learned 3500 words. That is not to say that I do not do this along with immersion. Immersion of course can be anything. I would prefer however drama because the style of conversation is more realistic, the ones that would be really used in real life. Aside from this immersion through i+1 materials is not necessary because you know several words.

Do you think this will work? Is it effective if we use Anki this way?

In theory, yes, it might work. But I fear you'll burn yourself out, even so, go ahead! It seems like a nice experiment.

For me, learning too much vocabulary is like eating too much food. It's just too much and I'm likely to get sick of it. Also, there's an issue of time that people might have where learning 500 words a day is likely to pose a problem.

That aside, learning 500 new words a day is different from reviewing 500 or more words a day. Reviewing stuff just involves repeating stuff that you already learned and did previously, where as learning possibly entails more time spent because it's new to you.

I'm sure it'll work to some extent, but I don't necessarily recommend doing it. 50-100 words a day should be sufficient for someone who's interested in speed learning.

I would also recommend that if you're learing so many words in a single week, that you spend the following week just reviewing what you've already learned so that you can get your review time down a bit. That way, in a month you'll be learning around 7k words, which is a lot imo.

Regardless though, it'd be interesting to hear about your results in this thread.

"And to maximize learning, you must learn 500 new words per day."

That's a weirdly specific claim. It just seems like such an arbitrary number.
If you can handle it, go for it.

Just to give you some idea, there was some other poster here who claimed they learned 1000 words in a day, or something, and then wanted to do 400 a day after that. He never posted back with his results (not that I know of, at least). Maybe he was successful, maybe he wasn't.
Some other guy was adamant against purposeful reviews at all. I'm curious to see how that's working out for him.

Also, I don't think you can learn a second language like you did your first language. Especially grammar. Sure, you might have a general idea, but there's lots of little things you'll never notice and incorporate unless you come across them purposefully. For example, do you think you would be able to distinguish the difference between sekkaku and wazawaza without having studied them?

I think you are just setting yourself up for massive burnout 2 weeks from now. It's not possible for a person to learn 500 new vocabulary every day unless you are a legit savant. Most normal people would burn out at just 50 new words a day.

Are these 500 words per day mainly kanji compounds? Would you learn the pronunciations as well?

You're fooling yourself mate... The only reason why you think it would work is because you're limiting your reviews. I'm learning 10/day and I'm having up to 500/day to review daily. That means you would have around 25,000 reviews per day (assuming you have the same retention rate as I do. Mine is not really good, granted, but good luck retaining so much material).

I hope one day someome will post "Do you think 3 words a day is enough??" I think you're the newest record lol... 1000 anyone?

Do you think the brain is capable to learn so many words per day in the first place? There is not a limit beyond that you cannot learn more? Like a sort of ceiling? I do think our brain has limits, so it's not only a matter of time... maybe it will works for a couple of days but after that your brain is going to be exhausted. You will start to mix up things, forget other things, so maybe at the end of the day the tangible results are the same of doing 50 vocabs per day for 4 months. I don't know, I'm not rethorical here, I wonder if it is possible... if it is then I'm the first to join the experiment.

Maybe you could study something like 10 - 50 vocabs every day, and then spend the remaining time to read something at your level and when you encounter a word you don't know you look it up and try to learn it. But right after that you move forward and continue reading. So if you learn some new words in this way, then good... if not, you've still exercised your reading skill, reinforced your grammar and vocabs you already know etc... So you still learn something more outside anki but without the stress of reviews. In case if you encounter words that don't stick this way, you'll learn them anyway in future with Anki. Does it make sense?

With rikaichan/rikaisama it's doable, I'm still on Genki I and I'm doing sentence from there to learn grammar and very basic vocabs, so I stick with things very simple to read, mostly posts from idols, singers and the like on Google+, Facebook, Twitter etc..

In other threads I defended Anki and I think it's a great tool, but just remember you can learn vocabs outside of it. There are people like Steve Kauffman that did (and still do) it this way. He does extensive reading inside LingQ and every time he encounters a new word he marks it, so the next time he'll encounter that same word, also if he doesn't remember it, he immediately sees it is a word he encountered before, so he continue to read and look up words and eventually they sticks. Now I do think Anki is a more efficient way to do it but it's not the only way and it's not you can do only Anki in every waking hour. I know it's difficult at the beginning becouse I'm here, you have little to no vocabs so it's frustrating to read something so I'm not saying my way is better than your, if you can do it then it's definitively a great way to learn as much vocabs as possible and then move on to reading, but I'm uncertain...

OP, if people could learn 500 words a day, everyone would do it and be a polyglott. But the truth is the average for most people is 30-40 words a day. Also what you're talking about isn't really learning, it's something like pre-processing (cognitive deciphering of new words). The learning is done when your card is mature (3 reviews I think), which since you're looking at 5-7 times the amount of reviews for each added word, I doubt you'll even reach, like comeauch pointed out (because with limited reviews you can't*, and with unlimited reviews, the most likely course is you will burn out and have no time for anything else).

In practice, a reasonable amount of vocab learning is more effective than binge learning, you just have to be consistent about it.

*technically you can if you increase the days you'll review exponentially, which would be the same as if you had started with a smaller number of words per day, with the inconvenient of your adding frenzy the regular and zen user doesn't have to go through.

markcat Wrote:and maximum of 1000 cards for review.?

Even if you survived the massive incoming burnout, this would be a problem. 1000 reviews per day for 500 new cards isn't nearly enough. It would basically defeat the whole purpose of SRSing, since your rescheduling would be all f*cked up.

Anyway, it does sounds like a fun little experiment, let us know how you fare if you try it anway =)

edit : also remember that when you see a card for the first time, at least on anki's basic setting, you have to review it at least twice to actually be done with it for the day (the basic steps go 10 min > 1 day). So in effect, you will see each of your 500 new cards at the very least twice a day (more if you screw up). Your reviews will always be over 1000 / Day in effect as a result.

In order to get good at Japanese you don't 'have to learn 500 words a day'.
And belive it or not, if you would know the grammar perfectly and many basic words, you could learn some words without learning them while watching something in Japanese. And you don't have to hear it over 1 million times.

Just get some basic grammar/vocabularies done and find something you are interested in and read/watch it.
That's the most effective and fun way at the same time.

But you can try to learn 500 words a day. (is this even possible?)
I'm sure that you will hate Anki after a few days.

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, which is not bad. However, the reason why I stress the learning of several vocabulary is because of the problem of looking for an i+1 immersion. It would be hard to look for an i+1 immersion because most of the media are i+>1, especially if you're a beginner. Also it needs to be interesting. It's hard to look for interesting immersion at a basic level. So here is how I will change the method:

Learn 100 words per day, no immersion yet (it is impossible to get i+1 immersion [that is interesting] with too little vocabulary). Start immersion when you feel confident (that's up for you to decide, maybe you feel confident at day 10, maybe at day 100; the point is you only start when you have a lot of vocabulary). Grammar will be taught by both immersion and SRS sentences.

Not to beat a dead horse, but even doing 50 words a day will burn you out. I was doing 50 new words day for roughly two month before I got sick of it. Consider this at 50 new words a day, with reviews, and grammar and everything all told I ended up studying something like 6-7 hours a day. Every day. If roughly double that sounds pleasant, go for it.

You don't want to overdo anki else you'll get sick of it. There are also other ways to review words outside of anki, for a beginner things like watching dramas with subs, doing a basic textbook or the pimsleur cds. If you review outside of anki then when you do your reviews you'll fail less cards and it'll take less time.

Contrary to the claims of others in this thread, I highly encourage to revert to your original plan of 500 new vocab/day. There is no better future for an individual than one with Anki ever-present. I can vouch for such a lifestyle myself, despite having tasted only but an ephemeral drop of heavenly nectar that is Anki's seductive grip on life. Once you experience Anki as the S, and yourself as the M, you'll never again think two ways about it. Now I must excuse myself, and return to the depths of depravity once again.

Apart from the issue of burn-out, there is also the question of learning itself. Memory needs time to consolidate, and cramming in a lot in a short time won't do anything for your long-term retention. If your plan is to stick with Japanese for the long haul anyway, you are better off spreading your learning over a longer time. (It might seem counterintuitive now, but a year from now, you will have retained more).

You use language acquisition in young children as an example of how learning by immersion works. But a three-year-old does not actually learn 500 (or even 100) new words a day. They learn less than ten a day, and this learning is highly contextualised. I am not saying that this is the only way to learn, but it is interesting to look at how native language learning works in the first place. By the way, native language immersion is not "i+1" - the ability to filter pertinent information from the wealth of things you are exposed to is how you learnt your first language in the first place, so don't be afraid.

Finally, I don't want to tell you what to do with your life or anything, but spending 16 hours a day every day with nothing than drama and Anki? Really? At least go for a walk every now and then!

Don't be hasty with Japanese, you are not going to get fluent fast however you try to do it so be patient. This is not an exam, being constant is better than cramming for a short period of time and then stopping due to burnout.

The most I've ever done is 2500 in around a month, and honestly it barely had any impact on my review time/day. I don't use the default Anki algorithm though (my initial interval on a new card is typically 4-8 days, not 10 minutes), and I only add cards that I feel I already know, so for me Anki is more of a long-term vocabulary retention tool. I can't imagine just using it as a brute force learning tool would prove terribly effective for mass vocabulary building when everything you're adding is new to you. I think you'd end up with so many failed cards that most of your time would be spent on reviews as opposed to adding new cards. Maybe I'm wrong, I've never done it.

From my own experience, adding 40-60 cards a day over long periods is very sustainable, but then I may not be using Anki the same way others do so I don't know if this would apply to everyone.

Why 500? Make it 10,000, that way you'll be fluent in 5 days.

If you were to dedicate your whole day to Japanese for a period of several months, I would put the maximum new vocab you could add a day to around 50 (if it's completely new words), or 100 if it's mostly words you've heard before but don't quite know at first glance, or don't know how to write/read them yet.

Any more than that is just not a realistic goal to have. And people who continually set unrealistic goals are also known as quitters.

markcat Wrote:Contrary to that, if you do know your vocabularies, but not your grammar, at least you have a good idea of what's going on.

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.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

markcat Wrote:Contrary to that, if you do know your vocabularies, but not your grammar, at least you have a good idea of what's going on.

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.

Waffles fish train station.

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

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.

As for the "method" in the OP; learning 500 out of context vocabulary words every day is beyond the mental powers of most people. Even if it were possible it's questionable whether it's a better process than building up your vocabulary slowly through reading.

Man, grammar is important, you don't have to study it in an academic way, but at last you must have a reliable translation of what you are studying, so you can infer grammar. Es.:

晩ご飯、食べた？- うん、食べた。(Have dinner yet? - Uh-huh, I did. [casual speech])

晩ご飯、食べましたか？- はい、食べました。(Have dinner yet? - Yes, I did. [formal speech])

So the best way is to go with a beginner book. Sentences themselves are going to teach you both grammar and vocabs. And if you don't understand something, then you can read the explanation. You don't have to memorize cognugation tables etc.. but at least you might study grammar by examples. And books like those are i+1

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 was a really good set of examples posted in another thread earlier with someone's first try at a manga scanlation; unfortunately the person posting the program took it down but I saved one of the examples:

ま　寝てるだけだし　いいよね translated as "I'll rest a bit anyway." This is a perfect example of what happens when you "know all the vocab" and are trying to pick up grammar through exposure/etc. In this case the translation makes sense in the context and since it's not a crucially important line you can keep reading the manga with no problem. But I'm not sure beginners understand how easily you can fall into the mindset where you think you "understand the main idea" but in fact are totally misinterpreting the sentence. It's also very surprising how wrong you can be about the meaning of large parts of something and still feel like you're generally following the story. This is particularly evident with manga or video games where you have a lot of visual reinforcement.

I'm not just pointing fingers; if I go back to some of the stuff I tried to translate 10 years ago it's painful to look at how confidently I thought I understood what was going on when I really had no idea.

Bottom line: You don't need to read a linguistics book, but don't look at grammar as something that should be totally ignored because it will be picked up naturally. It won't be.