I don't even know if this is true but I have the feeling that, when I encounter a new word in my own language or in a language I know well, I assimilate it sooner. At first I thinked it is because the new word resemble other words I already know, how it sounds etc... But I feel this happens also with words in almost-unknown languages when they are used in languages we know. Words like wasabi etc.. why I'd even know it? I've heard it one time used in an italian phrase like "wow I like wasabi, it's so tasty" and I can think to many examples, not only with japanese words but in hebrew or sanskrit from when I was interested in esoterism etc.. words like malkah, samadhi, etc..

Why is that? I think in part it is because the more words we know in a sentence, the simpler it is going to be the absorbtion of new words in that sentence. But another thing maybe is that in those contexts we don't put a conscious effort in learning the word.

Like some time ago I said a tv show where there was a girl named "yuki" and she said "my dad has chosen this name because it means snow in japanese" and I immediately learned that yuki = snow. I know it's a simple word but I know for certain I learned it faster than words like "雨" or "夢" where I was going to consciously think "ok, then... ame is rain... ame... ame.. rain... let's say if I remember it... how it was... mai? ami? ah no, it is ame"... in other words, it was not so immediate.

So, if I'm right, how can we exploit this? Because I'm having a hard time remembering important words but that are not significant to me... So my brain refuses to remember them... I bet if those words were names of girls I like, I would have no problem in remembering them...

cophnia61 Wrote:I think in part it is because the more words we know in a sentence, the simpler it is going to be the absorbtion of new words in that sentence. But another thing maybe is that in those contexts we don't put a conscious effort in learning the word.

I think this is probably the reason. When we see an unknown L1 word in context, we don't just know all of the other words, we really KNOW them. We don't have to spend any mental bandwidth remembering words that we kind of know, leaving you with plenty of brainpower to focus entirely on the unknown word.

I think the only way to exploit this is to give your brain time and practice to internalize L2 words so you know them as well as L1. That, and making sure you are studying n+1 style. I don't think studying L2 words in an L1 context would be efficient because when we study L2 sentences, we are also reinforcing all of the L2 words in the sentence. Even if we know all of the words in the sentence, we don't know them as intimately as we do most L1 words unless we have been using them on a daily basis for many years. So using the words that we know actually makes it easier to learn new words in context.

I agree strongly with this. But I think another reason is that we begin to learn the internal logic of the language, and we can intuit and work things out more quickly.

E.g., if I'm new at Japanese, I might be totally lost if I hear the word 不良少年 in conversation. If I've been studying for a few years, however, I already know 少年, and I can quickly intuit that 不 means "bad/not/negative" from my previous encounter with this pattern (不安, 不公平, 不便, etc.) If I remember that 良 has an 音読み of りょう, I'm well on my way to at least a rough understanding of this word.

I can see this happening a lot in my own learning recently. I've had many conversations with teachers where I hear a word I don't quite know but, based on the sound, I can reason that it's probably represented by such-and-such kanji, and thus likely has such-and-such meaning. And, most of the time, I'm right. It's nice.

The wider our language net becomes, the more points of connection we have between new and old material. The more points of connection we have, the easier it is to remember something.

This is also why it's really, really hard for Westerners to get started in Japanese: Since it's from a completely separate language family, we have next to zero touch points with our existing knowledge net.

The more I learned about Japanese, the more I realized there are a lot of English words I know in a fuzzy way, but can't explain well. Take "exfoliate". I've only seen it in skin product commercials, so I can guess it has something to do with skin. Something good, so people would buy a product to do it.
Is this a detailed definition? No. The better you get at Japanese, the more words you'll likely get in this category.

One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is not quite the same...

Pretty much you've got it. Since we know the rest of the words, our brains, designed as they are to focus on things that are NOT right due, allows us to pick out what we don't get and puzzle out the meaning, thus committing it to memory.

The flipside of that though is that if EVERYTHING is unknown, it becomes gibberish and our brains disengage.

Bokusenou Wrote:The more I learned about Japanese, the more I realized there are a lot of English words I know in a fuzzy way, but can't explain well. Take "exfoliate". I've only seen it in skin product commercials, so I can guess it has something to do with skin. Something good, so people would buy a product to do it.
Is this a detailed definition? No. The better you get at Japanese, the more words you'll likely get in this category.

I've had a similar experience.
I was reading about customs (like when you travel) in Japanese, and I didn't get the passage because I couldn't give a definition other than "something that happens when you travel and involves taxes".

I'm happy to read your answers! So it will became easier when I'll more accustomed to japanese? In a way I'm already seeing this, when I encounter new words which contain kanji I already know the reading of... I hope it will get better with time!

PS: I note this behaviour also with anime titles like "higurashi no naku koro ni", I remember this from a year ago when I read for the first time that title and I was still not interested at all in japanese. But I liked that anime so it was simple for me to remember the title. The same thing happens for medicines, with all those strange and complex names, but still we remember them because they are important to us.

Its worth noting that in L1's or fluent languages, your brain has a better structure set up for storing a new word. This comes in the way of storing the context you heard it in, taking the word apart and understanding the meaning, and linking the word with synonyms.

Consider any task that takes skill and practice to do well: play an instrument, do art, play a sport, drive a car. When you start out you aren't good at even the simple things. Once you get better though, maybe you encounter something new with it; maybe its a new riff on a guitar or a new technique for drawing. You'll pick it up quicker with experience than if you were a beginner. It's how our brain works.

I've no idea if it really is easier to learn L1 words because I've never really tried, though I have often forgotten the meaning of an L1 word seconds after looking it up in a dictionary.

I guess the problem is that in L1 all the low-hanging fruit is already picked, so what's left is words that are rarely used precisely because they are difficult to remember.

In fact I'm not even sure how I would go about SRSing English (or other alphabet-based languages, for that matter). Putting a definition on the back of a card seems a bit heavy-handed. Maybe cloze deletion with an example sentence that strongly hints at the meaning?

Certainly in Japanese I find sentence cards with hiragana words on the front highly ineffective as they are way too passive to transfer into the 'wild'. Perhaps L1 words would be different.

anotherjohn Wrote:Certainly in Japanese I find sentence cards with hiragana words on the front highly ineffective as they are way too passive to transfer into the 'wild'. Perhaps L1 words would be different.

Can I ask how do you set your cards? Kanji on front and reading + meaning on back?

Yep, kanji sentence on the front, everything else on the back.

For kanji I do kanji -> meaning now (almost a year now since switching to this way round).

Also I do plan to make some scrappy audio-only cards with subs2srs at some point with audio on the front and just enough on the back to clarify the 'answer' (i.e. just some hints, not a complete dissection of what was said), the idea being that they will be easy to make, so I can make lots of them.

anotherjohn Wrote:Yep, kanji sentence on the front, everything else on the back.

For kanji I do kanji -> meaning now (almost a year now since switching to this way round).

I'm thinking to do the same, but I don't know what to put as a meaning. Do you think something like the meanings you can find in jisho.org will suffice?

anotherjohn Wrote:Also I do plan to make some scrappy audio-only cards with subs2srs at some point with audio on the front and just enough on the back to clarify the 'answer' (i.e. just some hints, not a complete dissection of what was said), the idea being that they will be easy to make, so I can make lots of them.

Sounds like a great idea!

cophnia61 Wrote:I'm thinking to do the same, but I don't know what to put as a meaning. Do you think something like the meanings you can find in jisho.org will suffice?

For the RTK1+3 kanji already in the premade deck I'm using I just use the Heisig keyword, but I'm *very* lenient on what I consider a 'pass'. E.g. I don't care about the difference between cape/promontory, and certainly not between secret/secrecy/secretive/etc.

When adding new kanji I sometimes just copy all the meanings given on Tangorin (i.e. ultimately from KANJIDIC), particularly when they are similar. Other times I have a quick look at the compounds it's used in and pick whatever meaning seems like a good choice, if there is one that stands out. For cards with multiple meanings on the back I consider any answer in the ballpark of any of the meanings a 'pass', and generally settle on which ever one is easiest to remember. For example, one of my cards is:

Front: 蹲
Back: crouch;  squat;  cower

- for which I generally blurt out 'squat'. This one is from a Core10k sentence, which also comes to mind when this card comes up. (I have added all the kanji appearing in the core10k sentences to my kanji deck, and converted all the sentences to use as much kanji as possible, adding disambiguation info where necessary.)

I don't think the exact choice of kanji meaning really matters all that much provided it's vaguely useful. The point is just to create associations with the kanji to ensure that it's familiar when encountered in context, and to act as mental hooks on which to hang other things (e.g. readings). When reading, recalling the meanings of individual kanji is generally a fallback for use when in doubt. Recalling the associated meaning often cues the reading, I find, even when the meaning in context is different.

One of the great advantages of reviewing kanji -> meaning is that you can freely add whatever other kanji you want without caring about conflicting keywords or about how freaking difficult they are to write. For example, one of my new favourites is 鬮, which is very easy to recognise, but I don't fancy learning to write it, and I've never once bothered to figure out which primitives it contains.

Rambled a there

anotherjohn Wrote:

cophnia61 Wrote:I'm thinking to do the same, but I don't know what to put as a meaning. Do you think something like the meanings you can find in jisho.org will suffice?

For the RTK1+3 kanji already in the premade deck I'm using I just use the Heisig keyword, but I'm *very* lenient on what I consider a 'pass'. E.g. I don't care about the difference between cape/promontory, and certainly not between secret/secrecy/secretive/etc.

When adding new kanji I sometimes just copy all the meanings given on Tangorin (i.e. ultimately from KANJIDIC), particularly when they are similar. Other times I have a quick look at the compounds it's used in and pick whatever meaning seems like a good choice, if there is one that stands out. For cards with multiple meanings on the back I consider any answer in the ballpark of any of the meanings a 'pass', and generally settle on which ever one is easiest to remember. For example, one of my cards is:

Front: 蹲
Back: crouch;  squat;  cower

- for which I generally blurt out 'squat'. This one is from a Core10k sentence, which also comes to mind when this card comes up. (I have added all the kanji appearing in the core10k sentences to my kanji deck, and converted all the sentences to use as much kanji as possible, adding disambiguation info where necessary.)

I don't think the exact choice of kanji meaning really matters all that much provided it's vaguely useful. The point is just to create associations with the kanji to ensure that it's familiar when encountered in context, and to act as mental hooks on which to hang other things (e.g. readings). When reading, recalling the meanings of individual kanji is generally a fallback for use when in doubt. Recalling the associated meaning often cues the reading, I find, even when the meaning in context is different.

One of the great advantages of reviewing kanji -> meaning is that you can freely add whatever other kanji you want without caring about conflicting keywords or about how freaking difficult they are to write. For example, one of my new favourites is 鬮, which is very easy to recognise, but I don't fancy learning to write it, and I've never once bothered to figure out which primitives it contains.

Rambled a there

anotherjohn, thank you for you explanation! I'm going to do the same thing now!