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Vocabulary Mining from Manga with Anki?

#1
I am posting this because I am not sure if anyone has had this idea or not (I am sure someone hasTongue) I have thought of a new way to help bolster my vocabulary. While reading a manga with furigana, every time I encounter a new word with kanji (or with Kana for that matter) I create a flash card inside my own Anki deck. I usually decide to finish two full pages of the manga and throw all the new words into anki after looking them up on the internet. I then drill all those words over and over until I have them memorized before going back through and re reading the two pages. Now this is all in theory, and I am wondering what you guys think of a method like this. I don't need any lectures on how manga does not use "proper Japanese". I have been speaking for a while and I am primarily trying to excavate new nouns and adjectives from reading manga while improving my reading ability/speed at the same time. Any thoughts? Smile
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#2
This is quite a common way to learn new grammar, vocabulary etc. provided you like using Anki of course.

Go for it. If you don't get burnt out it works well.
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#3
For my taste, what you're doing is too slow and too study-ish. Reading two pages at a time and then drilling sounds like not much fun. If your level is low enough that the manga has so many new words that you can't understand what's going on, I think it would be better to drill a premade or more-efficiently made deck for six months and then come back and enjoy reading. Or find easier manga. What are you reading?

My personal method for reading is to put sticky-note markers next to words I don't know and then look up all the words later. If there are too many unknown words for easy comprehension, I'll pick up a different book. I think this strikes a good balance between learning stuff and reading - would be better if I could be bothered Ankiing the stuff I looked up, but lacking motivation.
Given that manga is rather short and doesn't have too many words per page, it might be just as good to reread the whole thing if you want to review rather than in two page chunks. You'll probably find a lot of manga where you know every word on the page anyway, so doing it in two page cycles won't work.

Anyway, reading is meant to be fun. In particular - manga is meant to be fun. This sounds fun-killy, and if you're not having fun reading you're not going to want to read. So be careful.
Edited: 2015-01-23, 9:44 am
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#4
I see where you're coming from, Aikynaro, but want to put a voice up from the opposite perspective, as this is how I started learning - reading things that looked fun and dumping everything into either Anki or Skritter. It may sound boring, but it worked for me. I liked working towards a goal (understanding something that I thought looked interesting), and I liked having an authentic native context for what I was studying. For myself, I found this more "fun" than studying a pre-made deck with cutesy example sentences.

Now, for the record, I found this a LOT easier to do with stuff from Hukumusume and elsewhere on the Web, as I could dump words along with example sentences into a text file using Rikaisama, and import those directly into Anki. Transcribing from printed material is slower and more painful; you might want to consider also importing material from a Web-based source as well (e.g., NHK News Easy) to accelerate your learning. But hey, if transcribing from dead trees doesn't crush your spirit, go for it.
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#5
One of my projects is to extend KanjiTomo and/or cb's manga reader to make it easier to transcribe manga. There's a couple of manga that I absolutely love and would provide a lot of motivation to understand & drill. Doing manga with something like LingQ/LWT/FLTR is a dream of mine.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:Now, for the record, I found this a LOT easier to do with stuff from Hukumusume and elsewhere on the Web, as I could dump words along with example sentences into a text file using Rikaisama, and import those directly into Anki.
Can you describe what you mean by "Hukumusume"?
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#6
I probably don't disagree with you, I'm just putting my point across poorly. I'm no fan of pre-made decks either.

But I do think there there's no good reason to read things so far above your level that you would need to stop every two pages to look up a bunch of words. Looking up everything after a natural break in your reading then putting it all into Anki should be perfectly sufficient given that you're reading something easy enough. And there's almost always something easy enough to do that with given that you have above a certain minimum of vocabulary (which from the other thread I guess OP has).

If you're just looking to strip-mine native material for vocabulary, subs2srs is a much better way to do it.
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#7
aldebrn Wrote:Can you describe what you mean by "Hukumusume"?
this site: http://hukumusume.com/douwa/
Edited: 2015-01-23, 10:34 am
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#8
I'm also doing the same thing right now and it helps a lot. But if your Japanese isn't high enough (what I assume is the case) it can get really frustrating. 2 pages is like nothing. I would recommend you to come back with a little bit more vocabulary and grammar so you can at least read 1/2 to 1 chapter at a time without seeing 500 new words and always having to look up the translation.

Oh and also KanjiTomo is super helpful. I really recommend it to you if you want to do this. It can identify kanji and shows you the translation. With that you can also read manga without furigana.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=9971
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#9
aldebrn Wrote:One of my projects is to extend KanjiTomo and/or cb's manga reader to make it easier to transcribe manga. There's a couple of manga that I absolutely love and would provide a lot of motivation to understand & drill. Doing manga with something like LingQ/LWT/FLTR is a dream of mine.
Totally agreed. I love using LingQ, an would jump at this.

aldebrn Wrote:Can you describe what you mean by "Hukumusume"?
It's a 昔話 site used by a lot of learners.

http://hukumusume.com/douwa/pc/jap/index.html
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#10
Aikynaro Wrote:I probably don't disagree with you, I'm just putting my point across poorly. I'm no fan of pre-made decks either.

But I do think there there's no good reason to read things so far above your level that you would need to stop every two pages to look up a bunch of words. Looking up everything after a natural break in your reading then putting it all into Anki should be perfectly sufficient given that you're reading something easy enough. And there's almost always something easy enough to do that with given that you have above a certain minimum of vocabulary (which from the other thread I guess OP has).
Yeah, I agree with that. I remember early on enjoying a certain anime, and being able to follow it (the language was quite basic, and tracked well to the manga), and then trying to read an interview on excite.co.jp with the author and being completely stymied. It proved too difficult at the time, so I put it away to read at some future date.

Personally, if something is interesting, and understanding is just a matter of looking up unknown words, I'd generally power through it. This can be really valuable for a book in a series, or a book in the same genre by the same author, where a lot of the vocab is likely to repeat from one book to the next. But if something has a lot of unknown grammar and you can't follow the flow, I'd set it aside for another time.
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#11
I think you get the most out of the stuff that's hard to get through in the long run. While reading something that's easy might be more fun, you learn less when you don't push yourself. Even in your native language, people who go out of the their way to read challenging books tend to have a higher vocabulary than people who only read what's on facebook and twitter.
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#12
kameden Wrote:Even in your native language, people who go out of the their way to read challenging books tend to have a higher vocabulary than people who only read what's on facebook and twitter.
I don't think this analogy really holds up though. Usually those books are a step or so above your current level so of course you learn something from them and really that's doing the same thing as people are suggesting. Reading just facebook and twitter is probably your current level and below.

As to the original post: I agree with what most people are saying, I think. You should probably find something just slightly above your level instead of much higher. I also think that mining this way is better if you have a digital version because you can use images on your cards which will help recall a lot.
Edited: 2015-01-24, 12:16 am
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#13
fwiw, when I'm using this kind of method I use my cell phone app as my dictionary and after looking up words paste them into a text file. Later on I'll e-mail the file to myself to make it easier to add all the words to Anki.

This is still a couple steps more than when working with online materials tho, it's true.

Either way, I'll find an example sentence I like from an online dictionary or space ALC or tatoeba.org or the like and use rikaisama to auto-create the card for each word. Grabbing whole sentences from the source material is popular I know, but for me I find that concise illustrative sentences (like you find in the dictionary!) are much faster and simpler to review.

As far as new grammar goes, beyond the basics that you get from any first year textbook, the majority of Japanese 'grammar' can be learned as vocabulary - it's mostly new grammatical words or suffixes. As long as your cards include example sentences there's no reason not to add that kind of thing right in as if it were simply vocabulary.

Two pages at a time -is- very slow, but on the other hand, if you continue through the same series (or even just stick with the same author), this will speed up naturally because of word repetition. It won't be long before there are very few new words and then it'll be natural that several pages in a row won't have any new words.

Don't be surprised or discouraged when you find that a new source from a different author in a different genre has tons of new vocabulary compared to the last pages of the book or series you just finished - this is natural but diminishes over time.

I agree with the hukumusume recommendation too. Not only is it short stories that share a lot of common vocabulary and are a fun way to practice in their own right, but if you get familiar with all the most famous mukashibanashi it will make things clear that are almost impossible to look up. I've come across references (generally in the form of a quoted line) to mukashibanashi in manga, movies, and light novels. If you don't know the stories it'd be hard to understand why that seeming non-sequitur is in there.
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#14
Thanks for all the replies and good advice everyone. I have actually continued reading and am beginning to pick up the pace a bit more than before. I think I just hit a few rough patches in the beginning because there were a lot of words I did not know and a lot of slang that I was unfamiliar with. The most difficult part for me is that most of the japanese I know is very polite while manga is extremely informal haha. So i guess it just takes some getting used to. I read about 20 pages of Yotsuba today and only had to look up a few words and grammar points. Overall, the furigana makes it pretty easy, though It also kinda feels like cheating -_-.

I have read through a bit of dragonball as well, though dragonball actually seems way easier. But in context with actual normal speech, I doubt I can take away as much learning material from dragonball. Yotsuba is nice because it kinda feels like I am a little kid learning about the ways of the world haha.
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