Hey,

I've completed RTK over a month without any issues, but I'm trying to learn vocabulary through a core deck in recognition mode and am having huge problems.

I've been at it for about 2 weeks and have added about 500 cards, but my young retention is still around 40% (today's was 35% correct), whereas I understand it should be at least in the 70%-80% range. I feel like I've hardly made any progress despite spending about 20 hours in Anki and also like I only actually know half of the cards I've learned, particularly the kana-only ones which I almost always fail.

I think this might be the result of some failure to properly encode the word in my memory(?) as I never instantly get the word and can only rely on semantic clues in the kanji to remember it. There's also a lot of times when I have difficulty retaining a word for the 10 minutes and end up failing it 5-6 times in the session.

Is this normal for a beginner or am I just upset with the amount of work that Japanese takes to learn and am ranting? I really want to learn Japanese and just trying to get some method that will work for me.

Thanks

Don't add any cards then review what you already have until you know 90% of it. I haven't done core yet but this works for me when I use anki.

That's pretty bad, yeah. You'll probably get there eventually but...

- Are you using a textbook? Are you using Anki to memorize words from the textbook, either with a textbook deck or by unsuspending specific cards in core?

- Do your cards have example sentences? Do you understand those sentences?

- Are you combining your learning efforts with audio resources? Even if it's just the wwwjdic single word audio, but better yet with example dialogues as from the genki or minna no nihongo CDs or the Erin's Challenge website?

Memorizing words without context and/or without an understanding of how they sound is -really- hard. Of course the more words you learn, the easier it is to understand example sentences. If you are using Core, there is a version of Core reordered with this in mind that gives you the best path to have the least-unknowns in each example sentence.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:That's pretty bad, yeah. You'll probably get there eventually but...

- Are you using a textbook? Are you using Anki to memorize words from the textbook, either with a textbook deck or by unsuspending specific cards in core?

- Do your cards have example sentences? Do you understand those sentences?

- Are you combining your learning efforts with audio resources? Even if it's just the wwwjdic single word audio, but better yet with example dialogues as from the genki or minna no nihongo CDs or the Erin's Challenge website?

Memorizing words without context and/or without an understanding of how they sound is -really- hard. Of course the more words you learn, the easier it is to understand example sentences. If you are using Core, there is a version of Core reordered with this in mind that gives you the best path to have the least-unknowns in each example sentence.

Thanks for the nice writeup

Honestly it probably isn't as bad as it looks, my retention would probably be around 60% (which still isn't great) but I have a lot of cards that show up in every session that I cannot remember for 10 minutes and just end up failing like 5 times. I kinda want to suspend them but it seems like too many and too common words to suspend.

I've been doing i+1 core6k and looking at example sentences on Jisho when I can't get a good sense of how the word is actually used from the sentence on the card. I know enough grammar to understand the sentences, but it's not really practiced at all so I parse things quite slowly.

I guess you're probably right about understanding. If I think about it, I think for a lot of words I've been associating the kanji with the English keyword/translation rather than the concept itself. This makes sense since a lot of the cards I have been failing repeatedly are more abstract.

I think I'm going to take a break from vocab and try reading something easy.

An option is making your own cards, and you won't have this problem. You're trying to grind dry lifeless premade vocabulary cards.

tinymint Wrote:I have a lot of cards that show up in every session that I cannot remember for 10 minutes and just end up failing like 5 times.
...

I think I'm going to take a break from vocab and try reading something easy.

Maybe you just need to take more time with cards that you fail. Read the example sentence out loud, see if you can think of a mnemonic (vocab mnemonics don't need to be deep stories like Heisig's system, these are just throw away mnemonics to help you remember the word for a day or two until it sinks into long term memory.

Terrible puns work (in either or both languages) 宮廷　- The girl at the king's court is such a cutey (cue-tay) (I had to imagine someone with a certain accent saying this of course) ; 驚愕 - today (きょう) we learned (がく) something surprising (meaning). Those are just ones I remember. As bad as they are most of my vocab mnemonics are worse, and that's fine. They're meant to be forgotten as soon as the word is remembered.
Sometimes I just have a mnemonic around the first mora of a word (some alliteration with another word in either language). Very often if you can recall the first mora the rest of the word comes rolling back into your memory. I can't remember any that I've actually used off hand but they might be like 緊張　-　きんちょうという感じがきらい or 'feeling きんちょう KEEps me awake at night'.

That's about how terrible and forgettable my mnemonics usually are. But if I can pass the word for a couple days running I usually don't forget it again even after I forget the mnemonic.

Also, while I definitely think you should balance actual reading with Anki, if you 'take a break' from Anki, try to make it a break only from adding cards. Do some reviews every day - you don't have to complete them if you're not adding cards - the backlog will naturally clear if you're not adding cards. However coming back to a backlog of 1000 or more cards is very frustrating. 10 minutes or so a day will keep the backlog manageable. Also setting a daily limit will hide the true size of the backlog and alleviate frustration. Also possibly help you manage keeping your anki time under control and let you do other things.

Everyone is different but I found it useful to separate the learning process from the reviewing process.

As an example of my learning process, I pick words from a vocab book which has one good context sentence per word to get a feel for the words' definitions. (Actually I used a kanji book which grouped kanjis by chapter, although some argue that may not the most effective method; this is an important issue.)

Anyways, every day I created a deck of 30 paper flashcards. Front side- kanji, back side- kana pronunciation (and English meaning in small red pen at bottom corner which is easy both to cover up and to ignore). Eventually, I got to the point where I could memorize c.30 words (kanji writing, pronunciation, meaning) in about an hour.

Downside of the physical cards is that the piles get massive and organizing the reviews is a challenge. A paper list might help with different columns for kanji, pronunciation, meaning, but the list has the disadvantage of being static in order so is not a great way of pushing your memory.

As far as the reviewing process, I think Anki is good for reviewing but unless I learn the word before Anki, it just does not stick.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:

tinymint Wrote:I have a lot of cards that show up in every session that I cannot remember for 10 minutes and just end up failing like 5 times.
...

I think I'm going to take a break from vocab and try reading something easy.

Maybe you just need to take more time with cards that you fail. Read the example sentence out loud, see if you can think of a mnemonic (vocab mnemonics don't need to be deep stories like Heisig's system, these are just throw away mnemonics to help you remember the word for a day or two until it sinks into long term memory.

Terrible puns work (in either or both languages) 宮廷　- The girl at the king's court is such a cutey (cue-tay) (I had to imagine someone with a certain accent saying this of course) ; 驚愕 - today (きょう) we learned (がく) something surprising (meaning). Those are just ones I remember. As bad as they are most of my vocab mnemonics are worse, and that's fine. They're meant to be forgotten as soon as the word is remembered.
Sometimes I just have a mnemonic around the first mora of a word (some alliteration with another word in either language). Very often if you can recall the first mora the rest of the word comes rolling back into your memory. I can't remember any that I've actually used off hand but they might be like 緊張　-　きんちょうという感じがきらい or 'feeling きんちょう KEEps me awake at night'.

That's about how terrible and forgettable my mnemonics usually are. But if I can pass the word for a couple days running I usually don't forget it again even after I forget the mnemonic.

Also, while I definitely think you should balance actual reading with Anki, if you 'take a break' from Anki, try to make it a break only from adding cards. Do some reviews every day - you don't have to complete them if you're not adding cards - the backlog will naturally clear if you're not adding cards. However coming back to a backlog of 1000 or more cards is very frustrating. 10 minutes or so a day will keep the backlog manageable. Also setting a daily limit will hide the true size of the backlog and alleviate frustration. Also possibly help you manage keeping your anki time under control and let you do other things.

Yeah, I plan on just not adding new cards until the current ones are under control and mature while reading. I've only read a ~6 pages of easy manga, but I'm finding that reading is helping a lot in concreting some of the more common words I've been failing a lot (like 難しい、低い、気持ち、少し、つもり）.

I have tried using multiple example sentences (like going to Jisho and reading 5-10 of them) for difficult cards in a lot of cases, but I find that it doesn't do much. I'll try mnemonics though; they probably take too much time for every card, but if I'm failing a card repeatedly it might be worth it.

Thanks for the advice

What I find helpful for acquiring vocabulary is to study a passage of a page or so, and read and re-read the passage until I can recall the new words in it.

tinymint Wrote:I've been at it for about 2 weeks and have added about 500 cards, but my young retention is still around 40% (today's was 35% correct), whereas I understand it should be at least in the 70%-80% range.

This is incorrect. Mature cards should have a 70-80% retention rate, young cards could be all over the place. If you are ending up with a lot of leech cards, then you might want to reconsider how you are learning/reviewing. Maybe change the card formatting or use other tricks to make them stick.

Since you state that you also tend to miss on new cards many times in a session. I recommend 'staging' the cards you plan to add to the review. So you would have a learning deck and a review deck. The learning deck can be a 'filtered deck' in Anki. In Anki 1, I use to have what I called my learning/priming deck which had the settings set up just right so that each day I would load 20-30 new cards in. You would only see 3-5 cards at a time. The deck was set so that these 3-5 would have accelerated "need to review" times. So at first it was "review now" and after I passed it with a 3 or 4 it moved to "review 1-3 min" and it would continue to increase until it was eventually "review in 1 day." Anki 2 has this in the form of "stepping" (its in the settings, read the manual). But the important point of the deck was that I would see the same 3-5 cards repeatedly until they got moved to the "review in 5-7 min" category, and then a new card would be shown. If a card in the later "review slots" was missed then any current new cards being reviewed were bumped out till those already reviewed cards made it back into later slots. Anki 2 can do all of these things but you might need to read the manual to figure out how to set some of them up. Stepping is the setting for how often to review a card before it moves from learning->young, tweak that. The "don't show new cards till old cards are passed" is probably in the part dealing with how to handle new cards. You can set all these up in a filter/cram deck.

Just note that once you return the cards in the cram deck to the home deck (where you pulled from), you'll still have to review them as new cards, but at least it should go quicker. Don't be afraid to add current troublesome young cards to the cram deck.

tinymint Wrote:Yeah, I plan on just not adding new cards until the current ones are under control and mature while reading. I've only read a ~6 pages of easy manga, but I'm finding that reading is helping a lot in concreting some of the more common words I've been failing a lot (like 難しい、低い、気持ち、少し、つもり）.

This is what I found to be the most helpful. It can be difficult to find things at your level early on, but I found that paying less attention to the word itself and more attention to the sentence it was in (reading, in other words) made it easier to remember words when I reviewed or added them in Anki.
I'm sure there's a way to make it more efficient, but I'm too lazy to do more than just read what I want and add cards from premade decks.

tinymint Wrote:I plan on just not adding new cards until the current ones are under control and mature while reading. I've only read a ~6 pages of easy manga, but I'm finding that reading is helping a lot in concreting some of the more common words I've been failing a lot

(...)

I'll try mnemonics though; they probably take too much time for every card, but if I'm failing a card repeatedly it might be worth it.

Thanks for the advice

Sounds like you're on the right track! I agree about both the effect of reading and your idea of when to use a mnemonic. You're welcome, and 頑張って!