Hey all!

So, I've gotten to the point in my Japanese career where I can handle pretty much anything written (my listening's still got a ways to go, though) that gets tossed my way and understand it with the aid of a dictionary. I'm over halfway through w/ Core 6k, and afterwards, I'm highly considering moving onto the 10k deck as well, but even then, I realize there's still gonna be a metric crap-ton of words I don't understand when I first encounter them. I do like to play through games in Japanese as a way to keep myself on my toes with the language, so when I encounter words that I'm not familiar with, I make it a point to record the words via Midori, and then export them to Anki for review.

...And yet, I can't escape the feeling that there has to be some better way to go about this. Doing the Midori-> Anki method, I of course lose out on example sentences, and while the Anki scheduling system makes remembering the words a bit easier, something about it doesn't feel quite as intuitive as going through the Core decks. Perhaps this is just an inevitability, but I want to get the most out of going through games like this, even if it means I go through them at a snail's pace. Furthermore, if I can find a good method, I can easily apply it to reading as well (I'm doing my undergrad thesis on representations of the American Dream in グレイト・ギャツビー in Japanese, so this is also a biggie).

So... long story short, I'd really like to get some advice from you all on how to efficiently and effectively mine vocab from games and such for Anki, particularly with regards to card structure, words per day, and so forth.

Play games that have a Japanese script available. I find that its slow an inefficient to follow the script while playing. Just play a while, then go back and read through the script for what you covered. Copy paste in to anki.

I just take screenshots and then use the actual image with a cloze deletion of the word and a definition on the front. The back is the word, it's reading and rtk keywords.

If the game is emulated you can use kanjitomo while you play. For ps3 games you can take screenshots in any game with custom firmware. Using images helps with recall a lot.

I'd also suggest just adding the most recent words as soon as possible so the scene in the game will still be memorable. So just add whatever words you saw on the same day or the next day if possible. If you get a backlog just keep adding as much as you're comfortable with.

Are you sure it's worth doing? If you're only halfway through Core6k and that's your main vocabulary source - if you want to learn more words wouldn't it make more sense to just up the number of Core cards per day? There's probably nothing special enough about words you find in video games that you should ruin the experience of playing them by stopping every few minutes to mess around with saving words and making cards. It might be better to just treat them as practice rather than something to be studied.

Unless you can get the script, mining games seems more trouble than it's worth.

If you specifically want game-related or fantasy-related vocabulary, rather than mining a game it might be better to go after game-related anime via subs2srs, which is always going to be more efficient.

Thanks for replying, everybody!

I probably should've specified, but games aren't my main source of vocab at all. I'm still moving through Core and the 完全マスター語彙 for N1 as well, along with my reading in グレイト・ギャツビー for my thesis. Mainly, when I do work with games, it's just when I realize I've got a few minutes of free time, and I want to be productive with them when I'm already on track for the day with my other study sources. With that in mind, the vocab's just a matter of me wanting to make sure I'm able to get the most out of what I've done. Most of the games I'm playing do have scripts available online for them as well, so that certainly helps.

In terms of making flashcards for words on your own, how do you all typically handle the definitions? Since Midori is where I get most of the definitions from, sometimes I end up with a whole slew of other meanings than the one I'm trying to focus on for a certain word. One other thing I was thinking about with the words was manually inserting the sentence I find them in into their flashcards. For those who've tried something like that, have you noticed if it tends to help or not? I'm just kind of a noob with what's effective and what's not when it comes to making Anki content instead of using pre-made decks.

Thanks a ton in advance!

Raulsen Wrote:In terms of making flashcards for words on your own, how do you all typically handle the definitions? Since Midori is where I get most of the definitions from, sometimes I end up with a whole slew of other meanings than the one I'm trying to focus on for a certain word. One other thing I was thinking about with the words was manually inserting the sentence I find them in into their flashcards. For those who've tried something like that, have you noticed if it tends to help or not? I'm just kind of a noob with what's effective and what's not when it comes to making Anki content instead of using pre-made decks.

I only put the definition that applies. I do think the whole sentence helps but like I said I keep the whole image of the scene and just put a box over the word.

Also it doesn't take me any longer to make production cards out of the screenshots compared to editing subs2srs cards into production cards.

cracky Wrote:

Raulsen Wrote:In terms of making flashcards for words on your own, how do you all typically handle the definitions? Since Midori is where I get most of the definitions from, sometimes I end up with a whole slew of other meanings than the one I'm trying to focus on for a certain word. One other thing I was thinking about with the words was manually inserting the sentence I find them in into their flashcards. For those who've tried something like that, have you noticed if it tends to help or not? I'm just kind of a noob with what's effective and what's not when it comes to making Anki content instead of using pre-made decks.

I only put the definition that applies. I do think the whole sentence helps but like I said I keep the whole image of the scene and just put a box over the word.

Also it doesn't take me any longer to make production cards out of the screenshots compared to editing subs2srs cards into production cards.

cracky, curious about your method, are you using image occlusion with your images?

repdetect2 Wrote:cracky, curious about your method, are you using image occlusion with your images?

The anki plugin? I don't use that, no. I just do it the manual way with photoshop and copy and paste it into anki. My workflow goes like this:
batch automate any changes I need to make to all of the images like resize
open the image I want to use
ocr or type the word into ebwin
drag a box over the word and fill
ctrl+a ctrl+c and paste it into anki
copy paste the definition, reading, word, and rtk keywords onto the card

More of it could probably be automated but that's how I do it.
Example front and back:
http://s2.postimg.org/n18csn76h/examplecard.jpg
http://s2.postimg.org/grhojdx5l/examplecard2.jpg

I use both english and japanese definitions depending on which one I like more.

cracky Wrote:

repdetect2 Wrote:cracky, curious about your method, are you using image occlusion with your images?

The anki plugin? I don't use that, no. I just do it the manual way with photoshop and copy and paste it into anki. My workflow goes like this:
batch automate any changes I need to make to all of the images like resize
open the image I want to use
ocr or type the word into ebwin
drag a box over the word and fill
ctrl+a ctrl+c and paste it into anki
copy paste the definition, reading, word, and rtk keywords onto the card

More of it could probably be automated but that's how I do it.
Example front and back:
http://s2.postimg.org/n18csn76h/examplecard.jpg
http://s2.postimg.org/grhojdx5l/examplecard2.jpg

I use both english and japanese definitions depending on which one I like more.

Awesome, thanks so much for your sharing your worfklow--I'm going to implement that into my student as it sounds like a great way to learn.

cracky Wrote:I just take screenshots and then use the actual image with a cloze deletion of the word and a definition on the front. The back is the word, it's reading and rtk keywords.

If the game is emulated you can use kanjitomo while you play. For ps3 games you can take screenshots in any game with custom firmware. Using images helps with recall a lot.

I'd also suggest just adding the most recent words as soon as possible so the scene in the game will still be memorable. So just add whatever words you saw on the same day or the next day if possible. If you get a backlog just keep adding as much as you're comfortable with.

I'm currently in the process of trying to get KanjiTomo to work on my Mac (any tips? It just keeps telling me I need to have some sort of Java Runtime Environment installed when I've already downloaded it AND installed it), but out of curiosity, can the program produce text that can be copied or somehow edited? Heck, if I could get something like that to work with Rikai-sama, I'd have it made with just about anything I wanna' study, regardless of whether I have a script or not.

I also saw you mention some site called box.com in another thread with regards to using images. I'm a little bit curious, and I was wondering if you could give me a brief idea of how it's actually used.

Thanks a ton!

Raulsen Wrote:I'm currently in the process of trying to get KanjiTomo to work on my Mac (any tips? It just keeps telling me I need to have some sort of Java Runtime Environment installed when I've already downloaded it AND installed it), but out of curiosity, can the program produce text that can be copied or somehow edited? Heck, if I could get something like that to work with Rikai-sama, I'd have it made with just about anything I wanna' study, regardless of whether I have a script or not.

I don't have a mac so I can't help with that but it should be fixable. You can copy the results to clipboard, it only recognizes up to 4 character words at a time though.

Raulsen Wrote:I also saw you mention some site called box.com in another thread with regards to using images. I'm a little bit curious, and I was wondering if you could give me a brief idea of how it's actually used.

Sure, I just use that for storing stuff off my tablet while I'm reading it. It's like dropbox if you've ever used that. You install the box app on whatever you're reading manga on and then you can easily export the image to it when you take a screenshot. Then you have all the images in a place you can go through on your pc later.

Well, I eventually got KanjiTomo to work, but it was a good deal slower than I expected, so I don't think I'm going to be able to use it.

As far as box.com goes, I like your screenshot idea a lot, so I might just try that! Thanks a ton!

If you have the script for the game, wouldn't it be easier to batch process sentences into anki and use something like morphman to filter out what you already know?

I'm not actually familiar with how to batch process sentences into Anki... but it sounds magical.

What I've been doing recently is just using Rikaisama with the scripts to isolate what I don't know as I play.

yogert909 Wrote:If you have the script for the game, wouldn't it be easier to batch process sentences into anki and use something like morphman to filter out what you already know?

Well for me the big part to begin with is the images so just doing the script would be missing that. I also find production cards to be more useful to me than recognition cards so I'd still have to edit them into production cards.

Can morphman automate creation of cloze deleted sentences? The sentences I add are usually i+1 anyway so I never checked it out. I'll probably stick with screenshots either way but it would be cool to know that's an option.