(2016-05-27, 2:58 am)cophnia61 Wrote: do you keep reviewing the sub2srs deck indefinitely? or just until you feel confortable with an episode? I asm because it sounds like a lot of work to review it once you reach a certain amount of material...

Let me offer a different answer than my first. There are a number of things that can work. 

Option 1 - Delete it once you feel comfortable with the drama. This is good for the mindset that you're trying to understand the drama when you watch/listen to it, not memorize it.

Option 2 - Create vocabulary cards from words you learn. Useful for those that tire of systematic learning of vocabulary via Core 2k/6k/10k or whatever. Keep the vocabulary cards, delete the drama cards when you're comfortable.

Option 3 - Create subs2srs with context information (something like 3 lines previous, 1 line next). Useful if you want to keep drama cards for the long haul and don't need to worry about context.

I'm leaning to option 1 since I'm getting back into grammar and vocabulary learning. If I finish that and still do drama decks, then I'll switch to option 2. While I did do Option 3 at first many years ago before I stopped studying Japanese, it really was pointless after a bit since I was watching, listening and reading the dramas anyway. The most important thing is getting it to where that drama makes sense when you watch it and you're picking up most words spoken.

If you do nothing but listening can you magically read? Of course not. It makes sense then that if you can read you can't magically listen. They are different skills. You need to train them both. If you out bulk time into one and limited into another of course one will be less than the other. Common sense.

(2016-05-28, 3:35 am)Mokumoku Wrote: If you do nothing but listening can you magically read? Of course not. It makes sense then that if you can read you can't magically listen. They are different skills. You need to train them both. If you out bulk time into one and limited into another of course one will be less than the other. Common sense.

These skills may not be exactly the same, but they're not unrelated either. If you spend a whole year doing nothing but reading comprehensible Japanese for hours every single day, it won't help your listening as much as actually listening to comprehensible Japanese. But it will most definitely improve your listening, in the sense that both listening and reading require you to process information in the target language. Both are passive skills that require interpreting a message in Japanese.

By the same token, writing can help your speaking. I can hardly speak any Japanese because I haven't been working on my production, but I know that writing would definitely improve my speaking. Yet, not everyone realizes, despite the fact that both skills involve the ability to put words together properly. If you can write sentences in Japanese "fluently"- in the sense that you can recall/use words and grammar efficiently without having to think about these things - then all you'll have to work on to speak well is pretty much pronunciation. As long as you work on that, you'll "magically" be able to speak.

(2016-05-28, 4:53 am)FlameseeK Wrote: By the same token, writing can help your speaking. I can hardly speak any Japanese because I haven't been working on my production, but I know that writing would definitely improve my speaking. Yet, not everyone realizes, despite the fact that both skills involve the ability to put words together properly. If you can write sentences in Japanese "fluently"- in the sense that you can recall/use words and grammar efficiently without having to think about these things - then all you'll have to work on to speak well is pretty much pronunciation. As long as you work on that, you'll "magically" be able to speak.

While this is true to an extent, I know from experience that writing doesn't help speech past a certain point. I haven't reached that point with Japanese yet, but in English (my native language), my writing is far better than my speech, not because writing is magically easier than speaking, but because I have as much time as I want to get my thoughts together (clearly, I don't use very much of it).
I've never been good at speaking; when I want to say something, there's too many ideas of what I want to say and how I want to say it going on at once; when I don't have anything I really want to say, I think too hard about how to speak without saying anything.
I'm not much of a conversationalist; I prefer listening to speaking most of the time, despite the way my posts make me seem.

The above isn't my problem with speaking Japanese, but there's a similar gap in my ability to write and my ability to speak that I think everyone experiences.
When I want to write something in Japanese, I have plenty of time to think about how to say it and how I want to say it, but when speaking, I'm floundering just to keep the conversation going (more so than with English, that is).

The conversation drills I've done with my tutor have been quite difficult, even though I'm only supposed to keep a conversation up for five minutes... I was saved one time by a video I'd just watched about a computer finally besting the top go player, but otherwise, it's been difficult even when I have something I want to try talking about.
(During normal lessons, it's the weird half-English, half-Japanese that happens when you're trying to both use the language and get things across at a reasonable rate)

As for reading and listening (a.k.a. the actual topic), I've found that reading does help listening by increasing your familiarity with common collocations and phrases; as someone already mentioned, it doesn't really help with words until you've figured out that that's the word that's being said.
I've found it easier to hear phrases that I've read to the point of instantly recognizing than any set of particular words.
That doesn't mean it's not still 'listen to get better at listening', because that's the main method. And of course, more comprehensible audio is good.

It's not that writing can't help your speech anymore at this point. In fact, it most definitely can. Well, not writing per se, but rather your ability to "create" sentences. Or perhaps I should say, selecting sentence patterns and words that will make your speech better beforehand, then making a point of deliberately using them until they become second nature. Of course, you won't be creating them on the spot... you'll be repeating them instead. But by getting used to saying certain things, some of the things you say will be as good as if you'd taken the time to write them down. My point is that making a point of using these patterns constantly in your writing (e.g. having a list next to you) would obviously help you get used to making sentences the way you want.

It's like learning how to play guitar solos. At one point, it hit me that the best way to get really good at improvising guitar solos was actually to study a lot of guitar licks (i.e. phrasing, patterns, etc) and even devising your own beforehand. That becomes your foundation for when you want to improvise, because it sounds good and you know it!

There's a huge difference between creating sentences on the spot and taking your time to write things perfectly. The former relies on what's become second nature to you for the most part, the later is simply put perfectionism that you can't afford to have in oral speech - unless you work on specific things you need to improve in advance. Hence, why I say that it's ("writing", or better yet in this case, production) fluency in the sense that you don't have to take your time to recall certains words or think to use certain sentence patterns or grammar points that can be helpful.

For instance, I'm sure if you start writing about a topic you don't feel comfortable with yet (e.g. politics, soccer, sci-fi, whatever really) every day, after a short while you'll be much more capable of talking about that topic compared to how you started, even if you don't have a single conversation with someone about these things.