This has probably been answered time and time again, so I apologize. But I realized that as I am studying Anki cards, there are some words where I ONLY remember because I remember reading the sentence, or because I made a connection with another word in the sentence.... meaning if I were to read it somewhere else in the "wild", I probably wouldn't know it.

What should I do about these kind of cards? Will I just learn them and be able to recognize them in time? Should I mark them as "Again" and go over them again?

You are right, this has been talked about many times before and I'm not sure there is exactly a perfect solution. But here are a few options that have been suggested:

1. Study single word vocabulary cards
2. Change your sentence cards to MCBs
3. Create multiple sentence cards for each word.
4. Use javascript to randomly select from multiple sentences containing the word.

My own preference is to study single word vocabulary cards. I do add the sentence to the back of the card so if there's any ambiguity in the meaning of the word, I can read the sentence. IMHO sentence cards in anki are more useful for learning grammar and not as efficient for learning individual words. I prefer to learn the nuance of words from reading them in the wild. But the MCB route is an interesting alternative if you really feel the need to learn vocab through sentences.

This exact problem is why I take my example sentences from the dictionary, looking for short sentences that give context for the word without making the word's meaning obvious.These sentences tend to be both simple and similar to each other, so it's less likely to memorize the sentences instead of the word.

I know people love their long citations from native materials, but I feel like those sentences give away the meaning of the word many times, and also just take longer to read. And they aren't really any more 'fun' than any other sentence when you're reading them for the 10th time.

Even though I try to avoid this problem, I don't think it's a big deal. I often find that, while it takes a struggle, I -do- recall the word when I encounter in the wild, just not easily. Even when I don't, I've effectively memorized the -sentence-, so when I encounter the word in the wild it gets properly fixed in my memory after looking it up once and seeing it in new contexts a few times.

Once in awhile the 'memorized sentence' gets to a big interval and I just fail it... I recognize the sentence but the word doesn't jump to mind anymore. In this last case I might just stop and make a better sentence.

I certainly wouldn't fail a card that you are recalling, even if you feel like it's only because of the sentence. Seeing the same sentence even more often will only lock it down more as a 'memorized sentence'. Change the sentence if you want, or just keep going and see what happens when you do meet the word in the wild.

Dreambox Wrote:What should I do about these kind of cards?

Do nothing.

There is so much vocabulary that you need to be exposed for that you should be going for breadth and not depth. An educated native has an absolutely massive passive vocabulary and you don't need to gimp yourself by prematurely focusing on perfection. The main focus of your studies for several years should be getting exposure to as much grammar and vocabulary as possible as every Japanese goal requires a massive passive vocabulary. All of the specifics are just mental masterbation that distract you from that goal.

So many posts on this forum make it sound like Anki stats are the ultimate goal, but I don't know anyone who started learning Japanese with the goal of making a huge Anki deck with perfect stat graphs. Figure out the amount of vocabulary you need to get to in order to start enjoying Japanese. Use Anki to expose yourself to that vocabulary as rapidly as possible and ignore anything that doesn't stick in a reasonable amount of time. Then start enjoying native materials and all of that vocabulary that was fuzzy will start solidifying from being reinforced by the context of native usage.

yogert909 Wrote:I do add the sentence to the back of the card so if there's any ambiguity in the meaning of the word, I can read the sentence.

Several people put the sentence separately on the front - and still test only the single word vocab.

Using white as a colour makes the sentence completely invisible (you have to mark the area to make it visible). Yellow would do the same and one member stated using light grey, personally I just use normal black some cm below the vocab (needs to be well apart), so if I do not recall the word I can see without any time loss the sentence.

And many times just by looking at the first words of the sentence the meaning and/or pronounciation comes to mind. So it is definitely in these cases the sentence and not the word I learned.

That is not ideal, but no big issue as I rate them as difficult. I think that is fair enough as in real life there is also always some context and never stand alone words. So no need to fail in these cases.

And also no need to put extra effort in the sentence selection or special trimming to avoid hints. I think if the sentence is not completely abstract it will work as trigger when you're reading it for the 10th time.

In practise there will be not a lot of cases where you need to make a better sentence.

tokyostyle Wrote:So many posts on this forum make it sound like Anki stats are the ultimate goal, but I don't know anyone who started learning Japanese with the goal of making a huge Anki deck with perfect stat graphs.

This is a result of striving for efficiency. If you have the 'proper' Anki stats (8x% retention rate, consistent card additions, fast review speed, etc), then you should be making the best possible progress on that front (that is, things you can do in Anki). Like any other pursuit of efficiency, after you've done it long enough, you fixate on those efficiency indicators.

(I do this with driving too, because I'm cheap. I have a target gas mileage that I don't like falling below (which is significantly higher than most people get out of that model), even if it means minimizing the amount that I cool my car in the summer (no opening windows, because that introduces too much drag). For my gas mileage stat bragging, I've got a 14 year old 'small truck' (~1400kg, 4-cylinder) that I get 25-27mpg out of, easily; lowest I've ever gotten was 21, and that was because I had to run the A/C (or risk heat stroke) and was in lots of stop-and-go traffic on that tank. It's only supposed to get 23mpg on the highway... I have a feeling these numbers are for people that suck at driving.)

Of course, it doesn't do you a bit of good if you're maintaining those stats at the expense of extensive reading, listening, or other important exercises. Recognizing words is good, but they don't do you a bit of good if you can't understand how they're used with other words.

Matthias Wrote:Several people put the sentence separately on the front - and still test only the single word vocab.

I do this. The sentence font is significantly smaller than the word that's being tested (rather, the word is significantly larger), and to the lower part of the card (on my phone, this puts it neatly at the bottom of the available screen space when in landscape mode). On the back, since I was using one of the newer Core10k decks, there's multiple other example sentences that were mined from various online dictionaries (they weren't always the right word, but it worked for most of them). This really helped me with vague words or ones where the original example sentence sucked.
Since I try to go through my reviews quickly (or rather, with minimal effort), I only look at the sentences if I have to. I also used them when I added new cards from the deck, but since I've gone through them all...

But yeah, even though it's great to do things as efficiently as you can (because that shaves years off of projects like this), it's a waste if you spend too much time on it.

As for the actual questions in the OP...
1.) Don't worry about those words too much
2.) You'll get them sorted eventually, especially if you do a lot of reading
3.) I only use 'Again' if I completely failed a card; I usually just hit 'Hard' for words that I can remember when reading a sentence.

[s0apgun]

Don't have sentences on the front of the card.

tokyostyle Wrote:

Dreambox Wrote:What should I do about these kind of cards?

Do nothing.

There is so much vocabulary that you need to be exposed for that you should be going for breadth and not depth.

That's the best advice I've seen on learning Japanese in a really long time. Good job.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:

tokyostyle Wrote:

Dreambox Wrote:What should I do about these kind of cards?

Do nothing.

There is so much vocabulary that you need to be exposed for that you should be going for breadth and not depth.

That's the best advice I've seen on learning Japanese in a really long time. Good job.

Agreed.

s0apgun Wrote:Don't have sentences on the front of the card.

This. I don't remember a thing from my sentence-on-front vocab deck.

wareya Wrote:

s0apgun Wrote:Don't have sentences on the front of the card.

This. I don't remember a thing from my sentence-on-front vocab deck.

That may be a matter of different learning styles. Personally, I found that no matter how many times I drilled single-word vocab cards, it didn't make any difference, I still wouldn't remember them when I met them in the wild. I -only- learn words by reading them in the context of a sentence. I'll learn a word better by meeting it in the wild and looking it up once or twice, than I will by drilling it dozens of times with no context. I'll learn it best ( meaning most reliably able to read it properly when I encounter it again later) by drilling it with a context sentence.

Of course, you can put sentences on the back, but then it's easy to -not- read them, especially if you got the card right, so I prefer to keep my sentences on the front.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:That may be a matter of different learning styles. Personally, I found that no matter how many times I drilled single-word vocab cards, it didn't make any difference, I still wouldn't remember them when I met them in the wild.

That's interesting there can be that big of a difference in the way we are able to learn things. I've heard people say that they prefer to learn vocab via sentences, but I've never heard people not being able to remember words that were studied via single word cards. I'm exactly the opposite - I feel frustrated when I'm reading something that has too many words that I haven't learned a dictionary definition for.

yogert909 Wrote:I've heard people say that they prefer to learn vocab via sentences, but I've never heard people not being able to remember words that were studied via single word cards.

I think Glossika summarizes well the reasoning behind using sentences rather than isolated words; what do you think of this? (Point 3 in particular.)

4 Secrets of the Mass Sentence Method

When learning a foreign language it’s best to use full sentences for a number of reasons:

1. Pronunciation—In languages like English, our words undergo a lot of pronunciation and intonation changes when words get strung together in sentences which is has been well analyzed in linguistics. This may be easy to learn for European students, but for Asian students it can be really difficult. Likewise it is true with languages like Chinese where the pronunciations and tones from individual words change once they appear in a sentence. By following the intonation and prosody of a native speaker saying a whole sentence, it’s much easier to learn rather than trying to say string each word together individually.

2. Syntax—the order of words, will be different than your own language. Human thought usually occurs in complete ideas. Every society has developed a way to express those ideas linearly by first saying what happened (the verb), or by first saying who did it (the agent), etc. Paying attention to this will accustom us to the way others speak.

3. Vocabulary—the meanings of words, never have just one meaning, and their usage is always different. You always have to learn words in context and which words they’re paired with. These are called collocations. To “commit a crime” and to “commit to a relationship” use two different verbs in most other languages. Never assume that learning “commit” by itself will give you the answer. After a lifetime in lexicography, Patrick Hanks “reached the alarming conclusion that words don’t have meaning,” but rather that “definitions listed in dictionaries can be regarded as presenting meaning potentials rather than meanings as such.” This is why collocations are so important.

4. Grammar—the changes or morphology in words are always in flux. Memorizing rules will not help you achieve fluency. You have to experience them as a native speaker says them, repeat them as a native speaker would, and through mass amount of practice come to an innate understanding of the inner workings of a language’s morphology. Most native speakers can’t explain their own grammar. It just happens.

[Source: Google Books]

That's the reasons for sentence decks, not for sentences on the front of word decks. Sentence decks have their place, but I really cannot learn words from word decks that have sentences on the front; and yes, there is a difference between them.

[s0apgun]

gdaxeman Wrote:...

Learn some words then read books.

wareya Wrote:That's the reasons for sentence decks, not for sentences on the front of word decks. Sentence decks have their place, but I really cannot learn words from word decks that have sentences on the front; and yes, there is a difference between them.

I'm curious as to whether the cards you used with sentences on the front were formatted to properly ask for a word or if the formatting allowed you to more easily look at the sentence than the word. Formatting is very important for manipulating someone's focus.

As I mentioned, the sentences I use on the front of my vocabulary cards aren't readily apparent to my eye, because there's a giant-ass blue word center-justified and just barely in the upper half of the card. By comparison, the sentence is much smaller, in the regular black text, and near the bottom of the screen. When I'm reviewing, I don't look at the sentence unless I can't think of the word without a sentence (only rarely does looking at the sentence help me with words I don't know, unless it's a word I've failed a lot), because it takes conscious effort to look at the sentence instead of the word (especially when I'm going through most cards in about a second each).

EDIT: fixed 'are' to 'aren't' in the first sentence of the second block.

tokyostyle Wrote:

Dreambox Wrote:What should I do about these kind of cards?

Do nothing.

There is so much vocabulary that you need to be exposed for that you should be going for breadth and not depth. An educated native has an absolutely massive passive vocabulary and you don't need to gimp yourself by prematurely focusing on perfection. The main focus of your studies for several years should be getting exposure to as much grammar and vocabulary as possible as every Japanese goal requires a massive passive vocabulary. All of the specifics are just mental masterbation that distract you from that goal.

So many posts on this forum make it sound like Anki stats are the ultimate goal, but I don't know anyone who started learning Japanese with the goal of making a huge Anki deck with perfect stat graphs. Figure out the amount of vocabulary you need to get to in order to start enjoying Japanese. Use Anki to expose yourself to that vocabulary as rapidly as possible and ignore anything that doesn't stick in a reasonable amount of time. Then start enjoying native materials and all of that vocabulary that was fuzzy will start solidifying from being reinforced by the context of native usage.

Agreed, and not just because my Anki stats are terrible lol

This reminds me of what my health prof said, "Even eating watermelons can get you fat". Watermelons are about 46 kcal in a diced cup serving which isn't much. But if you eat a ridiculous amount, you can get fat.

This is the same with your vocabulary exposure. Eventually all the words you constantly see will make you "fat" with knowledge. LOL sorry for my bad analogy xD

@OP: If you're curious about what method I use, I do MCBs and occasionally the other MCBs variation

gdaxeman Wrote:

yogert909 Wrote:I've heard people say that they prefer to learn vocab via sentences, but I've never heard people not being able to remember words that were studied via single word cards.

I think Glossika summarizes well the reasoning behind using sentences rather than isolated words; what do you think of this? (Point 3 in particular.)
.....

I think that's fine if people want to use sentence cards if that's what works for them. I've done about 2k sentence cards myself and I don't think I'll be adding any more. From my experience, there are 3 problems with sentence cards:

1. A sentence card takes about twice as long to review as a single word vocabulary card. MCBs probably help a lot with this, but then it's not a proper sentence card that addresses the 4 points you mentioned.

2. I don't learn the word nearly as easily as I do with single word vocabulary cards.

3. About 20% of my sentence cards suffer from the problem that started this thread, I memorize the sentence, not the meaning of the word.

These 3 points combined result in sentence cards being much less efficient with my study time. Here's my view on the 4 points you mentioned.

1. Pronunciation This is a fair point. If you have native audio tracks for the sentences and are actively shadowing the speaker. I think you can learn a lot from sentence cards this way. Even if you are simply listening and not shadowing, you probably absorb something, but probably not enough to justify using sentence cards all by itself.

2. Syntax This sounds a lot like grammar to me, so my comment on grammar applies here.

3. Vocabulary I believe collocations and idioms are much more efficiently(and enjoyably) learned via simply reading. You get much more variety and context(longer texts) from extensive reading then you do from reading the same sentence over and over.

4. Grammar I do feel that grammar cards are indispensable. But that is no reason to study thousands of sentence cards to learn grammar. My tae kim deck has about 500 sentence cards in it. I believe that's about 3 cards for each grammar point, giving me enough variety to understand the grammar if I encounter it in the wild.

sholum Wrote:I'm curious as to whether the cards you used with sentences on the front were formatted to properly ask for a word or if the formatting allowed you to more easily look at the sentence than the word. Formatting is very important for manipulating someone's focus.

Re:first:

The word was front and center in a large font. The sentence was in a very much smaller font and below it. However, every single word that I didn't know by heart, I associated the meaning with the sentence, rather than the word. The only way it could have possibly worked is if I had randomized sentences on the front, at which point they really become a hint, and showing hints by default is bad.

I'm sure it would work for some people, but we absolutely know that words-only on front will work for everyone. Asking people to put sentences on the front of vocabulary decks is bad advice.

RawrPk Wrote:@OP: If you're curious about what method I use, I do MCBs and occasionally the other MCBs variation

Your original article about highlighting information, rather than closing it, is exactly what I do as well. It makes reps nice and fast while still leaving the surrounding context. However instead of bolding I use a lot of Anki cloze tricks to get a highlighted word on front and full furigana sentence on back. This also allows me to use a singe Anki note to create several cards so I can take a huge paragraph and rip it into vocab. Due to the way Anki schedules things this turns into a form of incremental reading.

I also tried the one kanji per card but it was just a waste of time for me personally. I didn't learn hard words any better having to review them twice in a row and extra reps on easier words was just busy work.

Honestly I figured everyone was doing sentence cards like this by now. I can't imagine grading a long sentence with no focus as it totally breaks the flashcard principles set out by SuperMemo.

yogert909 Wrote:About 20% of my sentence cards suffer from the problem that started this thread, I memorize the sentence, not the meaning of the word.

This is exactly what you want and why sentences are so powerful. They provide patterns for you brain for production. If you are listing one of the goals of learning sentences as a negative then you have completely misunderstood the point of using them.

Japanese is not putting together a bunch of words based on English glosses and then reversing the order. It is speaking in the same flow and pattern as socially agreed upon by native speakers and in turn being able to understand the meaning of such utterances.

tokyostyle Wrote:

yogert909 Wrote:About 20% of my sentence cards suffer from the problem that started this thread, I memorize the sentence, not the meaning of the word.

This is exactly what you want and why sentences are so powerful. They provide patterns for you brain for production. If you are listing one of the goals of learning sentences as a negative then you have completely misunderstood the point of using them.

Japanese is not putting together a bunch of words based on English glosses and then reversing the order. It is speaking in the same flow and pattern as socially agreed upon by native speakers and in turn being able to understand the meaning of such utterances.

I agree with what you said about the need to learn patterns, but I prefer to learn patterns from reading and listening. You are writing as if the alternative to sentence cards are vocabulary cards and.... nothing else. But if you augment vocab cards with actual written and spoken japanese, you aren't just learning words to blindly plug into reversed english sentences as you suggest. You are learning the subtle meaning of words, how the words fit together in practice as well as multiple different ways of expressing the same idea.

On the other hand, I don't feel that memorizing japanese sentences would be very effective for me. And sentence cards aren't helping to learn vocabulary - for me at least. Like I said, I've done both and I know what works doesn't work for me.

yogert909 Wrote:I agree with what you said about the need to learn patterns, but I prefer to learn patterns from reading and listening.

I also treat my Anki reps as secondary to everything else. At the same time I have found that passive activities like reading and listening don't ever fix my mistakes so I have cards targeted at things I habitually mess up.

There's some good replies here already but it's an interesting topic and I wanted to throw in my two cents. I think what kind of flashcards you use to study can depend on what you're trying to accomplish and where you are at in your Japanese studies. When I was really new to Japanese, I found that studying vocabulary individually, without sentences, or putting sentences on the back just as a side thought for extra context if I so desired worked best. This was mostly because reading a whole sentence on the front slowed me down too much - even after a couple years of studying Japanese. In theory, if someone really motivated me to use sentence decks I probably could have forced it and maybe have been thankful but working it into my routine after work it just wasn't something that worked for me. I would rather use recall decks with pictures and english on side 1 than a sentence on side 1.

However, I've been studying Japanese roughly 4 years now - I don't live in Japan and didn't visit Japan until just recently. But I've been at it 4 years now without any big gaps in studying. I can do a sentence deck efficiently enough now that I wouldn't want to do it any other way. Word collocations are just so important and the best way to get them is by reading sentences. Sure, if your deck is setup so you're reading side 1 and it has the sentence then the testing is a bit passive in the sense that you're not forced to recall the target collocation. When you go to talk you may not get it perfect. But you at least have a basis, something in your head of how it's supposed to be like. You have a chance. I used to worry that a sentence was like giving myself a huge hint when testing a word and that doing it out of context was therefore safer but I'm really against that now. My anki deck includes tons of crap I put into it. If I am in the wild and reading something and it doesn't click I can just add a new sentence to my deck with that same word again from the wild. But in a new sentence in a new context. I'm now more likely to remember than before and with a new sentence to study I'm still learning new stuff - grammar new collocations etc.

But this is me at where I'm at now in my studies. A couple of years ago maybe sentences weren't the way to go. To be honest, I'm actually throwing whole paragraphs into my deck in some cases or multiple sentences if the sentences are short. I'm striving to get a good context on there for review. I don't want to review something after a big interval and forget the context that I grabbed the example out of. Context is so key.

That being said I do think that studying words in isolation can be of benefit. Especially if you do it as a recall so that you have English on the front. But I find this is more beneficial in the short term - like cramming for a test. In the long term i think the context and the connections you create out of that will create more permanent, stronger connections lasting a lifetime. I think if I went back to my former self four years ago I would insist on more sentences.. more shadowing. My former self might tell my future self to go to hell though heheh.

tokyostyle Wrote:

RawrPk Wrote:@OP: If you're curious about what method I use, I do MCBs and occasionally the other MCBs variation

Your original article about highlighting information, rather than closing it, is exactly what I do as well. It makes reps nice and fast while still leaving the surrounding context. However instead of bolding I use a lot of Anki cloze tricks to get a highlighted word on front and full furigana sentence on back. This also allows me to use a singe Anki note to create several cards so I can take a huge paragraph and rip it into vocab. Due to the way Anki schedules things this turns into a form of incremental reading.

I also tried the one kanji per card but it was just a waste of time for me personally. I didn't learn hard words any better having to review them twice in a row and extra reps on easier words was just busy work.

Honestly I figured everyone was doing sentence cards like this by now. I can't imagine grading a long sentence with no focus as it totally breaks the flashcard principles set out by SuperMemo.

lol I am not Jeff Ben but I just like his MCBs method. Just wondering how your clozed delete setup actually looks like? I'm having trouble trying to imagine it. Oh, as for the other MCBs, I actually do a production variation of the card. I only ever did this when I was still taking Japanese courses in school for production exams. I'll use Jeff's same example sentence.

がっ校に通う

-----
学校に通う

school

It's not something I do now as I am self learning only these days and recognition is good enough for now

There are a lot of interesting ideas and personal methods of study in this thread, which I appreciate and greatly enjoy reading about.. I didn't expect so many in depth replies! but it's too much to really wrap my head around. It SHOULD help, but honestly now I'm just running in circles. One says learn words in isolation, others say learn via context with sentences on the front.

After considering, I think maybe the only thing to do would be to try both ways and see what really works for me, since obviously everyones' brains work differently.

I currently don't have my own deck, which may be part of my problem; I'm using Nayr's core 5k deck with native audio. I thought it would be a better starting point than trying to make my own deck, also since it comes with decent audio (there are one or two mistakes I've come across so far where the audio doesn't match a few words)... but I realize that using a deck like this makes it difficult to make a personal connection to the content I'm trying to learn.

So... should I just scrap what I'm doing and start making my own decks again? I've started and stopped so many decks now I've lost count, due to me being unsure of myself. It's really getting silly. Despite this, I'm at a point in my studies where I'm noticeably improving again with listening and recognizing more and more words, but I know the starting and stopping is really just a big waste of time and is probably slowing me down. However, I like Nayr's deck because I've gotten accustomed to some previously unfamiliar grammar points and different uses for some words. The voice also helps for shadowing purposes.

Should I make my own deck alongside Nayr's, instead of scrapping it?