Which do you think is a better method?


It seems to me that sentence mining has the benefit of always being being known words +1 new word in addition to being something you found in the wild. The downside is that you may translate wrong.

On the other hand, core 6k seems good because it gives you the definition, but at a lot of times gives you 2-4 new words in a single sentence.



Which do you guys think is a better method?

Both; start with Core for a primer and switch to mining from native material (depending on your zeal, you may be doing both at the same time, at some point).

At this level, almost every word you see will be new; Core gives you a primer of vocabulary in a nice, premade set, which are mostly very common words which you'll need to know anyway. As such, I recommend it simply because you save a ton of time making cards.

However, some people really prefer making their own cards (they say it helps with their retention), so if that's your thing, go for it.

I've always gone with the most efficient/lazy methods, because the more effort you exert, the more likely you are to get burned out.

(2016-02-20, 8:36 pm)sholum Wrote: Both; start with Core for a primer and switch to mining from native material (depending on your zeal, you may be doing both at the same time, at some point).

At this level, almost every word you see will be new; Core gives you a primer of vocabulary in a nice, premade set, which are mostly very common words which you'll need to know anyway. As such, I recommend it simply because you save a ton of time making cards.

Do you think it is worth skipping cards in the core deck if you really don't want to learn them at the moment? Especially things highly relating to school, or specific things like that - things I won't be using often (thus probably forgetting them sense I never use the words)

Sentence mining "in the wild" gives per definition a random number of new words in the sentence.

If it is 0 the sentence is probably not interesting enough to enter into your learning base.
If it is 1 it is ideal.
If it is >1 you could create multiple entries from the sentence or choose one word and just rely on a translation for the others.

That is not that much different for Core 6k (or 10k). Though there is a version which tried to sort the deck according to i+1 to avoid that you get several new words at a time. It might be difficult to find nowadays, but perhaps someone who used it can help you.



Whatever way you choose, you have less problems with >1 new words in a sentence if you do learn vocab and not sentences - i.e. use the sentence only as example. And in that case the premade Core just seems more convenient.

Core covers a lot of frequent words and is by this more systematic than just picking up a word here and there. And if you use Core you can still pick up additional words in the wild!

(2016-02-20, 8:57 pm)danatoth Wrote:

(2016-02-20, 8:36 pm)sholum Wrote: Both; start with Core for a primer and switch to mining from native material (depending on your zeal, you may be doing both at the same time, at some point).

At this level, almost every word you see will be new; Core gives you a primer of vocabulary in a nice, premade set, which are mostly very common words which you'll need to know anyway. As such, I recommend it simply because you save a ton of time making cards.

Do you think it is worth skipping cards in the core deck if you really don't want to learn them at the moment? Especially things highly relating to school, or specific things like that - things I won't be using often (thus probably forgetting them sense I never use the words)

I only recommend suspending cards which are leeches (you fail over and over again) or that you already know perfectly (私, 出来る, etc); you can set Anki to determine leeches for you.
That's not to say that you can't skip words, but I don't see any point in doing so.

Most of the words that I don't see very often from Core are political or legal ones, but that's only because I don't care to read about politics in Japan (US politics is bad enough). There are maybe a handful of words for school subjects, so there's not really any gain in skipping them entirely, in my opinion.
Most of Core6k (and even 10k) is comprise of general vocabulary that aren't specific to any one field.

(2016-02-20, 8:57 pm)Matthias Wrote: Though there is a version which tried to sort the deck according to i+1 to avoid that you get several new words at a time. It might be difficult to find nowadays, but perhaps someone who used it can help you.

If that exists, it would be so perfect!

I think if your medium-term goal in Japanese is to enjoy pop culture stuff (light novels / anime / video games / music) then it really doesn't make that much sense to learn all the political and business words in Core. (Not right away, at least. Obviously you'll need to learn them eventually.) If you're genuinely interested in reading the Nikkei, that might be a different story. At the same time, I feel like with sentence mining you run the risk of adding a lot of very rare words.

My current strategy for studying Chinese is to find new words in native material I'm reading, but run all my new words through a frequency dictionary, and only add words in the ~15,000 most common. (I'll expand that as my vocabulary gets better.) I know there's a frequency list out there somewhere that's specific to light novels, rather than the newspapers that were used for the Core decks; it might be useful to make an Anki deck from that.

(2016-02-20, 7:44 pm)danatoth Wrote: The downside is that you may translate wrong.

Just don't translate. I have no English/German on most of my cards. 
If I have it, it's because the Chinese definition of the word was too hard or to cumbersome.
But I never put the translation of the sentence.

(2016-02-20, 11:14 pm)Wurstmann Wrote:

(2016-02-20, 7:44 pm)danatoth Wrote: The downside is that you may translate wrong.

Just don't translate. I have no English/German on most of my cards. 
If I have it, it's because the Chinese definition of the word was too hard or to cumbersome.
But I never put the translation of the sentence.

Sounds about as useful as bashing a book against your head to me... I'm assuming you have some system to connect what you're looking at and what it means?

Of course I have the Chinese definition of the unknown word on the back of the card.
What I mean is, when I read the sentence I don't think about what it means in English,
This only works if you have a foundation in the language already (after doing a textbook etc.).
Otherwise you won't be able to find sentences with just one unknown word

(2016-02-21, 3:59 am)Wurstmann Wrote: Of course I have the Chinese definition of the unknown word on the back of the card.
What I mean is, when I read the sentence I don't think about what it means in English,
This only works if you have a foundation in the language already (after doing a textbook etc.).
Otherwise you won't be able to find sentences with just one unknown word

Okay, I got ya. If the OP thinks they can pull off L2-L2 cards, great.
I personally don't use them too often, but there's nothing wrong with them; possibly even helpful.

(2016-02-20, 9:50 pm)danatoth Wrote:

(2016-02-20, 8:57 pm)Matthias Wrote: Though there is a version which tried to sort the deck according to i+1 to avoid that you get several new words at a time. It might be difficult to find nowadays, but perhaps someone who used it can help you.

If that exists, it would be so perfect!

I found this spreadsheet with optimized sorting from Nukemarine for you:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...li=1#gid=0

This should help you as it is cross referenced and has different sorting options.

(2016-02-21, 8:30 am)Matthias Wrote:

(2016-02-20, 9:50 pm)danatoth Wrote:

(2016-02-20, 8:57 pm)Matthias Wrote: Though there is a version which tried to sort the deck according to i+1 to avoid that you get several new words at a time. It might be difficult to find nowadays, but perhaps someone who used it can help you.

If that exists, it would be so perfect!

I found this spreadsheet with optimized sorting from Nukemarine for you:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...li=1#gid=0

This should help you as it is cross referenced and has different sorting options.

This is awesome! Thank you so much!