laner36 Wrote:hey glowing face man, how long do you spend in a day reviewing when you have 7000+ cards in your deck?
(PS your blog is indeed badass)

I assume that with an SRS, even a deck of 7000 can mean only 30 or so cards to review a day (even less). Assuming of course one keeps up with the reviewing.

Hudzon Wrote:After reading about the 10,000 sentences method the full immersion idea stuck me as brilliant; especially after coming in contact with a similar concept while I was researching lojban.

However, while I do not want to get off as someone lazy, the idea of mining for sentences strikes me with dread.

Quite simply, I don't have the time! With all the commitments I already have, I want to spend those precious hours I allocate on studying Japanese daily on actually studying the language, not searching for sentences that I could potentially study sometime in the future.

Considering that a few other people on this board are in a similar situation, here is what I wonder:

1) Is there an existing compilation of a few thousand sentences that I could use?
2) Would someone be willing to export the sentences from their SRS program and share them? (I would be vary grateful!)
3) If the above do not work out, would someone be interested in collaborating on creating a library of such sentences for all to use?

Hope to hear some replies!

I agree with what you are saying. I think typing out and seeking out new sentences is not an optimal use of your time especially if you are busy. Also quite frankly it is boring. Good luck doing that day in day out and staying motivated.

I lived in Japan for a couple of years, spent quite a bit of time studying japanese, never got that fluent, then left Japan and forgot about 80% of what I learned. One of the reasons I never got fluent was because I didn't spend my study time efficiently.

What I think is a great idea is for people to create compilations of sentences that go with popular text books (this is already underway for a number of texts). Then the learner can read the textbook, get the explanation of the grammar, vocab etc. And then systematically review it with their SRS. Also I think to get good at speaking and listening to Japanese, you need to (you guessed it) SPEAK and LISTEN to Japanese. So ideally you need to get audio into your study program too !

I wrote out lots of sentences while studying japanese, didn't help me that much. I think the key is forcing your mind to process the information at a deep level, and constant timed review. One of the mistakes I made was not reviewing enough, and trying to introduce too much new material without consolidating the existing knowledge. I think it is the reviewing of the sentences that helps you learn it, not the initial writing it down or entering it into your flashcard system.

As a beginner, don't think that watching anime in Japanese or whatever is going to help you. Hell I lived in Japan for 2 years, had japanese all around me, and it didn't help. You need some information to make sense of the input. I think the ideas on the AJATT website a good, but he goes a bit overboard at times, for example playing japanese in your sleep I don't think can help much.

If you want to get strong do you go to the gym and try and lift 200kg? No of course not, the key is systematic progression. That is why whatever input you decide to use needs to introduce material in a systematic manner, without bringing in too many new ideas or grammar points. For example whenever I tried to study material from a newspaper, I got overwhelmed by too many kanji, and ended up having to look too much stuff up in the dictionary. Frankly it was boring and really slowed down my study. I think your study has to be not too arduous if you want to keep up your moral and study everyday. So any sentences that people give you would need to be at the right level, have explanations with the right amount of detail, and introduce information in an appropriate order. This is where you might fall down just getting sentences from random people.

A mindset I see a lot, is that working hard and mining all your own sentences is somehow more virtuous. Wrong, all that counts is achieving your goal of fluency. At the end of the day nobody cares if you mined all the sentences yourself. That is why I think this site is great, people are working cooperatively to produce the sentences from the Kanji Odyssey books for example. Quite frankly you will find a lot of gaijin in japan to be kind of aloof and not supportive of other gaijin, don't know where this mindset comes from. Sometimes I see this attitude amongest Japanese learners as well.

In general I wouldn't use other peoples cards, unless a few people have checked them. As a beginner you don't want to be confused if that person has made some mistakes.

I think what would be a cool idea is to set up a database, with some kind of quality mechanism. People could enter in their correct sentences along with supporting information (definitions, explanations etc, difficulty level), other users could flag those sentences as being good, containing an error etc.

So what am I trying to say with this long rambling post, ummm I really have no idea. But seriously
1. You need a systematic approach
2. You need to be as efficient as possible
3. Use the right study materials for your level. If you have to enter the sentences yourself then you might have to bite the bullet, or better still do a collaborative approach with the people on this website.
4. Choose study materials that already have the sentences available whenever possible.
5. Spaced repetition and careful organization of study is extremely important.
6. You need to be constantly listening and speaking japanese if you want to build real fluency.
7. Study needs to be enjoyable otherwise you won't do it !!

Good Luck all and don't get discouraged !!

Quote:I think what would be a cool idea is to set up a database, with some kind of quality mechanism. People could enter in their correct sentences along with supporting information (definitions, explanations etc, difficulty level), other users could flag those sentences as being good, containing an error etc.

I think that could be an amazing project. I envision some sort of collaborative webapp where users could enter and correct sentences. The sentences would be automatically analyzed by their content and could be classified according to different criteria. For example, you could have a "JLPT2 only" criteria, which would only include sentences that contain exclusively JLPT2 words. You could also have a "JLPT2 plus 10%" criteria which would include up to 10% of words from outside the list. Users could then create and share dynamic lists which would correspond to their learning needs.

As for the creation and revision of sentences, any user could add a sentence, but some users would get special privileges for being a native, a high level japanese speaker or a mid level speaker. According to their proficiency, these users would get sentence revision privileges. All revisions would be tracked and could be reverted by a higher privileged user. Some high level users would get the privilege of giving sentences final approval, including them into a corpus of flawless sentences. Eventually, you would end up with a corpus of very good sentences which could be used for any purpose. Additionally, sentences could be flagged according to different categories. For example, newspaper, SF, anime, drama, everyday, business, medical, colloquial, slang, etc. so that users could choose to exclude some types of sentences, even though they are grammatically correct. That would allow people to study only "anime" japanese, or on the contrary not to study any.

Anyway, that would be a pretty big project and likely require serious coding skills. Perhaps a decent system could be devised out of cruder technologies (like google docs). Just my 2 cents anyway.

I am not new to RTK or to RevTK, but I've been quietly reading the posts on the forum for a while. This thread caught my interst. In regards to what MeNoSavvy mentioned:

MeNoSavvy Wrote:I think what would be a cool idea is to set up a database, with some kind of quality mechanism. People could enter in their correct sentences along with supporting information (definitions, explanations etc, difficulty level), other users could flag those sentences as being good, containing an error etc.

I think I found a site that has something towards what MeNoSavvy and Magnadoodle mention. The site url is: http://renshuu.org/ The site allows users to submit and evaluate sentences. There are categories to filter sentences ranging from Genki books only to various levels of the JLPT. I haven't gotten a chance to look at it closely yet though. Hope this helps someone out!