Because, Alyks, we are not all equally clever and, sadly, some of us labour under the obviously incorrect assumption that learning Japanese takes more than 5 months...

Correction: 45 days - as the "official" start date was released here. :-)

You forgot how good looking I am. Being incredibly handsome helps.

I use it when I'm a little bored or maxed out on anki. It's a little too hypnotic and my wrists hurt from all the clicking, but I mainly do anki, with a little lingq.com and now I know for a break when I'm in a study mood. Otherwise I watch cool Japan, listen to music, or watch whatever has come in on my netflix.

alyks Wrote:I'm curious, Nukemarine, are you reading Japanese books or manga or anything? It's just that you've been here for so long, I'm wondering why you would use another learner's resource.

I read manga and play games and still use 'learner's resources'. Why? Because learner's resources are more efficient.

Reading manga is fun, decent reinforcement, and I do pick up a few new words. I don't learn nearly as many words as with a 'learner's resource', nor do I get the benefit of having it in an SRS system. I could add it to my SRS but then I'm doing more work than the 'learner's resource' for the same gain.

EDIT: Also I forgot, a lot of resources are structured so you learn the more common words earlier. Another thing you don't get just out in the wild.

I spend almost every free second of my time reading manga or watching movies (I'm reading Death Note too high fivez). So I'm just using iKnow as a substitute for the example sentences in 大辞林 and 大辞泉.

This is partly why I really prefer Anki. The last 2000 sentences I imported (suspended) without the English translations. Whenever I come across a word in a manga or a 大辞林 definition that I need more example sentences for, I search for that word and unsuspend it.

It's just like the example sentences I was using before but vastly superior because it has audio. If I was just working straight through the core series material no amount of flashy interface would stop it being boring.

alyks Wrote:Everybody is waiting for me to voice my opinion on iKnow, and so simply I have to give it:
I'm having loads more fun reading Death Note and Ghost in the Shell with my trusty 大辞林.

Or, to put it more aptly, I was so eager to read Japanese "in the wild" after finishing UBJG, I couldn't imagine going back to a learner's resource.

I'm curious, Nukemarine, are you reading Japanese books or manga or anything? It's just that you've been here for so long, I'm wondering why you would use another learner's resource.

Currently I'm watching (with Japanese Sub-titles): Gokusen 3, Densha Otoko, Last Friends, Rookies, Battlestar Galactica, Team Medical Dragon, Death Note (anime)

I'm reading: 20th Century Boys Manga (just saw the movie yesterday), Hana Yori Dango and Rookies.

I've said it before, the more I learn, the more I'm able to enjoy what I watch and read. I'm also lazy and inconsistent with my methods. So I will not be the type to highlight a word in a book I'm reading and go look it up later. For me, a resource like iKnow (or KO 2001) just makes lazy guys like me able to consistently add vocabulary at a decent rate. Plus, it's not actually elementary words we're learning. It's the top 6000 words/phrases used in newspapers. Not a bad learning resource.

Let's face it, you screamed through Kanji, Onyomi, UBJG and are doing the immersion. I look forward to big things from you. I'm plodding along, so don't expect too much from me. I have a bad habit of over analyzing and discussing instead of just putting it toward actual effort.

The fact that the word-commonness-ranking is drawn from newspapers actually makes it less useful in my opinion. I took a quick peek at the 6000 level stuff and the first lesson was just full of economics vocabulary you're likely to never use. I then looked at the last lesson and it had words like "ring finger".

It's too bad that there is no public corpus of any decent size and breadth available for Japanese, but drawing vocabulary lists from novels and kokugo textbooks would probably be a lot better for useful basic & intermediate vocab.

Jarvik7 Wrote:The fact that the word-commonness-ranking is drawn from newspapers actually makes it less useful in my opinion. I took a quick peek at the 6000 level stuff and the first lesson was just full of economics vocabulary you're likely to never use. I then looked at the last lesson and it had words like "ring finger".

It's too bad that there is no public corpus of any decent size and breadth available for Japanese, but drawing vocabulary lists from novels and kokugo textbooks would probably be a lot better for useful basic & intermediate vocab.

Again, that's just the lessons that Cerego released. Another company may throw together a different list that's based on larger resources and put it on iKnow. It can't be that great a task in the age of Google to gather a list of the most common words used in written communication. Hell, I bet Google has that list already compiled.

I find the list useful as I like to read newspapers (ok, I go to the comic section first, but I'm only human dammit).

Just been trying to get some files to work with Anki and stumbled into some good listening practice.

http://www.filefactory.com/file/ed80cd/n..._01-08_rar

This is the file for Anki containing all the sentences. There's a folder with all the pictures and audio in it also. What I did was copy all the audio files into foobar http://www.filehippo.com/download_foobar...a31799e66/

Just listening to the sentences playing right after each other all in a row feels like it's really testing my listening. Just as I'm trying to understand what is being said, it's already onto the next sentence. I find it hard to to just listen to Japanese audio in the background usually as I find myself trying to follow it, and getting distracted. Doing this, it's just random sentences after each other so I'm not having that problem. Try it out.

to me the economics words are a relief...I like watching economic news to an extent and I have TV Japan, which is NHK ....I also like watching Kodomo News which explains the weeks events for kids...I really should tape it for sentence mining...they always create these large and cool models to explain events

iKnow really looks great. If their sentences end up covering most of the KO2001 level 3 vocab, then maybe we can have a KO2001 level 3 after all. It would just be a matter of making a list with all the words.

Also, there are many E-J sentences for english learners. Couldn't these be exploited as a source for sentence mining? It would just be a matter of "flipping" the flashcards. I'm sure someone more technologically knowledgeable could manage to make some anki decks out of those. Cerego and AGOS seem to be the main sentence providers.

iKnow looked awesome, but I checked the audio and understand pretty much all of them 100%. Is there any advance sentences? (Thought the audio was a little slow as well.)

yup the content provider is working on putting more up and they should have 10,000 sentences up by the end of this year (i e-mailed him about it) go here for some of the more advanced stuff http://www.iknow.co.jp/series/3321 ... more stuff will come soon

First, I altered how I study with iKnow. At first it was 30 items per course per day for about an hour or two. That quickly ran into problems, so now it's:

1. If a course is new (unstudied items in it), I do 10 item lessons reviewing all due older items then studying new items till ~20 new items are studied.

Review old item - I write down the word, preferably from memory
Study new item - I write down the word, pronunciation and then the entire sentence

Reviewing 10 old items takes about 5 to 10 minutes
Studying 10 new items takes about 20 to 30 minutes

2. If a course offers no new study items, I'll review all older items, then study ~20 new items on the next course.

3. If I study 2 courses so that both have no new items (only review items), I'll merge them into a 400 item list.

It may seem a bit complicated, but I think this is what I've been needing for my mentality. I'm not worried about EVERY word in the sentence. I'm only concerned with just that one word for that item. The sentence and photo and pronunciation are all there for context for that one word. This speeds up my review. Plus, I'm always adding new words every day. It's at such a pace, I'm not overwhelmed with reviews.

Yes, I could replicate this with Anki. It's not too much to BOLD the hiragana word that I'm to write out. Plus, with only worrying about that ONE ITEM, I can have long ass sentences and not worry about it. I'm not writing out the whole sentence. I'm just worried about that word. When I switch back to Anki, I can implement this.

We all have our own quirks. I'm lazy and easily distracted (ooh, something shiny, umm sorry). This is keeping my attention at the moment. Plus, it's something I missed when I was starting KO2001: MORE VOCABULARY!!! I notice every word I add seems to come up in stuff I read and watch (instant gratification FTW). When I did KO2001, I got stuck on writing out the entire sentence. Well, writing out the same crap that I knew, some stuff that wasn't even reviewed yet, and of course the word I really was worried about wore me down. If I had my viewpoint back then, I'd had bold termed the vocabulary words in the sentences and told myself to worry only about those. Akin to worrying only about the grammar terms with UBJG.

Anyway, here's where I part company with some (current) advice from AJATT. Don't worry about writing out the whole sentence. You can only write out 私は。。。ではありません so many times before you get the point. You're testing your knowledge of the word in that sentence, so don't worry about the sentence (well, read it out and understand it when you hear it), just write the word.

If you'll excuse me, I need to make a necro post in AJATT pointing that out.

Nukemarine: For you the advantage of iKnow is that you can concentrate on one single word (the "item") and ignore any difficulties which you might have in the example sentence. That obviously speeds up your study. If you want to implement that in Anki you would have to match each item to its sample sentence. But with the material downloaded from shakkun (sentences in order of appearance) that is not possible and also at iKnow you can't sort the items according to the order of appearance. So if you plan to switch back to Anki I would recommend that you take note of the order of appearance while you are learning the items. That will help you later on to match sentence to item.

I tried putting 400 audio tracks in an mp3 player and just shadowing them as I walked around. I didn't understand most of it, however, my listening skills did improve for a while. It wasn't 100% practical -mostly because my mp3 player is old and now doesn't work properly, so I haven't done it again. Once I get a new mp3 player I'll put in 200 (adding and subtracting 50 per day) and shadow as part of my normal study routine.

Matthias Wrote:For you the advantage of iKnow is that you can concentrate on one single word (the "item") and ignore any difficulties which you might have in the example sentence.

personally, i make sure i learn the whole sentence when using iKnow... if there is any words that i don't know, i just type them in on google and look at them with rikaichan so that i understand what they mean...

Mattias, it's very likely, due to the community content nature of iKnow, that we can get a spread sheet of sort for item that'll have sentences, photo and audio of the sentence and the item word. This may happen via the developer content programs they linked on the main page (I haven't looked to far into this).

Hashiriya, yeah, I learn the whole sentence, but I'm not testing my knowledge of the whole sentence. It's that, when I started this sentence method, I immediately saw the benefit of writing out sentences when the idea was first suggested. Then came the suggestion to write it out via audio or kana sentences. What started to happen is doing reviews became more and more of a chore. Then I remembered when I started KO2001 how all the words coming up were appearing in a manga I was reading. Yet, it was a chore trying to wade through or test out the whole sentence. There were sometimes 3 or 4 new words plus grammar points. I told myself, maybe I needed to step back, get into grammar a bit (via UBJG). Again, that chore thing came up. Then came the suggestion to break up the sentences. It helped, but that chore still remained, plus some context began to suffer.

Really, it was staring me right in the face. Stop worrying about the whole sentence when it came to writing or passing it.

For UBJG (or Tae Kim Sentences), you don't have to write them down. It's about the grammar points, so hearing and reading comprehension are key there. If you write down sentences there, you're repeating ALOT of the same words. For those grammar sentences, now, I just want comprehension when I listen to the sentence or read the sentence. I don't write down a damn thing.

With iKnow (or KO2001 or KIC), there's words that are marked as being the point of that sentence. So it's not just asking the word (vocabulary drills) nor is it all parts of the sentence comprehension. It's just a happy medium that's working for me. I still want to write down my answers, but now it's just that word. It's quicker, and the results are at the same level.

Plus, all of this is meant to do one thing: make my watching and reading more enjoyable. Some vocabulary and/or grammer points that I learned or reviewed seemed to pop up in the stuff I read or watch on that day.

That said, maybe, just maybe, if you're starting off it's good to write out the entire sentence. Then again, it could be one only needs write out the entire sentence once (initial review), then just concentrate on the one vocabulary word and/or grammar point from then on out.

PS: another good thing about iKnow is your results are public. Anyone looking at your profile can see: How many items you are reviewing, how many you have completed, how many items you reviewed that day, and how long you reviewed that day. For those of us that are competitive in nature, this can be a useful motivator.

yeh the competitiveness is definitely there for me haha.. i always say to myself "oh i can't fall behind that guy so i got study a couple extra lessons today" lol... as for writing anything down... i'm not doing that at all, i don't have a lot of time to dedicate anyways between college full-time and work part-time... i personally planned to go back through the steps in kanji focus in the future though and write the words out then. i'm just trying to do the best i can with the little time that i have...

Edit: another great thing is the high fives on the site... i always try to make it to where i can get another and end up studying a little extra to get there sometimes...

I'm not writing down the words either. I mentally remember the kanji that make up the word and the reading but that's it. Also, I usually review the words I had trouble with at the end of the lesson, when you have that list there of all the ones from the lesson and your percentages. I look them up in Kenkyuusha and read over the sample sentences a few times until I'm comfortable with it.

Anyways, same as you guys: Iknow has been a great thing for my motivation and got me back into studying.

yeh cracky, you are doing great i think i know i'll never catch up to you... just curious though, is the reason that you are going through the iKnow steps so fast because you know most all the words already or is it because you don't have a job and are just camping out on iKnow all day long haha!! either way man, i wish i could go through them that fast too i wish i could quit everything and just concentrate on learning japanese for a couple of years >_<

Hashiriya Wrote:yeh cracky, you are doing great i think i know i'll never catch up to you... just curious though, is the reason that you are going through the iKnow steps so fast because you know most all the words already or is it because you don't have a job and are just camping out on iKnow all day long haha!! either way man, i wish i could go through them that fast too i wish i could quit everything and just concentrate on learning japanese for a couple of years >_<

I did know some already, I'd say less than half but I'm not totally sure. Some reviews I'd already know a lot, and sometimes I'd know none. A lot of the words mixed in later are give mes too, like 高さ and stuff like that. Besides that it depends on the word and the kanji in it. A lot of words just stick, especially those with kanji I can recall easily, and some are just a pain.

i see... i notice a lot of the same kanji sometime reoccuring in different words, so i am getting better at guessing the readings the more kanji i do ^_^... i am watching Onechanbara right now and i think it's really cool that i can pick out so many words just from what i have already studied ^_^

Does anybody know if it's possible to make a list with the sentences from any given course and study those in AJATT style (kana to kanji)? I tried but all I could add was the words not the sentences using those words.
Thank you!

Check a few pages back. You'll find all you need there.