Man, I ignored this thread until today because I thought iKnow was some sorta app for the iPhone. But I was linked to iKnow via Lang-8 and I was in for a nice surprise.

I think the sentences and audio are an invaluable resource. But I'm curious about the SRS aspect. Does anyone know what kind of formula it's based on? Is it actually an SRS? Will items that I've learned 100% on iKnow show up again some time in the future? Or is it a learned and move on type of system.

suffah Wrote:I think the sentences and audio are an invaluable resource. But I'm curious about the SRS aspect. Does anyone know what kind of formula it's based on? Is it actually an SRS? Will items that I've learned 100% on iKnow show up again some time in the future? Or is it a learned and move on type of system.

I'm not sure what the formula is based on but yes they do keep showing up after 100%. There is a "goal" mode or something where they don't show up anymore though.

I forwent the use of iKnow and opted for using Anki instead. I liked the idea of being in control of the data and where it's stored. I started using the website last week, though, and I have to admit... I like it. I'm even considering throwing some data of my own into the mix.

I've looked at iknow a little bit more and while I might use it a bit in the future, I don't really like it that much.

Two reasons:

1) The "official" cerego vocab lists are in a ridiculous order. There are jlpt1 words in the 3rd lesson of 2000 level, and preschool level words in the last lesson of 6000. The commonness ranking of the vocab is based on a newspaper I believe, but it's clearly an economics & politics focused paper.

2) The drilling games are pretty clumsy. Every wrong answer I've gotten so far is either from the flash not recognizing the romanization I used, or auto-complete kicking in and ruining my correct answer by adding more stuff to the end. Even if that worked fine they aren't fun anyways, which is the whole point of using games. I'll just stick with Anki, it's equally dull but doesn't take as long.

There are of course some good points. Free example sentences that aren't awful (like Tanaka corpus) for those who can't afford buying a dictionary, and voice samples for all of the vocab (which is really only useful for beginners but still). There is also the community/competitive aspect of it, but I've never been a competitive studier. Once I'm done with these JLPT vocab lists I might go back and import their lists into Anki just for something to work off of, but I doubt I'll ever use the site proper.

I'm liking it because it breaks the somewhat mundane SRS pattern. I get bored easily. The most interesting parts of the site, to me, are the BrainSpeed and Dictation. But, as I told a friend, I'll probably get bored of it in a week or so.

I feel the same way as Jarvik7. Granted, I only tested it out for about half an hour, but I will stick to Anki for my primary studying.

However, I'm definitely going to use iKnow for audio practice. I like the way the dictation is set up and I think via the community there will eventually be some great audio exercises.

Jarvik7 Wrote:I

1) The "official" cerego vocab lists are in a ridiculous order. There are jlpt1 words in the 3rd lesson of 2000 level, and preschool level words in the last lesson of 6000. The commonness ranking of the vocab is based on a newspaper I believe, but it's clearly an economics & politics focused paper.

Why is that a "ridiculous" order? I'm learning Japanese so I can function as an adult in Japan, not as a preschooler so if certain words are more common and frequent in ADULT daily life then that's exactly the type of words I want to learn. If you're worried about passing things like the JLPT then yeah I guess it is an issue but I'm not learning Japanese so I can take tests.

They could have built a list from more common literature. Or even from other sections of the newspaper. I'm a normal adult and don't want to focus my study on economic/political vocabulary. It's the only gripe I had with Kanji in Context. There were way too many political words that I had no interest in studying.

EDIT: Here's a quick example I found in a few seconds. You learn 円高 and 大蔵省 thousands of words before words like 一周 and 一時.

activeaero Wrote:Why is that a "ridiculous" order? I'm learning Japanese so I can function as an adult in Japan, not as a preschooler so if certain words are more common and frequent in ADULT daily life then that's exactly the type of words I want to learn. If you're worried about passing things like the JLPT then yeah I guess it is an issue but I'm not learning Japanese so I can take tests.

You often see that vocab lists are based on newspapers, and it gives silly results. Adults do not talk like newspapers and this is maybe even more so the case with Japanese newspaper language.

It really gives silly lists. It's like the T9 system for texting on your mobile. I don't know how it has advanced, but my awfully outdated cellphone sometimes comes up with bizarre results.

Dutch (being my native languages) example but it'll do:
If you type 5 (JKL) 6 (MNO) 8 (TUV) and it'll come up with 'lot' which means 'fate', while I meant to write 'jou' which means 'you'. Obviously in spoken language you'll use 'you' far more often than 'fate'; But in a newspaper you will hardly ever have people be addressed with 'you', the result is that the priorities are all jumbled up.

Same goes for Japanese based vocab lists based on non-conversational sources. Even a corpus of literature would give more realistic results than those based on a newspaper. Therefore you can definitely call it a "ridiculous" order; unless you think all Adults ever talk about is stuff in newspapers and economics.

activeaero Wrote:Why is that a "ridiculous" order? I'm learning Japanese so I can function as an adult in Japan, not as a preschooler so if certain words are more common and frequent in ADULT daily life then that's exactly the type of words I want to learn. If you're worried about passing things like the JLPT then yeah I guess it is an issue but I'm not learning Japanese so I can take tests.

Preschooler level doesn't mean "peepee" and "poopoo". It means words you're going to need a lot more often than "minister of finance". Stuff like "right" "left" "mom" "house" "hand" etc. As the list stands right now it's about as useful as opening an abridged dictionary to an arbitrary page and memorizing words randomly.

I'm learning Japanese so that I can talk with natives and function in Japanese society, not so that I can play the Japanese stock market or run for office. "ADULTS" don't talk about politics and economics in daily life anywhere as much as you might expect them to. If having adult-like conversations was the #1 priority of those lists, the first few lessons would be all about the weather, followed by adjectives describing food.

Try not to be so sensitive about criticism of a site that isn't even YOURS or make assumptions about what people are studying or why. Some people don't want to be studying JLPT but need the certificate for employment reasons mmk? In fact if JLPT was my sole concern then the lists would be marginally more useful, since most of the words I've seen on the lists that I don't already know come from JLPT1.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Stuff like "right" "left" "mom" "house" "hand" etc. As the list stands right now it's about as useful as opening an abridged dictionary to an arbitrary page and memorizing words randomly.

Is this a coicidence or what? I just reviewed these words on iKnow level 2. Strange world.

Jarvik7 Wrote:If having adult-like conversations was the #1 priority of those lists, the first few lessons would be all about the weather, followed by adjectives describing food.

曇り、晴れ、雨、雪、天気、気温、度、おいしい、まずい　haha i just typed what came to my mind in like five seconds after reading this post

The first 400 (steps 1 and 2) are basic words. After that, the order is determined in part by the common word list derived from newspapers. So yeah, it gets hard with step 3 and beyond.

Note: that's the CEREGO word list. It's just ONE word list. Users can go in, create lists of their favorite vocabulary words and learn those instead. If the word you choose happens to be in a sentence that matches Cerego's list, you're likely to get a sentence that has audio and photo attached.

Remember, the Japanese to English side has over 30,000 vocabulary words in addition to hundreds if not thousands of word lists (formal and user created). There could be a word list covering 500 words that are useful for watching "Prison Break" while another for watching "ER". In time (actually, even now), lists for the Japanese to English will be put together. Some good examples take a video on YouTube, then present vocabulary used in the videos (how nifty is that?).

Basically, don't get put off that the initial offering is 6000 words determined by word frequency. Plus, you're still learning Japanese vocabulary. These words will pop up in part or whole. In addition, you'll find sentences have vocabulary in them that pop up, you're just not studying them in a formal manner.

Nukemarine Wrote:Remember, the Japanese to English side has over 30,000 vocabulary words in addition to hundreds if not thousands of word lists (formal and user created). There could be a word list covering 500 words that are useful for watching "Prison Break" while another for watching "ER". In time (actually, even now), lists for the Japanese to English will be put together. Some good examples take a video on YouTube, then present vocabulary used in the videos (how nifty is that?).

That's the kind of thing I really hope takes off on the website. The DEMO demo really opened my eyes to what they are hoping to do with the site.

just out of curiosity, how many words are necessary to reach fluency? i'm sure there isn't an exact range... just an approximate range would be fine... i know that iKnow plans on having 10,000 words in its main study section... i just wonder what kind of level i will be at after completing it's main section (along with studying grammar of course). what do you guys think?

Apparently, for English, vocabulary that makes up the usage in the language is:
10 : 25% : the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, I
100 : 50% : from, because, go, me, our, well, way
1,000 : 75% : girl, win, decide, huge, difficult, series
7,000 : 90% : tackle, peak, crude, purely, dude, modest
50,000 : 95% : saboteur, autocracy, calyx, conformist
>1,000,000 : 99% : laggardly, endobenthic, pomological

And apparently an adult would be in the 7-50k bracket. I would personally expect an educated adult to be VERY high in that bracket. This would theoretically carry over through most languages, more or less.

But these statistics tend to be kinda whatever. Because statistics are bullshitty in general, but also because there's so many different ways of defining what a 'word' is.

So, whatever.

QuackingShoe Wrote:And apparently an adult would be in the 7-50k bracket. I would personally expect an educated adult to be VERY high in that bracket.

Depends on how young you are when you go Japanese only...

I meant a native. An educated adult is obviously easily in the 0% range in a language he hasn't studied.

QuackingShoe Wrote:I meant a native. An educated adult is obviously easily in the 0% range in a language he hasn't studied.

And I meant it as a joke. If you're going J only, you're not going to be exposing yourself to English anymore.

I've found this site extremely useful. The voice actors are excellent.

Though I've not actually used the application part of the site - I've merely been moving some of the example sentences into my anki deck.

QuackingShoe Wrote:Apparently, for English, vocabulary that makes up the usage in the language is:
10 : 25% : the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, I
100 : 50% : from, because, go, me, our, well, way
1,000 : 75% : girl, win, decide, huge, difficult, series
7,000 : 90% : tackle, peak, crude, purely, dude, modest
50,000 : 95% : saboteur, autocracy, calyx, conformist
>1,000,000 : 99% : laggardly, endobenthic, pomological

And apparently an adult would be in the 7-50k bracket. I would personally expect an educated adult to be VERY high in that bracket.

I don't think many people are in the highest bracket, even out of highly educated people. They would have to be highly educated in every field, and have interest in a ridiculous amount of varied material.

Hashiriya Wrote:just out of curiosity, how many words are necessary to reach fluency?

Well, fluency and vocabulary are two different things but my personal rule of the thumb is that if you know 10'000 words you should have the basics covered. I think at this point it becomes possible to start reading novels with a dictionary to fill in the gaps.

that's kinda what i was thinking codexus... i hoped after learning that many words that i could do a lot of reading a listening so that i could understand better the patterns of speech of everyday japanese... thanks for the answers guys ^_^

For me Iknow is another of mixing it up....lately I have three windows open on my mac...anki...youtube (ikebukuro west gate park)....and iknow....when I get tired of one mode I move to the other....it's funny that I 'take a break' from watching youtube by studying newspaper style Japanese...it works for me and it's free...not sure of the effectiveness but at least I'm treading water instead of sinking

cracky Wrote:I don't think many people are in the highest bracket, even out of highly educated people. They would have to be highly educated in every field, and have interest in a ridiculous amount of varied material.

I said very high in the 7-50k bracket, not in the highest bracket...