I'd say my English definitely falls in the 7,000 bracket and im a native speaker >_<

QuackingShoe Wrote:

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...

I see where I misread, sorry about that.

I use both anki and iKnow. With anki i feel totally in control.

As for iKnow- as nukemarine pointed out I think- it's nice that you're told you have this many items left to study, now please. I actually like picturing the iKnow team coming to kick my ass if I don't.

Ok, the politics-or-economics-related-words-I-may-not-use thing - so?
I may not use them but getting accustomed to hearing them and seeing them I take as a good thing. I don't use all the words I hear on a news channel, but I understand them and that's the point.

Plus I just finished a list with my own content (well, dorama content) for iKnow, audio too, that was a mutha. Y'all can check it out.
http://www.iknow.co.jp/list/29590-hana-y...with-audio

lindacrisan Wrote:Ok, the politics-or-economics-related-words-I-may-not-use thing - so?
I may not use them but getting accustomed to hearing them and seeing them I take as a good thing. I don't use all the words I hear on a news channel, but I understand them and that's the point.

It's not that they are on the lists that I/people complain about. It's that they are in the first beginner lessons, while some very basic words aren't brought in until the end of the 6000 series. Basically the order makes no sense if you're a beginner starting from level2000 lesson 1.

I'm not a beginner nor do I use iknow so it's not an issue for ME, but it is an issue.

Perhaps you underestimating the students who use iKnow. Oh well, if it really is an issue, perhaps, they will fix it in the future... Or someone can arrange the items in a list themselves (thought that would take forever and day).

I started off with words like 仰向き, 船, and 潤い, so the random words don't bother me much. I just learned ネズミ.

thanks lindacrisan...any other cool courses you"ve seen

kazelee Wrote:Perhaps you underestimating the students who use iKnow.

If iknow's beginner/lower-intermediate students (level 2000 lesson 3 etc) are so advanced, why do advanced levels have simple words like (taken from the final lesson of level 6000) 下品　あだな　諦める　あり　いか　いじめる　炒める etc, all of which you'll come across more in daily life than "ministry of finance". In short, the word ordering has no relation to word difficulty or how commonly it occurs in normal life.

it really doesn't matter to me what order words come in, my goal is to learn all of them... iKnow just gives me a set plan (which i desperately need) i don't have to hunt down sentences or anything like that, i just log in and do my words and log out... the best part is that iKnow has the audio so that if i am too lazy to read, it will read it to me

Jarvik7 Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:Perhaps you underestimating the students who use iKnow.

If iknow's beginner/lower-intermediate students (level 2000 lesson 3 etc) are so advanced, why do advanced levels have simple words like (taken from the final lesson of level 6000) 下品　あだな　諦める　あり　いか　いじめる　炒める etc, all of which you'll come across more in daily life than "ministry of finance". In short, the word ordering has no relation to word difficulty or how commonly it occurs in normal life.

You misunderstand me. I mean you are underestimating them in the sense that, how do I put it... it seems you're saying iKnow is like their only source of input. Like you are underestimating their resourcefulness.

Regardless of the word order, they are going to learn other words in other place (other sites, shows, and sources). So, iKnow making them learn about he ministry first is inefficient, but it's not really doing any harm to a student serious about learning Japanese.

lindacrisan Wrote:Plus I just finished a list with my own content (well, dorama content) for iKnow, audio too, that was a mutha. Y'all can check it out.
http://www.iknow.co.jp/list/29590-hana-y...with-audio

For the じゃあ、一曲歌ったりした方がいいのかな？ line, isn't　一曲　いっきょく rather than　いちきょく? (I can't listen to it again now, but it sounded like いっきょく).

I like the idea of lists based on dorama. I wouldn't mind trying to make one for Maou when I have more time.

albion Wrote:For the じゃあ、一曲歌ったりした方がいいのかな？ line, isn't　一曲　いっきょく rather than　いちきょく? (I can't listen to it again now, but it sounded like いっきょく).

You're right - and I didn't input the kana. It's automatised.
Didn't you notice the url for the list says hana yori danshi? I don't how to change it - that's why I put up the audio, for less confusion.

I think I'll piggy back off Kazelee concerning word frequency:

If you think about it, getting hung up on word frequency for your learning path is akin to some of the anti-RTK complaints about it not going in kanji frequency order (or teaching very common kanji almost at the end). I'm guilty of the same thinking of word frequency, but yeah, all these words common to newspapers are bound to be common in general language.

Learning by word frequency won't get you reading fluently any quicker. Native level material might make sense earlier, but you're still going to suck at it during this phase anyway.

Plus, like with KO2001, words that you don't know yet are in the sentence which come up later as a formal vocabulary word. I find those words go faster. So if word frequency is occurring naturally, you'll be exposed to the more common words anyway and have exposure prior to it coming up as a tested item.

So just study the vocabulary, keep reading and listening to native material, and revel in the pleasure of more and more of it making sense.

Different note:

I added up my hours so far on iKnow. Studying steps 1 through 4 to 85% completion (800 items) has taken about 75 hours according to their clocks. To be fair, I switched up my study habits since starting step 4 (not writing out the sentences every time, just concentrating on the word). So though step 4 had more difficult vocabulary, it is going on par for speed.

I'm still wary of the 100% reviews. Currently it shows the entire sentence in Kanji with the tested word highlighted, and the audio for the sentence plays once. I would prefer if the tested word were shown as kana (but still highlighted), and be able to replay the audio. Hopefully, they implement a change kind of like that in the near future.

Another thing that worries me is access to iKnow when I move to Africa next year. Not sure what my connection will be like then. Though I doubt it, maybe a item progress export will be released similar to what RevTK did.

PS: Hey Xaky, if you're lurking this thread, why not post a thought or two about the RevTK site in general (;^P)

"Learning by word frequency won't get you reading fluently any quicker."

I disagree. It will get you reading quicker, and reading quickly quicker, and that will lead to fluency quicker. Anything you do now to accelerate your progress means you get there faster.

For instance, if you learn a lot of uncommon words now, but don't know the most common ones, you're going to spend more time with a dictionary than if you'd learned the more common ones. That means it takes longer to get to a basic level of reading. It's going to be more frustrating, and you won't see the initial progress that's needed to keep you motivated.

Sure, in the end, you still know the same words... But the journey is different and I'm sure it would take longer if you learned the words out of order.

Note: There are exceptions to everything... If the word order was carefully planned, like RTK's order was, it would speed things up instead of slowing them down, even out of frequency order.

My most recent rambling about fluency is this:

Every "word" or "grammar point" was 3 levels:

Hability to read word -> Hability to listen it actively -> Hability to listen it while distracted.

Only when you achieve lvl 3 with each concept you'll be "fluent" in it.
So language learning will always be an ethernal fight with a half beast: your fluency.

I often think about somehow getting a pool of common words. You would need some better sources than newspapers, perhaps tv dramas and movie scripts would contain more conversational language. So you collect a bunch of them of different categories, then you need some linguistics tools to analyse them, tally up the common ones and extract their sentences. I might look into it, I saw some analysis tools somewhere around.

Edit: So it seems for Japanese it would be difficult to use a non-specialised concordance program to analyse texts. The problem is Japanese word boundaries not being very clear due to lack of spaces and mixing of particles and such. Also the programs are quite expensive.

probably the key is not just words but sentences...even a weird word embedded in a sentence helps you get exposure to grammar and the sentences around it

I still think Google is sitting on the data. They're bound to have word rankings sorted not only by language, but by topic (politics, medical, science, school, etc.). The INTERNET is bound to have a better cross section of word usage than newspapers.

Anyone know how to ask for a published list (or if one was already done?).

There is no publicly available Japanese corpus of any real use. One of my professors last year is working on a phd in Japanese linguistics and was creating her own corpus by scanning in tons of books. I asked for access but got denied on copyright grounds

I should ask what software she was using for analysis next time I run into her.

Right now probably the best thing the public has for a corpus is the set of books at Aozora Bunko. The only problem is that they are all quite dated books.

this seems to be an internet based frequency table, but i'm not sure of the details surrounding it

http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/frqc/internet-jp.num

anyone know any more about it?

spinoza99 Wrote:this seems to be an internet based frequency table, but i'm not sure of the details surrounding it

http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/frqc/internet-jp.num

anyone know any more about it?

It looks good but it obviously needs a lot of cleaning up. There are a ton of garbage entries like "v".

yeah, you're right!!

i messed around with the data in excel and got it tidied up in about an hour

looks like a reasonable list

spinoza99 Wrote:yeah, you're right!!

i messed around with the data in excel and got it tidied up in about an hour

looks like a reasonable list

Share, please?

Tis a very long list. Are you planning to make a sentence deck with entries added in this order, or something?

hey guys, i just noticed that xaky has got steps 9-12 released on iKnow now they are upper-intermediate courses... check them out!! http://www.iknow.co.jp/series/3321

w00t! That's great!

(Even if I'll probably die of old age before I complete the previous steps

Codexus Wrote:w00t! That's great!

(Even if I'll probably die of old age before I complete the previous steps

Aye! The recommended time on them is 75 days! Ouch!

Edit: Of the new ones, I mean.