Forgive me for opening up a topic thats been opened up several times before, but I'm starting out on KO2001 and what to get my cards set up right from the start. I'm focussing on recognition, but occasionally adding production cards.

In Anki, the "Japanese" model default is English meaning => Kanji and Kana.

The alternative I'm considering is kana => Kanji and English meaning if necessary. Would this make more sense as a complement to Recognition do you think?

I'm torn between the two.

English meaning => Japanese makes little sense.

The way you want to do, Kana => Kanji, seems much better. I don't do it, but I often felt tempted to do it, but I was afraid of the review schedule it would impose me ^_^

There is also people that do cloze deletion of particles.

Have many people tried kana->kanji? I have been playing around with it and it seems so much more difficult. Kanji->kana works well enough.

Nii87 Wrote:Have many people tried kana->kanji? I have been playing around with it and it seems so much more difficult. Kanji->kana works well enough.

It works well if you have audio of the sentence. eg. iKnow sentences.

Many people do it.

For me Kanji-kana also works well enough, but I'm not sure if it is really better. I like it because I can add more sentences in a shorter amount of time.

Yeah, don't do English to Japanese or even Japanese to English. The English is there as an upfront (and later last minute when all else fails) aid.

I do dictation, and yeah, it slows you down big time. The thing about dictation though is it's like doing Japanese keyword to Kanji in RTK. On the same token, other side though, you also need to know if your recognition is good (both pronunciation and meaning of the word).

I'll put it this way: Kanji cards I do production and recognition; Vocabulary cards I do dictation of the vocabulary word only and reading of the entire sentence; Grammar cards I do recognition only (although I do type out the sentence); Sentence method cards I've been doing reading and typing them out.

So you're not stuck to one way, and you can mix and match based on where you are recognizing weaknesses. You can tell we all are taking different approaches and still get success out of it. As always, adapt and improve as you go along.

Kana->Kanji helps you a bit more with output, it makes the word slightly easier to recall and use. However, it also takes a buttload of time and it might not help your ability to read much (since you'll go from kana, you'll always have the reading at hand).

My personal opinion is to stick to kanji->kana. It saves you a TON of time and it trains the most important point, reading. You'll be up and reading novels far faster if you stick to kanji->kana, and that should be your first priority. If you later feel that you need extra exposure to the basic stuff, or maybe some words you find extra important, add kana->kanji for those.

Why not just make two cards for each fact? One kanji to kana, the other kana to kanji.

(If you're that worried about doing something "wrong", I mean. Obviously it'd take a little longer to review.)

Hmm, does Anki have a feature where you can just flip the cards? I thought it did...would be much easier if you could just do kanji on the front, kana on back, then reverse the setting from time to time so you can write the kanji from the kana.

Could someone give me some advice on English to Japanese template on Anki?

Im running into a alot of obstacles reducing my efficiency of writing them down, such as constantly having to switch from Japanese to English and vice versa (as im using the IME function)

I've run into loads of problems in terms of finding a template that works, but my major problem is that i can't write in English using the Japanese IME as sometimes it turns into hiragana and katakana and other times misses out words ive entered.

Basically, along with this problem, does anyone have an English to Japanese template that works and is easy and efficient to enter Kanji from RTK?

(I didnt want to make a new thread so sorry if this is slightly irrelevant, and i cannot use Kana to Kanji as a don't know it fully yet.)

Thanks in advance!

Aijin Wrote:Hmm, does Anki have a feature where you can just flip the cards? I thought it did...would be much easier if you could just do kanji on the front, kana on back, then reverse the setting from time to time so you can write the kanji from the kana.

It's in the "generate cards" feature, when you open the deck browser under Action. You have to have two card templates for the model.

For the IME, there's nothing to do except to get used to the keyboard shortcuts.
Alt+shift to switch language.
Alt+` to switch between kana & alphabet input.
Ctrl+CapsLock to switch to hiragana / Alt+CapsLock to switch to katakana.

There are some premade RTK decks in Anki through the Download / Shared deck feature.

I still have not understood how it's possible to go Japanese-only (kana <> kanji or kanji <> kana) if you don't even know what the words/sentences mean in English?!

vosmiura Wrote:For the IME, there's nothing to do except to get used to the keyboard shortcuts.
Alt+shift to switch language.
Alt+` to switch between kana & alphabet input.
Ctrl+CapsLock to switch to hiragana / Alt+CapsLock to switch to katakana.

There are some premade RTK decks in Anki through the Download / Shared deck feature.

Thanks a lot man, your a real help.

Now i just need to figure out how to use Kanji stroke order font with IME, if you can at all..

stoked Wrote:I still have not understood how it's possible to go Japanese-only (kana <> kanji or kanji <> kana) if you don't even know what the words/sentences mean in English?!

Learning from context and using Japanese dictionaries. This doesn't work for beginners of course, but one can start doing it way earlier than most people think. To make a really basic example:
車が青い。　(the word you don't know is 青い)
くるまがあおい
青い　－　水の色

There's no need to use English once you're good enough to understand without it.

@stoked
I have a 2 extra fields in my deck
One is called "English definitions", the other is called "Japanese definitions".
I gradually stopped adding English definitions in favor of Japanese definitions.
Eventually, I configured Anki to hide English definitions, resulting in a Japanese only deck.

Im sure im missing something simple here, but how do i get kanji stroke order font to work in Anki?

Fonts & colors.

vosmiura Wrote:Fonts & colors.

Ive changed it there, but no success. =[

What do you use to write the kanji?

Hmm, so did you install the stroke order font?

I use the RTK deck shared by 'nukemarine' and it has the stroke order font already set up.

vosmiura Wrote:Hmm, so did you install the stroke order font?

I use the RTK deck shared by 'nukemarine' and it has the stroke order font already set up.

Thanks for all your help, along with everyone elses.

I managed to fix it, and of course it was a silly mistake.

I wasn't aware of the "fields" tab, on fonts and colours and so did not change the font there on the seperate field, but instead changed the answer font to Kanjistrokeorder font, which doesn't seem to work.

Thanks again! and good luck to everyone studying Kanji/Kana

Thanks for the replies. Kana->Kanji makes a lot more sense than English->Kanji+Kana, I was just confused by Anki's default settings which put the latter as "production".

Tobberoth, I agree about the cost-beneft thing of doing production- I just feel that even though recognition is more useful for my short (JLPT) and long term (reading) goals, if I can cement a kanji in my mind by doing production at this stage it might be worth it. I have a few example sentences with 公開される　for example, and I think that if I just practice writing out 公開 from the kana one or two times it will be firmly embedded in my mind.

Anyway, cheers to all for replying!

I actually started adding English->Japanese cards to my deck recently because I thought it would help with my actual production. When I want to say something in Japanese, I usually think of it in English first and translate, so I thought these production cards would help speed the process. Additionally the bulk of the cards have one word/point underlined that I base my pass/fail on because I'm trying to remember that word or grammar point.

Once I become comfortable with a word or concept I don't have to translate it, but for new material, I find it helpful.