tashippy Wrote:

uisukii Wrote:

Splatted Wrote:I finally caught up with my SRSing.

Bet that feels pretty damn good.

I can only imagine.

Getting there with Core6k... nearly at 500 words now! Have done anki for 9 days in a row now, and whereas that may not sound like much, I'm normally very bad at making myself do anything everyday. Despite seeing loads of people moan about this deck and how boring it is, I'm actually enjoying it. I feel like I'm learning something fully for once too, if that makes sense, as in -- I'm learning vocabulary WITH the kanji, not just vocab as it is with the occasional kanji or learning kanji by itself (i.e. RTK). I never finished RTK nor do I think I am ever going to as I find it incredibly boring now, but I did 1000+ and it's definitely helped me along the way.

Also, I'm finding it easier to learn words with the kanji now too. At first it was pretty difficult, but I'm noticing stuff in the kanji that makes it easier to memorise (such as noticing 冬　in 終わる) and some of the parings I find really interesting.

Bit of a ramble, but oh well!

Three achievements in two days!

Yesterday I finished reading my first volume of manga in Japanese (Detective Conan 1). I needed a lot of help to decipher most parts of it (picture context, dictionary, English fan translation), but I did a lot better than I was expecting and really enjoyed it!

Then today, I:

- finished working through Tae Kim's "essential" grammar section and adding cards about it to my Anki deck. Took a good number of weeks, because I've been really discouraged about diving into grammar, but after letting myself take it slow, it got easier to digest and sorta fun. Now I just have "special expressions" and "advanced topics".......... lol "just."

- hit the 3k mark in Core 6k!!! This is the biggie that I'm really proud about. Technically it took me 4.5 months, but nearly 2 of those months were me only adding a handful of cards per day (at the start). Then I came across Mezbup's topic here and decided to quicken the pace. Now I'm adding 44 cards/per day and it's pretty challenging but suuuch great advice to follow if you have the time for it.

(Why 44? Er, I like the number 4 a lot =D)

I should be able to finish Core6k before my birthday (9/17), so look for another post from me before then! ＼(^o^)／ So happy!

Yeah, nice. Finishing Core6k would make for a great birthday present, I reckon.

Not a complete Milestone just yet but have been reading Kokoro for the last few months (totally got out of the swing of reading it regularly) and I am about a quarter of the way through. I'm going to try my best to read it all by the end of the month then get started on another book!

Gone through first volume of Harry Potter using L-R method(the one introduced by buonaparte).

The effect it has on listening comprehension is way beyond my expectations, just after 3 hours I could clearly hear the words I newer heard before from the japanese songs I've listened to tens of times before. Now I'll go through the second volume, and probably L-R both books again from the beginning.

I'm yet to find how it will affect my vocabulary, but i definitely prefer doing this, than sitting hours in anki, and trying to cram vocab. It's fun once you start it, and those hours of audiobook pass very quickly if you can get into the story. I want to learn German in the future, and L-R will be the first thing I'm going to do.

In meantime I've done 4,5k vocab from core deck, but I'm sick of doing core already, probably not going to finish it. It's probably, because I didn't had much exposure to the language and should've done more fun things, than sitting all the day reviewing.

That's pretty interesting, meeatcookies. Downloaded said files, etc. yesterday and have been looking at it with interest (enjoyed reading the series when I was younger, so I'm already familiar with it). Only instead of HP, using the format and structural ideas and making a parallel+audio source out of different source material I already read/listen to/watch daily anyway. May as well enjoy it at a more intimate level, right?

So today I just passed the 10,000 mark in vocab between my two main decks. That makes RTK1,3 and 10,000 vocab completed since I decided to relight the torch exactly one year ago. Sounds like I'm well on my way to becoming mezbup's poster child (but meh not really.. I've been around too long to look like a real success story).

Anyways, I want to make this somewhat more informative rather than braggy because I have experienced something interesting. So first, I started vocab by doing core6k production style. Near the end it was becoming very difficult due to the large number of synonyms in the deck. I think any SRS user can attest to the fact that it is more difficult to remember large numbers of similar items without bringing them together in a single card where the differences are what you actually memorize. However, this practice is inconvenient to perform for every pair of similar words you meet. Now, I enjoy the production-style of approach, but the problem was bad enough to dissuade me from continuing in that style. At first I thought the problem I was facing with ambiguity was a result of me just not being able to make the synonyms distinct enough from lack of experience. Now I am starting to think that they just aren't actually different enough. I am starting to think that there's just a lot of redundancy in the semantic ground covered by the words in this language.

But what I've come to realize from this is that there seems to be much more importance in the understanding of kanji than I originally expected. It seems that the way it normally works is you have two kanji X and Y with a sort of nebulous meaning of their own that can combine in a logical way to form a meaning Z. So you have X+Y=Z. But then you also have many kanji with similar meanings to X and Y, and even though you already have a term that means Z, and you'd think we'd be happy with that, the philosophy behind the language seems more like 'well we can combine these to mean Z, so why don't we?' So what you end up with is not a single word for a single concept Z, but a family of kanji that can be combined to mean Z. And if you want evidence, just check a J-J dictionary. Basically every entry seems to follow the format "Long explanatory sentence. Synonym." And the synonym is some uncommon term that you've probably never seen before, but still if you've been around for long enough, you can probably understand it. It just goes to demonstrate the whole 'why not' mentality. Another thing they do is try to use words that utilize the kanji of the defined word in its own definition to try to demonstrate the logic of putting them together.

Anyways, the point is that this can actually work to your advantage. These days I am doing a recognition deck. First the JLPT1,2,3,4,5 tagged terms in anki from a large deck of near 30k duplicate-checked words. That took me to about 9k words. Then all the EDICT words tagged as common. Just core6k + the JLPT terms + this would be enough to take me over 20k words, but there's no way that I am going to add that many simply because I believe there is no point in adding a recognition card for a term that I can already recognize on the first view. So, immediately I deleted every katakana term. I can normally tell which English word they are going for, and if its not English, its still pretty easily learned. That took out about 5k, and when I was at 9k added, I had exactly 10k unseen. Now I am at 10k added and have 7640 unseen. That basically means I deleted 57% of my new cards because I could already understand and read them on the first view, despite never having seen them before. I feel pretty good about this, and if this rate continues, I expect I will only add 3200 more before having covered every common term in EDICT.

I think 13000 is a reasonable number, and I think this demonstrates the effectiveness of a vocab-centric approach. Lots of people seem to recommend 10000 cards, and this isn't much more. But also I think this result is only attained by paying close attention to the kanji. Noting their meanings in a compound, memorizing their readings, and paying attention to when a vocab item adds something new to your knowledge of a kanji, because those are the ones you want to keep. I pay close attention to the keywords of the kanji I'm seeing because I find that helps me keep track of them-- how they are used, the reading-- basically the sort of continuing narrative that starts to form around them. I think doing this, and putting in the time with the SRS is something that can speed you to an intermediate-level reading comprehension quite quickly, and that's how it worked for me (I had forgotten basically EVERYTHING when I started up again last summer).

Anyways, the take home message I guess is: pay attention to kanji and do your RTK reps guys, cuz its probably going to save you a lot of time later on. Thanks to anyone who humored me by reading this.

Yeah that sounds like what I also found to be true for some Kanji compound words.
For example 進化, advance + change = evolution, progress.
I look forward to finish RTK and study words like you.

Thanks for the story Haych. That's starting to becoming a lot of evidence on this forum for the Anki-supported, vocab-centric approach with recognition cards.
Would you have a few comments about :
- isolated vocab vs sentences (with possibly a different opinion depending on the level of the learner);
- the effect of the audio sentences, particularly in the Core cards?

接続の不具合.

@Northern_Lord Yeah that is a good example. All you need is the keywords and the readings and you've basically already learned all that an additional recognition card could teach you so might as well skip it. And as you get more of a nuanced knowledge of the kanji, this just happens more and more.

@Warp2243 For the isolated vocab vs sentence thing, I gotta admit I am not the best person to ask. I developed a bias against sentences somewhere along the line and nowadays, don't really want anything to do with it. I think its sort of an imperfect approximation of real world exposure. I think it just takes the potency out when the only stakes on understanding is a failed card. I'd rather stick to the individual vocab because they are quick and I don't feel I'm missing out on much. Although I admit there may be benefits. Like for example when I was first learning 厳密 as "strict; close", I was like "what's that supposed to mean." But then I clicked on example sentences I saw that pretty much every one included 厳密に言えば or 厳密に言うと - "strictly speaking", and that immediately made much more sense to me than just the definition. If you were doing sentences you'd probably see stuff like that right away, because your sentences would probably use common expressions like that. Also some stuff can be included in definitions but no one does it. Like when you're first learning 務める you might have something like "to work for, to serve as", but that's not gonna teach you how to use the direct and indirect object as [employer]に[position]を務める. Maybe we should have something like "[trans] to work as (DO) at (IDO)". But I'm pretty sure no one thinks to do that and sentences would show you that format right away. The thing is, I think no one expects a perfect understanding to come from anki alone. So I'd rather just go with the more minimalist approach: just get a decent sense for the word with a well-chosen definition, then leave a lot of the learning for later when you start seeing and using it.

Also, as for the audio thing, once again I'm not good to ask because I didn't use it. I don't really like dealing with audio files because they make your deck all bloated in size. Also, anki these days seems to have this thing where it reuploads your entire collection if you make certain kinds of changes (like deleting a note type that no cards use, renaming a note type, basically anything with note types--ugh). Anyways, my listening is pretty bad for that reason. But that's something I'll work on later. I've seen lots of good resources around.

I guess I passed 3100 kanji recently, and finished 装甲悪鬼村正 without much issue.

I might just do a few hundred more kanji, retain for a year or so, and quit anki forever. I don't think I really need it anymore at this point.

weirdo Wrote:I might just do a few hundred more kanji

Are you taking them from some kind of list?

I use thecite's "RTK4" list. Just added 200 kanji (that I've seen in the wild) today. The keywords are much better than RTK3 - it took me three and a half hours (plus breaks) to add some 400 kanji from RTK3 (I had intended to add 600, but so many of the words just weren't sticking that I suspended the more nonsensical ones), whereas these 200 have only taken 50 minutes so far (200 reviews left - a 90-minute step).

You said my numbers were impressive, but yours are amazing!

Can you elaborate on your recognition-only approach?

1. Preferences->Show new cards before reviews and Learn ahead limit=1 minute. Still do all your reviews before adding any new cards, of course
2. Deck options->steps=1 3 15 90 (I think Anki rounds it up to 2 hours, though). New cards/day=0
3. Custom study->Increase today's new card limit by 5 cards
4. Quickly go through the cards; hit 2 if you remembered (even if the last time you saw the card was only 10 seconds ago), 1 otherwise.
5. Go to 3 when you're out of cards to review.

(0.) Experiment with the parameters in 2-3 as well as the font type and size. I use メイリオ (for no particular reason; 明朝 may be a better choice) size 30, yellow text on blue background (the deck came that way). Bigger and the strokes get thick; smaller and they get simplified, blurry or both. Small fonts murder the kanji.

Back when I was adding RTK1 kanji, I was probably a little slower than you, overall (I could add cards at ~1/minute but my reviews were likely slower). And I didn't learn how to write them. Hence why I'm impressed.

Studied 1542 cards in 69 minutes (~60 cards / 4 minutes were reviews) today. A little over two and a half seconds per rep. 4 kanji left.

So you are not able to write them... But other than that aren't you having any collateral effects on your Japanese studies?

I believe one of the reasons why the general consensus is against kanji -> keyword is that you don't want to associate a single meaning to the character.
But I am not far enough in my studies to have an informed opinion about this.

They're not meanings, they're names. Sometimes the two coincide. Sometimes the name helps you remember a nuance of the meaning. Sometimes the name refers to a rare meaning or to a compound, or the first meaning you come across is at odds with the name (this used to be a problem). You probably misunderstand many of the names.

For meanings, I use dictionaries and my understanding of the rest of the sentence (and the context of the sentence). I don't especially try to associate meanings with English. I don't SRS meanings - they're too vague to me.

The names eventually fade away once you get to know enough real meanings, at which point going kanji-to-name runs into the problem of forcibly trying to remember something useless - I deal with this by suspending kanji whose meaning(s) I know even if I can't recall the name quickly.

Anyway, milestones. I thought I'd crossed 3000 kanji when in reality it was only 2970. Still, it's over 3000 if you count the other 50-ish I'm not SRSing because I don't have names for them.

So as of this week I have passed 1000 core words (vocab-optimized order), finished Genki I+II, and I'm still keeping up with RTK reviews. This is the first time all the different skill sets have aligned such that I can say I could pass N5.

My vocab is actually closer to N4 (all Genki Vocab + 1000 core seems to get me to ~64% of N4 words) and my grammar should be closer to N4 but it is in dire need of practice and refining. Reviewing the TaeKim deck for Grammer only gets you so far.

Really starting to get desperate for native reading material but understand my Vocab is still a bit lacking. In this odd spot where much practice is needed to reinforce what I have learned but at N4~N5 level it is hard to find. There are sections of the Genki books outside the regular exercises and workbook I have left to do, so perhaps I will feel better after that.

I'd love a large library of sentences that goes over a large range of grammer points and includes english translations as well, if anyone has any suggestions. The Core sentences are a good start, but, at least around 1000 or below, are fairly simplistic structure and grammer wise. I don't know if get more complex after that.

At some point I am going to just sit down with raw manga and translation side-by-side, but I don't see that happening until I get to 2K~3K words, which is a ways off.

muteki99 Wrote:I'd love a large library of sentences that goes over a large range of grammer points and includes english translations as well, if anyone has any suggestions.

I don’t put much into SRSing sentences and definitely agree with you that Core’s sentences quickly wear out. If you would like to get some more interesting ones though, take a look at sentences from:

[1]Dictionary of Japanese Grammar (you may want to have a physical book with those as well)

[2]Kanji in Context (non-trivial sentences, might be a bit hard, which might be a good thing actually…. Also no English translation there, so you are on your own, so to speak.)


I would recommend real texts instead of sentences though, check out those:

[3]CosCom (grammatically simple news/weather reports/articles on variety of subjects from 2009-2012, mp3s included)

[4] Read Real Japanese – Essays (indeed real Japanese texts (read difficult) but as they are fully annotated, they are actually approachable. You will have good chances understanding other real Japanese texts after you are done with that one. There is also volume Read Real Japanese – Fiction, but I don’t think it’s as good, educationally wise, as Essays. With either volume, you are getting audio as well.)

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2032035930
[2] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2316424408
[3] http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_m...CosComSite
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Read-Real-Japanese...1568364148

Inny Jan Wrote:I don’t put much into SRSing sentences and definitely agree with you that Core’s sentences quickly wear out. If you would like to get some more interesting ones though, take a look at sentences from:

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm not looking so much for more SRS material (as I have my hands full with that at the moment), just looking for something engaging I can spend free time on in-between reviews.

I recently ran across this site which has a few essays separated by level:
http://chokochoko.wordpress.com/the-great-library/
Only downside is they are rather short and no accompanying translation. I feel that helps me the most, to have something to check against. Often I think I have an overall grasp of what is being said because of all the vocabulary, but I miss a particle or helping verb somewhere and it completely changes the meaning.

At this point it is mostly overall structure, nested clauses, etc that is giving me trouble. I can review each grammer point in isolation and it makes perfect sense but out in the wild I get lost when everything is combined together on top of each other. I figure the best I can do is just read more and more until it sinks in.

And like I said, I'm only N5~N4 so still a loooong way to go.

Inny Jan Wrote:There is also volume Read Real Japanese – Fiction, but I don’t think it’s as good, educationally wise, as Essays.

RRJ-Fiction may not help with general conversation or the JLPT as much as RRJ-Essays, but it specifically addresses many points specific to fiction writing in the annotations. If reading fiction is one of your goals (and many people do take up Japanese for that reason), well then, in that case RRJ-Fiction is invaluable.

Halfway through Core6k as of right now.

Guess I'll use this to post an update. Sorry I haven't been around much lately, but I've been...well, studying Japanese. :-D

Background: on and off student of Japanese since 1992; starting in April 2012, I devoted myself to making it a daily habit.

I finished two books back to back recently - モニタールーム and パズル by 山田悠介. Honestly, they weren't very good. But it helped me fill in a lot of holes w/ vocab and kanji, and the sentence structure helped reinforce a lot of basics about Japanese sentence structure in my head.

I just finished 第二巻 of デスノート in just a few days. There are still sentences that are hard to figure out, but after finishing two novels it's a LOT easier to process. I can understand the majority of it, and follow the story easily. I'm working through 第三巻 now, and also reading リング by 鈴木光司. I continue to read and listen to NHK on a daily basis.

Skritter stats: 4,221 word writings and 1,808 kanji writings known. My actual known words count (depending on how you count such things) is likely approaching 10,000, but who knows. I timebox Skritter to 30 minutes/day so that my focus remains primarily on reading, listening, and speaking.

Speaking - speaking 1-2 hours a week w/ tutors on italki (Japanese only). I'm looking for a new primary tutor, as the one I was meeting with for an hour a week had to quit suddenly. I get high marks from all of my tutors on my pronunciation and grammar; it's just a matter now of getting the words to flow smoothly, and being able to speak on a variety of topics.

Aiming for JLPT2 again in December. Pretty confident I'll pass this time around, but I'll start formally preparing next week by taking a model test.