MAYBE THE TITLE SHOULD BE
An Argument for Vocabulary SRSing.

As some of you may know on the 20th I am taking off for Shanghai for 3 years of study, first being a language student, and following will be full undergraduate studies to finish my degree.

Well, I have recently started getting my Chinese reading ability started before I get there and all in all things are going well and in the past 2 weeks I have learned to read 300 hanzi already (Playing the Pokemon Pearl underground translation version is actually getting pretty fun now!!) But what I have noticed is that unlike in my Japanese studies which I am much more familiar with I seem to have a lot of trouble thinking of vocabulary meanings and even at times being able to easily identify words in Chinese... I noticed that I would not pay enough attention to each term in a sentence in Chinese(In Japanese for some reason I do not have this problem, probably because my listening is a lot better as I have listened to probably 5 times as much Japanese, so every words seems to sound like I have heard it before! which makes them rather easily learned) Well anyways, recently within the past 2 days I have just started adding all the vocabulary from my sentences into a separate vocab. deck, and I can only say actually great things about it.( I'm just doing recognition and reading, but for words only, not production.. yuck, and I am using the mandarin toolkit for Anki)

The positives:
*I have instant recognition of every　term in my sentences.
*I have very little difficulty seeing the structure of the sentences.
*It seems much easier to relate individual Hanzi and remember which words I have seen them in before, when I was just doing sentences it seemed like I knew I had seen that character before but never seemed to instantly recognize the word I already knew it in, and most of the time I had a hard time with reading these said characters correctly.
*Also, a big thing is I tend to remember the sentences much much more clearly since I am so familiar with the individual terms in the sentence.

Negatives:
Other than spending time individually reviewing vocabulary I don't see much of a negative to this, I think overall time may well be saved this way because of all the cards I am not failing.

DISCLAIMER:I want to state one final thing, vocabulary drilling by itself, I agree is ineffective. My stance is that it may be beneficial to drill sentence vocabulary to build familiarity with individual terms in each sentence, don't take my word for it though, and I am sure it is not for everyone, nor do I even plan to do this when I am already comfortable with most readings then I think it will be a waste of time, but at the beginning of my studies it seems hellishly effective, since many sentences seem to contain 4 to 5 new readings at times, and 3 or even more at times, new terms,

Opinions on this are greatly appreciated.

That's good that it's working for you so far. I tend to burn out SRSing words alone faster than SRSing sentences(after 1000-2000 words, so I can't exactly say it's useless).

Yeah I managed 215 words so far in the past 2 days, I usually go ten at a time and rep through and hit "soon" the first 3 times, and after I know that I know them I mark hard, I am currently reviewing those words now, and I'm almost done with them and I've only forgotten 3, then I am going to do the sentences with these words.

I also drill new vocab. I don't keep a separate deck, but rather I drill new vocab in lists before adding sentences to Anki, and then I just do the sentences from then on.

I've been doing this for all new vocab for one month and I think it works very well. It helps retention significantly. I adapted a drilling method that I just apply every time - takes 5 minutes for 14 words (21 seconds per word), and I usually have near 100% retention the following day.

Once I set up my sentences for the day, built my vocab list as usual and drilled it, but by mistake I missed 1 word from my list. The next day I got all sentences right first time, except the one with the word I missed of course (which was 潜る). I reviewed and failed it 5 times in Anki - then I drilled it in the following days list and haven't failed it since.

I think it saves review time, and stress.

EDIT: As for SRSing vocab, I haven't done it for a long time but a while ago I was doing it with SuperMemo, and the same as yukamina said, I got burned out after 1-2k. It just gets boring and hard without context.

Yonosa Wrote:I usually go ten at a time and rep through and hit "soon" the first 3 times,

Another one who is abusing Ankis system, therefor messing up their own reviews. You might not care, but just so you know, pressing soon doesn't simply reset the scheduling, it also raises the cards difficulty rating. Putting in a word you know and properly grading your reviews isn't the same thing as entering it, pressing soon 3 times and then grading it properly.

As for your approach to learning just words, I don't recommend it... but you seem to have good reasoning behind it and it seems to help you, so go ahead. Any method of study that brings progress is a good method.

Tobberoth Wrote:Another one who is abusing Ankis system, therefor messing up their own reviews. You might not care, but just so you know, pressing soon doesn't simply reset the scheduling, it also raises the cards difficulty rating.

Actually from the Anki FAQ:

Quote:Successive failures while cards are 'young' (under 21 days) do not result in further decreases to the card's ease.

So it shouldn't be a problem to fail the cards a few times.

Codexus Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Another one who is abusing Ankis system, therefor messing up their own reviews. You might not care, but just so you know, pressing soon doesn't simply reset the scheduling, it also raises the cards difficulty rating.

Actually from the Anki FAQ:

Quote:Successive failures while cards are 'young' (under 21 days) do not result in further decreases to the card's ease.

So it shouldn't be a problem to fail the cards a few times.

Oh, I didn't know that. Nice!

Codexus Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Another one who is abusing Ankis system, therefor messing up their own reviews. You might not care, but just so you know, pressing soon doesn't simply reset the scheduling, it also raises the cards difficulty rating.

Actually from the Anki FAQ:

Quote:Successive failures while cards are 'young' (under 21 days) do not result in further decreases to the card's ease.

So it shouldn't be a problem to fail the cards a few times.

Yeah I already knew that as well, so it is more just personal choice how I run through my cards at the beginning. By the time 21 days comes by I've pretty much already mastered those said cards and if I miss them then their difficulties should indeed go up.

I agree with drilling vocabulary. I have always created SRS cards mainly on the basis of finding some vocab first and *then* finding sentences with that word in it.

i'll agree with drilling vocab too... as long as you are drilling sentences and grammar in another deck also... i think a good way to drill vocab would be in chunks of kanji compounds with at least 1 same kanji linking them together...

Hashiriya Wrote:i'll agree with drilling vocab too... as long as you are drilling sentences and grammar in another deck also... i think a good way to drill vocab would be in chunks of kanji compounds with at least 1 same kanji linking them together...

HECK YES SON!We be drilling Kanji that appear in multiple words ! We don't play games......except in Japanese of Chinese!

I drill vocab and sentences together. I mine sentences that are I+1 (mostly words I know, with a couple new ones). I also make cards for the new words themselves.

Yonosa Wrote:Yeah I managed 215 words so far in the past 2 days, I usually go ten at a time and rep through and hit "soon" the first 3 times, and after I know that I know them I mark hard, I am currently reviewing those words now, and I'm almost done with them and I've only forgotten 3, then I am going to do the sentences with these words.

I pretty much do this to learn new Genki vocab when I'm in my classes. Also used this method for my Spanish classes a few semesters ago. Works for me. I don't keep a separate deck though, I will usually just try and find sentences for my vocab cards latter on, and sometimes reschedule them as new cards if I think I need to.

Sometimes using a sentence to learn a new word (especially nouns) seems over whelming.

I enjoy it for Chinese anyways, because it helps me to keep from mixing character sounds in sentences.

In japanese there are the kana, that separate the kanji into nice little segments, occasionally we get string of 4 or 5 but it is rare.

But in chinese, I often get 4 new characters in a row in a sentence, often time even more. Drilling the words separately make me connect the individual sound to the character and doesnt get lost in the confusion of some longer sentences.

Vocabulary drilling is my main form of Japanese study (I don't do sentences), and obviously it isn't holding me back (I got 94% on JLPT2 with vocab drilling as my only directed study). I view it as prep for when I eventually encounter those words in conversation or reading, at which point I will have the proper context.

The major plus of drilling vocab is sheer speed. When I'm actively studying I do 200+ words per day with only ~2 hours of real study (including expired cards), while watching videos or whatever else.

I do however use the sentences plugin with anki for some small amount of context (although the corpus is the heavily flawed Tanaka one).

I'm going through KO now. My top priority is learning to read the sentences, but I have a separate deck for vocab too. I use full Anki client for sentences and Ankimini for vocab. This makes it possible to study even when I only have a few minutes available; it's easy to zip through 10-20 vocab cards.

My vocab cards are kanji -> kana + Heisig keywords. I auto-generated them using chasen and some Python scripting. I don't put any definitions on the cards. I get the meaning from the kanji themselves and of course from the sentences in my main deck.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Vocabulary drilling is my main form of Japanese study (I don't do sentences), and obviously it isn't holding me back

You do already have a lot of Japanese experience though right? There is the whole "being a translator" thing and all

I imagine vocab drilling is probably a lot more effective for someone with a lot of experience like you because, as you said, you can just pick up the context when you see that word in a sentence. I think that is harder to do for a newbie.

I used to vocab drill to quickly learn words for my Japanese class quizzes but I personally didn't like it very much. I probably won't need to be doing that again either, since I'm nearly finished KO2001 which is about 5 years ahead of the curriculum

blackmacros Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:Vocabulary drilling is my main form of Japanese study (I don't do sentences), and obviously it isn't holding me back

You do already have a lot of Japanese experience though right? There is the whole "being a translator" thing and all

I imagine vocab drilling is probably a lot more effective for someone with a lot of experience like you because, as you said, you can just pick up the context when you see that word in a sentence. I think that is harder to do for a newbie.

I used to vocab drill to quickly learn words for my Japanese class quizzes but I personally didn't like it very much. I probably won't need to be doing that again either, since I'm nearly finished KO2001 which is about 5 years ahead of the curriculum

HAHAHA, dude classes... what the hell... I really don't understand it.

I think the process you're using to get the results you're seeing now would eventually become monotonous as you build a larger collection of sentences. Basically it seems to me like you're doing twice the work necessary - it may give you more immediate results for the short term though because you review each word twice right? So you're technically doing double the reviews usually "recommended" and that's why you're seeing the short term results, IMO.

Tobberoth is right though, whatever study methods bring results!

If that was in reply to me, I don't do sentences at all. I am of the opinion that flashcards should be brief and gone through as quickly as possible.

coverup Wrote:I think the process you're using to get the results you're seeing now would eventually become monotonous as you build a larger collection of sentences. Basically it seems to me like you're doing twice the work necessary - it may give you more immediate results for the short term though because you review each word twice right? So you're technically doing double the reviews usually "recommended" and that's why you're seeing the short term results, IMO.

Tobberoth is right though, whatever study methods bring results!

Yeah I just need it right now, because I have trouble remembering some pronunciations for characters in the context of sentences for chinese since it's still new. Eventually I will stop the vocab drilling, also I will delete vocab as it becomes too familiar and leave it in the sentences only, seems like a win win. I don't want 500 vocab reviews per day after all.

Jarvik7 Wrote:I am of the opinion that flashcards should be brief and gone through as quickly as possible.

Me too, except I use sentences. I put the least amount of info on the card as possible, and sometimes the answer side is blank. I don't get why people put whole kana transcriptions, lengthy J>J definitions, notes, more than 2 sides to a card, etc. After a couple reviews you shouldn't even need to see the answer side, and inputting and reading all that info really slows you down.

yukamina Wrote:I don't get why people put whole kana transcriptions, lengthy J>J definitions　(...)

It might save time. Usually, you don't need them though, only in case you forget the reading/meaning of a sentence/item.

As for vocabulary vs. sentences, I recently started to create vocabulary only items for animals, plants etc. simply because I'll probably be able to use them in context immediately. Most items are still sentences though.

yukamina Wrote:Me too, except I use sentences. I put the least amount of info on the card as possible, and sometimes the answer side is blank. I don't get why people put whole kana transcriptions, lengthy J>J definitions, notes, more than 2 sides to a card, etc. After a couple reviews you shouldn't even need to see the answer side, and inputting and reading all that info really slows you down.

+1.

I used to include full kana & translations, but since a while my sentence cards look like this:

Q: わたしの研究テーマに関連がありそうな論文はすべて集めました。
A: わたしの研究テーマに[かんれん connection;relevance]がありそうな論文はすべて集めました。

I mark only whatever word I'm learning with the kana + brief description. After a few reviews I don't even look at the answer side because I know when something feels right. The way the Q&A are, if I ever feel like it I can swap them and do kanji production too.

I don't get the point of lengthy J>J definitions either. The whole point of using sentences is to get a feeling for the meaning of the word through its usage. Having a lot of details on your cards is not useful if you never need to look at it. You can always add some more to the card later if it doesn't feel right.

vosmiura Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:Me too, except I use sentences. I put the least amount of info on the card as possible, and sometimes the answer side is blank. I don't get why people put whole kana transcriptions, lengthy J>J definitions, notes, more than 2 sides to a card, etc. After a couple reviews you shouldn't even need to see the answer side, and inputting and reading all that info really slows you down.

+1.

I used to include full kana & translations, but since a while my sentence cards look like this:

Q: わたしの研究テーマに関連がありそうな論文はすべて集めました。
A: わたしの研究テーマに[かんれん connection;relevance]がありそうな論文はすべて集めました。

I mark only whatever word I'm learning with the kana + brief description. After a few reviews I don't even look at the answer side because I know when something feels right. The way the Q&A are, if I ever feel like it I can swap them and do kanji production too.

I don't get the point of lengthy J>J definitions either. The whole point of using sentences is to get a feeling for the meaning of the word through its usage. Having a lot of details on your cards is not useful if you never need to look at it. You can always add some more to the card later if it doesn't feel right.

I somewhat agree here, katz did 7500 sentences in 18 months, Im on pace for nearly 15000 in one year, and I dont thin using english when i need it is poor, because I dont connect the word solely to the english definitions, I take is more like a clue, seeing it in a lot of different contexts will do more than a lengthy definition ever will, another of my few disagreements with katz. I mean is it really possible to translate in you head? then understand? I don't get the point of that because who would need to do that, we aren't trying to decrypt a language, with familiarity we hear it and the "oh, I can understand this" feeling happens. Im way too lazy to half way try and think about the english equivalents, usage irons out the discrepancies...