I've finished RTK a little while ago and I've started doing sentences from Tae Kim's grammar guide. I'm running into a problem however with what I feel is a complete lack of a system for remembering vocab. I have the kanji down really solid, and most of the time I know what the word is supposed to mean but I just can't effectively remember the readings for new vocab when I run into it.

For example when you run into a word like:
高速道路 - こうそくどうろ
what exactly do you guys do remember it? I do find the fact that I already know 高校 helps me a lot with the first character, but at this point most of the time I see a reading it's for the first time...

Or another example, 宿題 - しゅくだい , sometimes I just slip a long vowel in there like しゅうくだい ...

Are there any mnemonic devices that work here, or is it just brute forcing it? I might be a little bit spoiled from RTK (I thought that was fairly easy), this is quite a bit harder for me.

Basically, could some of you describe exactly what steps you go through when you see new vocab in a sentence? Do you use any special tricks, or is it just saying it a couple of times, writing it and hoping it sticks?

Yeah I'm using anki already, without it I think I would have gone insane already haha. I do use IME already, that definitely works great for making sure I have the readings down.

So is it pretty normal to get say 4 or 5 fails before actually remembering something tricky sentences for good? I haven't used SRS before RTK, and with RTK I remembered most kanji solid after just 1 or 2 reviews (and have around 98-99% in long term reviews), so I guess this might just be different at first. Do you really try to learn the sentence (like spending maybe 4 minutes on it), or do you make a faster pass on it (maybe 1 or 2 minutes) and just learn through lots of SRS fails?

I do know that to remember something you have to make cross-links in memory (that's the whole point of the RTK stories), but it's pretty rough when there's really nothing else. As you said, I hope it will get easier when I start seeing the same readings repeat in different contexts.

I´m in your situation - I´m up to 120 sentences in Tae Kim´s guide, and it´s not the grammar I struggle with, it´s the readings!
Currently I´m not too hard on myself with the readings - I focus on the grammar (and of course I try to remember the readings, it´s just not my main focus).
I just want to get through Tae Kim´s basics + essentials, THEN focus 100% on the readings. But that´s just me... Maybe I´m wrong? Who knows?
Hopefully you guys can give us some tips about how to remember those suckers, hehe! =)

I do something similar to Iversen's method: http://natural-language-acquisition.blog...method.php .

This is no memory trick, it's pure memorization, but it's very efficient.

Whenever I'm learning some sentences, or just reading a book, I make a note of all of the new kanji vocab I come across. I add this to a list in the format: kanji, kana, meaning.

I then learn the words on the list. The key is doing it in groups without dwelling on any single word. I do 7 words at a time.

I cover the kana & meaning side and look at each kanji word - and try to say the reading and remember the meaning and check if it's right. If I don't remember then I repeat it once, and move onto the next word. I keep going through the list several times until I remember all of them easily. It should take about 2 minutes per 7 words.

Don't do a,a,a,a,b,b,b,b etc. This is ineffective at getting stuff out of immediate memory. Do a, b, c, d, e, f, g, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, g, f, e, d, c, b, a, etc. If you have trouble remembering 'a', try a,b,a,b,c,a,b,c,d,a,b,c,d,e,f,g. Get some spacing in there. It makes all the difference for moving the word into your memory.

After that I usually will remember between 90~100% for the next 2 days. I let the SRS take care of it from there.

@Zorlee:
I've actually gone through the grammar guide (just by reading it), and using the sentences as a second pass. I found that two pass learning worked really well for me with Kanji. What I would do is on the first day go through the characters I would want to study, find stories for them, but not actually test them or worry about remembering them (so I'd spend under a minute for every new character). Then I'd come back to them the following morning, re-read the stories, and wait till evening till I tested them, at which point i'd have about 85-90% retention. I'm sort of using the same approach on the grammar.

@vosmiura:
That's great! I was really hoping for some sort of logical method for doing this, and doing groups like you mention makes a lot of sense to me. I always like when something can be simplified down to a procedure that can be followed, so that I can concentrate on what I'm learning as opposed to how I'm learning it. I'll give this a try right away

There's no need to fail sentences many times. With the method I described I usually fail next to no new or young cards.

You just need a lot of listening. When you have heard 宿題 and 高速道路 100 times you will never mistake the reading. Also I would suggest doing production and recognition in that order. Doing production first should root the word deeper in your memory.

vosmiura Wrote:I do something similar to Iversen's method: http://natural-language-acquisition.blog...method.php .

Interesting method. I too am having probelsm with readings, so I'll give it a shot.

The Iverson's method works, and I'll attest to that. I've been doing it for years, long before I even considered learning Japanese. As I do my reviews/study new cards, I keep a list of words that I failed to remember/don't know. When there are 6+ vocab on the list, I spend a few minutes coming up with or remembering mnemonics for them, then cross the six off the list. Eventually the card I failed will show up again and that'll be test of whether my mnemonic was good or not.

To the original question, yes mnemonics are essential to learning vocab. For words composed of kanji you know the reading of, you can make stories using the keywords of the kanji, much like Heisig. But for other words you have to rely on sound mnemonics. An example I remember from when I first started learning: "onegai shimasu!" sounds a lot like a slurred "oh my gosh a mouse!" to the naïve ear.

thermal Wrote:You just need a lot of listening. When you have heard 宿題 and 高速道路 100 times you will never mistake the reading. Also I would suggest doing production and recognition in that order. Doing production first should root the word deeper in your memory.

I partially agree; production is better first (by this I presume you mean English -> Japanese) as it enforces words better, but just hearing something a lot doesn't always work. I still need to stop and think about 貸す and 借りる, and 使う and 作る because both pairs have related meanings and sound similar (to me anyway), maybe if I was speaking Japanese regularly this wouldn't be a problem. I find that the most effective thing for me is to try and relate a similar sounding word to the word I want to learn; for instance I remember that you "use" a scouring pad and for me "scour" is close enough to つかう for it to act as an audio clue so I know 使う means "to use." I did have a stab at trying to make this more scientific than an ad hoc approach (a bit like a mini Heisig with sounds), but it all seemed to be a bit complex and didn't work very well, so I abandoned it.

The best tip: Use it. The more you actually use it, the easier it becomes to remember.

As for complex vocab, do not try to learn them first. As a children must learn the easy stuff first, it will be easiest for you to learn them, too. It's a lot easier to learn 'train station' if you learn 'train' and 'station' first. In Japanese, you can even take it a step further because the kanji for train can be broken into 2 parts and learned first as well. (RTK was that step, in case you didn't notice.)

So again, start small, keep using it, and just have fun. It'll all come naturally.

Sure it takes a little time to make the list though I do it at the same time as I look up words to put in the cards anyway. I keep thinking about making an Anki plugin that will make the list automatically when I add cards with words marked up in a certain way.

It's 2 minutes per list of 7, so about 17 seconds per word. That's similar to doing 1 sentence rep for me, although when I forget words I find that reps take a bit longer as I'm trying to recall them.

Anyway, I've been doing it consistently for a month and a half and I kept statistics to try to tell how it works out over time but I'd like to do it longer. It's been enough time so I can tell what effect it's had on cards reaching maturity but not much past that.

On average across all cards it's cut the number of reviews per card to reach maturity by 33% from before, so that's roughly the amount of review time saved overall.

vosmiura Wrote:Sure it takes a little time to make the list though I do it at the same time as I look up words to put in the cards anyway. I keep thinking about making an Anki plugin that will make the list automatically when I add cards with words marked up in a certain way.
.

You've done KO2001 already haven't you? Did you use this method to learn the KO2001 words? Do you find it is still useful even after finishing KO?

The reason I ask is because after finishing KO2001 I rarely have any difficulty remembering vocab. I've become familiar enough with the common readings that most words have enough memory 'hooks' to let me remember them even if one or more kanji use unusual readings.

bandwidthjunkie Wrote:

thermal Wrote:You just need a lot of listening. When you have heard 宿題 and 高速道路 100 times you will never mistake the reading. Also I would suggest doing production and recognition in that order. Doing production first should root the word deeper in your memory.

I partially agree; production is better first (by this I presume you mean English -> Japanese) as it enforces words better, but just hearing something a lot doesn't always work. I still need to stop and think about 貸す and 借りる, and 使う and 作る because both pairs have related meanings and sound similar (to me anyway), maybe if I was speaking Japanese regularly this wouldn't be a problem. I find that the most effective thing for me is to try and relate a similar sounding word to the word I want to learn; for instance I remember that you "use" a scouring pad and for me "scour" is close enough to つかう for it to act as an audio clue so I know 使う means "to use." I did have a stab at trying to make this more scientific than an ad hoc approach (a bit like a mini Heisig with sounds), but it all seemed to be a bit complex and didn't work very well, so I abandoned it.

Production

Q: The audio or hirigana of (難しい！頭を使いますね。)
A: 難しい！頭を使いますね。

Recognition is the opposite. I wouldn't have English on your cards. If you don't understand the meaning then use a dictionary.

Mnemonics have their place. However, if you are needing them for anything other than high level words then IMO you are doing it wrong. I hear or read a word like 使う about 10 times everyday. I couldn't forget it if I tried. My advice is go nuts adding words to your SRS in the beginning and do a lot of immersion. You will hear/read everything you add many many times so you shouldn't need mnemonics. Eventually they will become second nature to you.

blackmacros Wrote:You've done KO2001 already haven't you? Did you use this method to learn the KO2001 words? Do you find it is still useful even after finishing KO?

The reason I ask is because after finishing KO2001 I rarely have any difficulty remembering vocab. I've become familiar enough with the common readings that most words have enough memory 'hooks' to let me remember them even if one or more kanji use unusual readings.

I did the 1st volume of K02001. I didn't use this method at the time, only the last month & a half, with Reibun de Manabu and at the same time Kanzen Master.

I agree it gets easier the more kanji you know. Where I found this method makes the biggest difference is with the more difficult words and sentences that have several new compounds. It sort of flattens the difficulty.

Reibun de Manabu has quite a bit of overlap with KO, so when I started quite a lot of words were easy to go over - in the beginning I was getting about 65% of sentences to maturity with no lapses. As I was going through there were more unfamiliar words and at a point I was lapsing on 50% of cards; that's when I thought about trying this method (it was around the time Ahibba mentioned Iversen's method). Since then I get between 90 and 100% of cards to maturity with zero lapses.

Another point where it's good is that before I would usually answer '2' for new cards, but now I feel confident to answer '3' for a lot of them, which saves a lot of reviews.

These graphs show a 5 day running average of % correct for new, young and mature cards. The X axis corresponds to the day the cards were first answered.



47 days ago is when I started the method, and there's a clear difference since then I think. Correct rates for new & young cards get very high. I think long term it probably doesn't change much from normal. Today I had 166 sentence reviews and got 98.2% correct overall, 95.8% for mature cards.

PS. You might also want to try this method just with words that give you trouble; if you keep forgetting some readings try adding them to a list and doing this method.

thermal Wrote:Q: The audio or hirigana of (難しい！頭を使いますね。)
A: 難しい！頭を使いますね。

Recognition is the opposite. I wouldn't have English on your cards. If you don't understand the meaning then use a dictionary.

Mnemonics have their place. However, if you are needing them for anything other than high level words then IMO you are doing it wrong. I hear or read a word like 使う about 10 times everyday. I couldn't forget it if I tried. My advice is go nuts adding words to your SRS in the beginning and do a lot of immersion. You will hear/read everything you add many many times so you shouldn't need mnemonics. Eventually they will become second nature to you.

I'm just talking about when I first learn a set of words, as far as I can see you have two choices either try to use some leverage to learn the word, or just hope it will stick by endless repetition/magic. I've tried endless repetition/magic and eventually words might stick, but for me it is not very effective. However, if I think about the word for a minute and try and associate it with something then it often sticks first time. So when you say "Mnemonics have their place. However, if you are needing them for anything other than high level words then IMO you are doing it wrong." I can't see why that should be the case, over time as words are used more, the mnemonics will fade away, but I find them to be a very handy way of getting them into longer term memory. I do English -> Japanese in the book and I test myself on the words a few times, I find I learn them better that way from Japanese -> English because that is a harder production task, so it enforces them better. Then I pick out sentences containing those words and put them into the SRS in Japanese with a translation as the answer. I've got no doubt that hiragana -> kanji is good for one, but it I found it way too time consuming for me and I'm not particularly bothered about writing at the moment.

To be fair if you are in Japan, as your location suggests, then your learning style and needs are going to be somewhat different from someone living outside of Japan, because Japanese is actually of real relevance to your daily life, to me it is just a hobby and the amount of exposure I get to it is pretty low, so things aren't going to stick by pure weight of Japanese being hurled at me.

I find that if im having trouble with a new reading for a particular kanji in a word... I found other words that use that reading and I learn them too and that way when it comes time to review the word im having trouble with, im familiar with the new reading I learned and it makes it far easier to remember.

I only need to use mnemonics for new words ocassionaly... but yeah it should be 20% of the time absolute max.

FooSoft Wrote:I've finished RTK a little while ago and I've started doing sentences from Tae Kim's grammar guide. I'm running into a problem however with what I feel is a complete lack of a system for remembering vocab.

Reading your post, it looks like you’re studying alone and you’re using reading materials to learn. I think this is your problem. It sounds to me like you need a lot more listening and speaking exposure. If you’re not in Japan, I appreciate that this could be difficult but this is one of the reasons that I think a class is good for people outside Japan.

I’d also recommend using audio/video materials as well as reading materials like Tae Kim’s guide. If you’re hearing these words being spoken naturally and you’re imitating the pronunciation correctly, you probably wouldn’t get mixed up like you are.

Quote:Or another example, 宿題 - しゅくだい , sometimes I just slip a long vowel in there like しゅうくだい ...

I used to get confused about whether vowels were long or short as well. What helps is to recognize the reading of each kanji. No kanji has a reading of しゅうく, so that should help. Listening to this word being spoken and learning to hear the difference between long vowels and short vowels will sort this problem out for you. Rhythm is the key here.

Quote:高速道路 - こうそくどうろ

For this one, definitely break it up into 高速 and 道路. Also, concentrate on shorter words, before trying to memorize longer ones. You don’t have to cover each and every vocab item you encounter. Picking and choosing helps a lot.

There is nothing inherently wrong with what you are doing, but the way most of the people here believe the best way to learn is to get a lot of exposure and make sense of it bit by bit. I am back in Australia now, but average about 12 hours a day (including sleeping). Generally we try and understand real Japanese because it is interesting like from an anime or manga and don't study it other than in it's real unalloyed form.

I personally believe that learning language is a primarily unconscious process, so using translations and focusing on grammar and vocab, won't get you very far. I tried for 2 years doing this way, 1 of those living in Japan and I didn't never became good. Anyway, just my thoughts.

I know what you're saying thermal but you know you don't get good until you get good. Every marathon is ran one step at a time. Starting out with Tae Kim's guide is a pretty good starting point for grammar. Even Khatz mined a grammar book in the beginning.

The other option is to change the word giving you problems. Another is add that word to your vocabulary deck.

What helped me is I started looking at grammar sentences as grammar sentences. They're there in my SRS to give simple grammar examples. I don't fail a grammar sentences unless it's the grammar concept I miss. If a sentence is a vocabulary sentence, then I fail it only if I miss that vocabulary word being tested. This way forces each and every example sentence to be i+1.

That said, I've recently started legitimate sentence mining. Those by their nature have many fail points (grammar, vocabulary, overall concept). Since I created such a solid base with the grammar and vocabulary sentences, I can handle a mined sentence with less effort. Well, and adding vocabulary sentences with each new word helps.

I've been using the movie method with the locations to help me determine what the onyomi is (post-RTK). It works a charm.

Wow, thanks for all the ideas and feedback! Even though logically it's obvious, it's nice to hear other people went through the same challenges. I'm trying the word grouping method now, so far it seems to be helping, I'll see if it translates to better long-term memorization in a couple of days

In terms of language exposure, I do watch a lot of stuff in Japanese on TV (about an hour a day), rest is work/studying. I can't do w/o subs yet, but I do listen for things I've learned. I've actually watched anime for quite a while before I started Japanese, and having learned English mostly from TV, I was able to gain some familiarity w/ the Japanese language, so a lot of things I learn feel like connecting the dots (which is great).

You may be interested in reading the first couple of pages of this thread.

my 2 cents:

mnemonics are key. Before I knew what RTK was, I used them to survive 2 years of basic Japanese classes. It's silly (aren't they all, really) but I learned 落ち込む（おちこむ）by thinking of Zoro (from One Piece) giving a fitting curt response such as お or ち, and combing his hair こむ.

I recently had trouble retaing 理科（りか）"science," so I now think of the word Eureka! And it sticks. It's all in the vein of RTK, sometimes rote memory works, sometimes words are kanji appear unique enough to be learned with little effort, but when you make repeated errors and have trouble with long term retention, mnemonics are a real life-saver.