From the Kanji Odyssey web site, what products (which books, DVD, etc. ?) would you recommend and for stage of the learning curve?
Are those products essential? I already have tons of learning methods, grammar dictionaries and books, RTK, Pimsleur, and... all the free resources available for free on the internet.

Out of 9 posts 3 of them have been new topics. You really need to do some research on your own and I mean that in the nicest way possible as I'm bad about it too at times. If you search Kanji Odyssey you'll find all the information you could ever want.

The reason why people like Kanji Odyssey is that it covers a lot of vocabulary with sample sentences. The level is beginner but not newbie so you need to be already familiar with basic grammar and vocabulary.

Getting the book or the CD version is a matter of preference, I've heard that the CD is now supposed to have full audio for all sentences which makes it very interesting.

Just search the forum for more information.

Sentences: Boring
Audio: Even more boring

bombpersons Wrote:Sentences: Boring
Audio: Even more boring

Intriguing post. What else? (no reference to G. Clooney here! )
Seriously, what's your preferred approach?

bombpersons Wrote:Sentences: Boring
Audio: Even more boring

Heisig was well maybe not boring but certainly an uphill slog. So what if it's not "fun"? If you can blitz it in a month or two it'll be a big boost to you're understanding. Get it with the audio though, big difference. I tried just doing sentences from natural sources and whilst that was good and I was going great at it it took me a long time every day to get 30 sentences. With KO2001 I can do approx 100 a day ( = 200 cards from the anki deck im using)

So it's a case of Fast vs Fun. Personally the efficiency is worth the lack of fun because once you're done you can get down to fun stuff and enjoy it a whole lot more.

YogaSpirit Wrote:

bombpersons Wrote:Sentences: Boring
Audio: Even more boring

Intriguing post. What else? (no reference to G. Clooney here! )
Seriously, what's your preferred approach?

I'd say do the KO2001 version on smart.fm. The sentences from KO2001 are mind-numbingly boring, the guy who does the audio puts no energy into it at all... However the sentences on smart.fm are much more interesting, and the audio is much more lively.

Every other sentence in K02001 is about a company or some sort of business, so I suspect but it'd for "business" Japanese, but seriously it's ridiculous:

My company exports automobile parts to Japan.
In my company, there are 5 foreigners. Amongst them, 3 are very good at Japanese.
On Friday last week, I went to a concert with someone from my company.
I go to my company at about 8 o'clock everyday and return home at about 7 o'clock.
It takes 1 hour from my house to my company. I usually leave home at 8 o'clock.
Mr. A's occupation is a company employee. He works in sales at his software development company.
All Japanese zip codes consist of 7 digits. My zip code is 153-9999 and my company's is 106-9999.
This trading company imports all kinds of goods and supplies them to shops in the country.
etc...

Unless you like that sort of stuff it's incredibly boring. I'm going back to native sources instead, since I don't really need KO or smart.fm any more, but I would suggest smart.fm if you're just starting.

Sure the sentences aren't that exciting, but they serve their purpose of providing context for the new words.

Are sentences from "native sources" really more interesting once they are taken in isolation? Also I don't know what exactly your "native sources" are, but in my case that would be manga and novels and retyping sentences from those would be so much pain that I can't even imagine doing that.

(and at this point we should probably mention for the original poster's benefit that the KO2001 sentences are available as spreadsheets if you know where to search).
EDIT: And just to be clear, I'm only saying that as an incentive to buy the books/CDROM and not suggesting getting only the sentences as an alternative which wouldn't be nice.

Codexus Wrote:Sure the sentences aren't that exciting, but they serve their purpose of providing context for the new words.

Are sentences from "native sources" really more interesting once they are taken in isolation? Also I don't know what exactly your "native sources" are, but in my case that would be manga and novels and retyping sentences from those would be so much pain that I can't even imagine doing that.

(and at this point we should probably mention for the original poster's benefit that the KO2001 sentences are available as spreadsheets if you know where to search).

Sure I see the benifit, but I did over 1000 of KO2001 cards and I just couldn't take it anymore.

One of the major problems with these type of things (KO2001 and smart.fm sentences) is that there is no context. What would be epicly awesome, would be a light novel / manga version introducing the kanji like ko2001, only it would have a proper storyline and actually be interesting. That way every sentence would have a context and be easier to remember. I know it would be difficult to order the kanji right and keep a story that makes sense, but it would be possible.

*Edit*
You can download an anki deck with all the sentences put in already, http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3283

After I finished KO Vol. 1 I switched to just doing smart.fm, and in retrospect I'd recommend the KO lists at smart.fm only, but personally I never found myself getting bored, per se, when learning Japanese--it was always exciting to me to learn new words even if they were part of an imaginary context of business-related items. But the more personal nature of smart.fm's sentences and recordings from Japanese voice actors in combination with KO's order? Can't be beat for systematized early learning of the kanji readings.

However, hopefully we'll eventually have enough pre-made subs2srs decks that you can just run them through a list of kanji readings you want to learn and have a large collection of sentences from your favourite media at the drop of a hat. I guess the tech is already there to do it in a slightly lengthier process, though there's still the issue of maintaining basic grammar in a streamlined way.

They should make factual sentences :o

"Did you know, the size of a dolphins penis is about 50cm long?"

"Yesterday, I heard that dolphins can have sex up to 5 times a day"

"Every morning, a honey bee performs his chores consuming roughly 500kJ of energy per hour"

Not only do you grasp context here, but you get some interesting insight too.

These sorts of sentences can come about from a joint project of English natives + Japanese natives.

(NB: I made up those facts)

bombpersons Wrote:

Codexus Wrote:Sure the sentences aren't that exciting, but they serve their purpose of providing context for the new words.

Are sentences from "native sources" really more interesting once they are taken in isolation? Also I don't know what exactly your "native sources" are, but in my case that would be manga and novels and retyping sentences from those would be so much pain that I can't even imagine doing that.

(and at this point we should probably mention for the original poster's benefit that the KO2001 sentences are available as spreadsheets if you know where to search).

Sure I see the benifit, but I did over 1000 of KO2001 cards and I just couldn't take it anymore.

One of the major problems with these type of things (KO2001 and smart.fm sentences) is that there is no context. What would be epicly awesome, would be a light novel / manga version introducing the kanji like ko2001, only it would have a proper storyline and actually be interesting. That way every sentence would have a context and be easier to remember. I know it would be difficult to order the kanji right and keep a story that makes sense, but it would be possible.

*Edit*
You can download an anki deck with all the sentences put in already, http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3283

no context? A sentence itself is a context. It doesn't have to be in the context of an entire story. IMO that's almost TOO wide.

Agreed about the company focus too. My company this and my company that... but look at it this way, it helps to internalize certain grammar structures quite well because they get repeated so often. Simple things you will use everyday. Eventually it'll be rooted in your brain so well you can replace "company" with any word you want and be able to use the grammar/sentence pattern in the correct manner. The words used are really just semantics. Plus, the aim is to learn Japanese and learning even 1 new Japanese word no matter how company or work related it is is still an achievment.

P.S there's also a bit of mountain related stuff thrown in there to cheer you up.

I'm about half way through Kanji Odyssey now. It certainly has helped tremendously with my reading and some vocab, but it is only the motivation I get from knowing that I will be closer to reading native material once I'm done, that keeps me going. It can be boring.

My favorite sentence so far:

毎日いろいろな事件が起きる。新聞は事件のことでいっぱいだ。
Everyday, various incidents happen. Newspapers are full of those incidents.

Codexus Wrote:Are sentences from "native sources" really more interesting once they are taken in isolation?

Having completed KO2001 and been mining native stuff for around a month now I've come to essentially the same conclusion. Sentences in an SRS have no context outside themselves. Sentences, once they have been mined and placed in the SRS, are nothing more than a collection of words. Sure they are interesting when you're reading it in your manga. But once its in your SRS its just another sentence. The sentence itself might be funny or interesting; but that is a function of the sentence, not its context. I don't find reviewing natural sentences any more fun or enjoyable than reviewing KO sentences.

bombpersons Wrote:What would be epicly awesome, would be a light novel / manga version introducing the kanji like ko2001, only it would have a proper storyline and actually be interesting.

I've thought that myself a few times actually. It'd be cool if some good Japanese author did it; they could be given a list of acceptable ranges of words/kanji use and use it as a sort of "creative restriction". Sort of like how you get 140 character twitter stories or poems composed entirely out of search engine results (I read about that one recently on boing boing). I bet it would turn out awesome

nest0r Wrote:After I finished KO Vol. 1 I switched to just doing smart.fm, and in retrospect I'd recommend the KO lists at smart.fm only, but personally I never found myself getting bored, per se, when learning Japanese--it was always exciting to me to learn new words

From what I've been reading recently, smart.fm KO lists are probably the better way to go. More interesting audio, and it has a greater word density than the KO books do, so you'll actually end up learning more words. Plus its free.

Also I totally agree about never getting bored; learning is a pleasure in and of itself..

@blackmacros - Precisely, those word stats from radical_tyro really cinched it, I think. Also, yes, and it's free! ;p Poor Coscom. What I meant to say was um, buy the KO books!

I still want to make the idea of using KO (or other) lists w/ subs2srs stick, but I can't try very hard to promulgate that as I haven't even been using subs2srs yet. I've fallen behind. Once I start making decks, though, expect extreme methodological proselytization...

As for stories using the KO kanji, that could be cool--might be good to just digitize some of those graded readers and rearrange them somehow to accommodate new orders. Or perhaps take some of the possibilities of doing output--taking what you've already learned and remixing them into Twitter-sized posts or into 'fan fiction' of sorts, and then arranging and sharing them for others. Part of what I might do in trying to design a non-SRS media environment to help crystallize what I've learned would be constructing lengthier narrativized patchworks from stuff I've already studied. That too could be parlayed into beginner learning materials. OK I think I've inspired myself w/ enough random speculation the past week or two, time to put it all on hold again and just study. ;p

The problem I see with using subs2srs is its not all that beginner friendly. The reason I went through KO first was because I found throwing myself into the deep end straight away was just too draining. subs2srs is great for me now and I'm enjoying going through FMA at the moment. But for it to be useful for beginners you would probably have to expend a lot of manual effort into presenting only simple, easy to understand sentences.

I got halfway through your second paragraph but then you lost me. I think I need to do some more AEATT to keep up with you...

first thing : Where did you get FMA subtitles ??????????

as for the KO2001 it s boring argument ....
1st the best way to tacke with it is to storm through it ...if you aren t able to withstand a 3 months trial then I think the problem lies elsewhere .
2nd I think people still don t use anki -sub2srs to its full extent...
in my deck there are more than 2000 cards that are not used with no specific schedule to study them...And this figure should grow more and more ...
why ? because anki is not only a SRS for me now... To coin a word I m trying to make it into a MEDIA DICTIONNARY.
Let s take an example : i take some 電車男 , deathnote , FF7 advent children, もののけ姫　、Fate Stay Night .....While watching those , I edit the subtitle file to only take what I deem interesting and SRSize them (full sentence , no extract must last more than 10 sec otherwise I take both part of the sentence and the full sentence) : which means not only new word but also sentence that are an illustration of grammar point that I already know , sentence including words that I already know through a formal source like KO2001 ,KM or a dictionnary but for which I don t have a real source/media counterpart .
Do I use all of them right on the spot ? far from it .If I don t I just tag them with a priority number ranging from P1 , the most urgent to P3 , useful but not indispensable. So except for P1 those cards can remain in the deck without being reviewed for a very long time...
Does it mean that they re nothing but a dead weight ? don t think so....
because every once in a while when I need some context to understand a new sentence , I just type in a the word/expression I m interested in and more and more I seed those unreviewed sentence pop up .
Basically it s the same thing as a dictionnary : you don t directly use/mine all the damn sentences . Where anki/srs really shines it s that all the examples have a 1st rate context , as I love the shows I include and know them by heart , and the best 声優 in the world as I have a very good taste
What s the relation with KO ? well nobody ever told you that you were supposed to use KO sentences forever right ? In the first place they re supposed to be quickly dispatched as you grow stronger 2nd you can suspend them anytime for instance as soon as you get some live media counterpart that includes the word you re looking for ..... KO is still great as it gives a very good frequency list and it doesn t get in the way of your fun anymore .

The subtitles themselves can be found here, I believe (for the new FMA series): http://kitsunekko.net/subtitles/japanese/

But I just downloaded pre-made deck (warning: low quality pictures and no video. But I believe it covers 16 episodes) that someone kindly made available here: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Sub2srs_decks

EDIT: So if I'm understanding you correctly you add a bunch of subs2srs cards to your anki and let them act as a repository of sentences that you activate when needed (and can search through at will)? I'd really like to do that but...I couldn't handle having Anki tell me "5500 new cards to review". I would feel compelled to try and get reviews + new cards to 0. It would break me.

those so called new card aren t "new card" since they never appear.... They re suspended.
They become new card IF I choose to activate them . When you suspend them they won t appear anymore in your SRS schedule but they still appear in your search results.....if it can relieve your guilty feelings....
And as I said some of them will never be activated , the same way you won t mine the 50 exemples for a word in your dictionnary , which doesn t mean you won t consult your dictionnary sometimes to check the way it s used....
those suspended cards are both SRS material and Media Dictionnary material. Obviously the weaker the priority , the more likely those cards are nothing but Media Dictionnary material

EDIT :Last but not least . After a great deal of thinking I made up 3 laws of SRS that are my 3 laws of Robotics and that I violate on no occasion whatsoever. We already talked about that elsewhere so to sum it up : understood , short , interesting/useful .
what do you do with a barely understood sentence but so damn exciting ? I don t know for you but as for me I just suspend it with a priority tag . In the worse case it will give me some background that can help me if I run into the same difficulty later with a different sentence , in the best case maybe in 2 or 3 years after a search in my database I ll find this sentence , burst out in laugh to the idea I wasn t able to understand that , and reinclude it in my active deck.

blackmacros Wrote:The problem I see with using subs2srs is its not all that beginner friendly. The reason I went through KO first was because I found throwing myself into the deep end straight away was just too draining. subs2srs is great for me now and I'm enjoying going through FMA at the moment. But for it to be useful for beginners you would probably have to expend a lot of manual effort into presenting only simple, easy to understand sentences.

I got halfway through your second paragraph but then you lost me. I think I need to do some more AEATT to keep up with you...

Yes, maintaining the grammar could be a little extra work. Something that might work better on the tail end of someone else's studies, after they've become familiar with their materials and can rearrange them for future learners--but then, there's already filters in subs2srs for limiting sentence sizes amongst other things, and if you're choosing certain types of media to create decks from, you can have more control of the level of grammar/complexity. Take those and pair them up with exclusions lists modeled after KO, perhaps.... What ghinzdra and Nukemarine seem to use subs2srs for is really cool too, it treats Anki as part of the environment. Thinking of subs2srs decks as 'corpora' I think creates interesting possibilities. My vague theories about the future entail having enormous Anki-structured bodies of media created from subs2srs to be used in a variety of ways (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...1#pid40711 [and a link I posted above which talks machine corpora in a much cooler and more academic way - http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid40705 ] and http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...3#pid40863 and http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid40945).

What I referred to in the second paragraph was really extensions of stuff here, but I was thinking, as mentioned above, those possibilities for creating 'ah ha moments' (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...4#pid64484), for using Twitter and other constrained forms for output practice (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid64650), remixing stuff into 'fan fiction' esque forms (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...8#pid65068), as you go through, if you go through, a process of taking what you've learned and then 'remixing' it into output or reconstituting them to new narrative forms as extra environmental reinforcement, when you're done with all that, you'll have had that bottom-up, inside out look at the materials that can save those who come after some time.

Whew, too many links. I'm trying to correct this problem I have where I'm always referencing my past comments out of context by linking them all. I figure it also helps because we have a sense of disconnection on this forum between past and present.

If you suspend them they don't show up in the "new today" row, but still get counted under the "new total" row. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it would cause me severe mental distress. I have to keep FMA in a seperate deck from the rest of my stuff so that all those unreviewed new cards don't bother me...

EDIT: But having said that, what you (and as nestor points out, Nukemarine does something similar) are talking about- using Anki to store a corpora of media- is super-awesome. So I'm going to bite the bullet and start by importing my FMA stuff into my real deck. My perfectionism will just have to go jump in a lake.

EDIT2: nestor, I'm still digesting all the links, but I think what you and ghinzdra and Nuke are talking about are all quite closely aligned (with the whole Anki = media database thing). And I think it sounds awesome.

Quote:EDIT2: nestor, I'm still digesting all the links, but I think what you and ghinzdra and Nuke are talking about are all quite closely aligned (with the whole Anki = media database thing). And I think it sounds awesome.

well didn t know about nestor and nuke's own thinkings but as they say great minds think alike.... And as with most great ideas it s simple and painfully obvious (to his advocaters at least...)

N.B in order to avoid some large scale flame war "fool rarely differ" should better be not dropped in the debate:lol

Yes, it's been very cool to see how cb4960's program was 'born', and how everyone immediately seized upon the possibilities, sometimes without even realizing it, and it just continues to evolve. I like to think that the general awareness online of how to look at software differently contributes to this and is part of a change to what Rushkoff might loosely call a 'programmer's' perspective on media tools: http://rushkoff.com/2009/08/04/did-capit...ys-philly/

IMO, KO2001 is not worth it. bombpersons said it best.

bombpersons Wrote:Sentences: Boring
Audio: Even more boring

I don't know why people like KO. I've looked through it, and wasn't impressed. Go with Kanji in Context. Why?

1. KiC has sentences for all Kanji, KO for the first 1110
2. KiC is not boring
3. KO doesn't have a search feature, KiC is a book (but I downloaded a vocab list)
4. Even though KO is digital, you cannot copy the sentences.

Man, what's with all the business hate? Every time business vocabulary ends up in a learning resource it gets listed as a negative point, or at best something to just grit your teeth and try to bear. I feel like I must be the only person in the world who's actually going to Japan to study business...