So earlier today I made my way over to the yahoo japan kid's news site, and decided to see how much, if any, I could manage to read. I ended up being somewhat surprised at how much I could actually read and understand, but I also noticed a startling trend.

There where are whole bunch of words that looked familiar (or sometimes didn't even look familiar), but I had no clue what they meant. A quick glance at the with rikaichan revealed them to be words that I have absolutely no problems with when I'm reviewing them with anki in context of the sentence. They were things like 質問 and a couple other words (which of course, I can't remember).

I think what's happening is I'm simply memorizing the sentences rather than the vocab. Is there any way to prevent that? Should I not be worried? Separate vocab deck?

read more, review less

Move to Japan.

The brain includes contextual/environmental information in memories. So, if you see the word 質問 in the kind of sentence you've seen before, while in your room, in anki, in your "flashcardin' mood," your odds are high - because that's how you're used to encountering it. If you see it in an off-the-wall sentence, or by itself, out in the middle of the street, on a sign, while thinking about groceries, your odds are a lot lower - because all of that's an unfamiliar environment as far as the word 質問 is concerned. That's just how memory works.

You'll also find yourself easily able to read, for example, some absurd fonts as long as they're being used in contexts you're otherwise completely familiar with. Works both ways.

So, yeah. Read more.

It sounds like lack of reading must be the reason, considering I haven't actually done any real reading outside of the context of anki. I guess I just need to step outside more...

I think... you could also try putting in more sentences with that/those words into your SRS. I can't remember where I saw this statistic cited, but I think you need to see any given word 20 times (in 20 different contexts?) before mastering it. I'd say you could also increase your ability to read such words in out of context scenarios simply by having practiced more scenarios in the first place.

Short answer - getting picking those sentences!

No, SRS is the problem. You need to be seeing unique sentences, not reviewing old stuff.

To clarify: picking sentences for use in an SRS necessarily involves reading widely - therefore, it's not the SRS which is the problem (as that is how patterns of language are most efficiently internalized, almost by definition). It's the exclusive use of the SRS that's not working - it works just fine, and you'll find it difficult without making some use of it.

I often find that some words don't properly stick until I've seen them used in a few different sentences. For more common words, any pre-made collection of sentences (I've been using the smart.fm Core 2000/6000 lists) tends to repeat them often enough that you'll grow accustomed to them, while, as your story indicates, other words may only show up in one sentence. For those words, I would suggest adding another sentence if you desperately want to learn them as quickly as possible. It may not be i+1, but maybe i+1/2.

Edit: Or, as mafried suggests, simply read more and it'll take care of itself. Your specific approach isn't all that important. The simple fact is that a word will be more firmly rooted in your memory when you've seen it in several different contexts.

From my experience, even though it's little, I found that if you encounter a word that you learned "in the wild" and didn't recognize or read it, your comprehension for that word will be boosted after you check it!
So more exposure to real contexts is the solution.

Sup3rbon,

There's merit to half of Mafried's advice: read more. Actually, read and listen more. And what you read and listen to should be enjoyable and entertaining. If this sounds like AJATT, well, it is.

His bit about reviewing less or "SRS is the problem" I would advise to ignore. If your studying is efficient (I think there's about 100 threads on efficient studying, so there's no quick answer to this) then that leaves time to enjoy Japanese on its own. It's not an either/or, it's an in addition to.

To answer your particular question, not being able to recognize a word on its own or outside of context learned, I think another poster had similar problems. Not sure where it's at though. No real answer.

I think I mitigate it by using a vocabulary deck where the word being tested is seperated off from the example sentence. In addition, pretty much every word in my vocabulary deck after the basic 2000 is in at least two cards in either vocabulary deck or subs2srs deck.

I totally agree with Nukemarine. Keep SRSing, but really put the majority of your effort into real-world reading/listening. The SRS isn't there to help you learn, it's there to help you remember what you learned. Learn it in the real world.

No method will give you better results than constant exposure to native media.

After reading through all of these posts, I realized I'm going about this whole thing totally wrong, as I'm depending too much on the SRS. I definitely need to start reading more rather than just going through lists and lists of sentences I don't really even care about.

Thanks a bunch guys.

At the beginning this happened to me all the time and it began to disappear as I read more outside of the SRS. I think there's a simple explanation to such a phenomenon - while SRSing you know that all the material there is familiar and that you shouldn't have a problem recognizing it. But when you're reading sentences that you know have a good chance of being unfamiliar to you, those odds are taken into mind and even words you know can be seen as a possibly unfamiliar word. I realized it was time to break out of the comfort of the SRS and read more than review, as someone posted above.

Edit: Quackingshoe pretty much beat me to it by a long run :B

"Read more" is good advice, but also "more sentences" might fix it as well. I had the feeling early on that I was memorizing sentences, but eventually I found that my stock simply overwhelmed my ability to actually get by by memorizing them wholesale.

~J

sup3rbon Wrote:After reading through all of these posts, I realized I'm going about this whole thing totally wrong, as I'm depending too much on the SRS. I definitely need to start reading more rather than just going through lists and lists of sentences I don't really even care about.

Just to clarify for the side-debate of this thread, this is what I meant by "review less."

EDIT: best of luck on your journey, sup3rbon.

The only way to review less is to not add so many cards. But delaying reviews that are already due is not a very good thing in my opinion.

Nii87 Wrote:The only way to review less is to not add so many cards. But delaying reviews that are already due is not a very good thing in my opinion.

Or, you know, delete those sentences you don't care about.

~J