Mafried, out of interest, how much time are you (were you) spending on your reviews? How are you (were you) reviewing?

If you use an SRS properly, it stops reviewing (well, slows down fast) for you so long as you stop adding stuff. I'm not getting your push for stopping all together after some magic number of vocabulary words.

In addition, for those of us not exactly basking in Japanese input 24/7 (for whatever reasons), having an SRS there to create of holding pattern of sorts for what we've learned thus far is vital. I spent hundreds of hours learning this stuff, I'm more than willing to spend dozens of hours to retain it via spaced reviews while I'm not in Japan or have good internet access.

mafried Wrote:I'm seeing massive results (in French and German--Japanese is no longer important to me).

But learning a language related to your own in many ways is not the same as learning a language that's completely different.

I find it a lot easier to remember words for a while in English or German after seeing them once while I usually need some repetition for Japanese words or I forget them literally right away. Plus with those languages, you get thousands of words that are very similar to words you already know and that really helps you get to a point where just reading in that language is very efficient. Additionally you don't have to deal with the kanji difficulty.

Codexus Wrote:I find it a lot easier to remember words for a while in English or German after seeing them once while I usually need some repetition for Japanese words or I forget them literally right away.

I've found the same with English (native) and Spanish (not good) and Japanese. Spanish words are usually -very- easy for me to remember. Japanese words are a lot, lot harder, even the easiest of them.

mafried Wrote:The remaining you will pick up from context (or when absolutely necessary a dictionary) and those which are important and necessary to remember will naturally select themselves into your long-term or active memory.
...
Active, real-life usage is itself not just a good way to study and review (it is) but also a much better selector of the vocabulary and idioms you need to learn than SRS+your intuition could ever be. Don't trust your intuition on this.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'm wondering what you would say to someone in my position, where I probably have at least a passive vocabulary of 7000 words or so, but every time I read something somewhat advanced (not necessarily contemporary novels, but current events articles, certainly) I run into a ton of vocabulary I don't know, and whether I look it up or guess it from context it doesn't stick into long-term memory... specifically because it's in that long tail of uncommonly used words, I don't see it again before I forget what it means.

So I've been experimenting with using an SRS for vocabulary retention, not as a replacement for the reading I do every day (hopefully 25-40 pages) but in addition to it. It hasn't been very long. I'll see how it works out.

I don't think there's any reason *not* to use an SRS, but naturally, exposing yourself to native materials is the #1 way to reinforce what you've learned. It's also a great way to learn new things in general. Khatzumoto repeats this a lot: the SRS is only a tool. I think that's true. It's an aid. You learn things first, then put them in your SRS to remember them. The SRS doesn't teach you anything.

But, hey, whatever works for you. You're the only one who can discover how you learn best.

I only have a few minutes during my lunch break at work, so I can't address all the questions directed my way (yet). But:

sethg Wrote:But, hey, whatever works for you. You're the only one who can discover how you learn best.

I should have preferenced all my comments with this. Everyone must find their own path and there is no one system that will work for everyone.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that I don't believe word frequency or statistically long tails have any relation to how easy it is to memorize words. We are really just observing patterns that don't really mean anything besides what we try to make them out to be.

I'm more of a believer that "whatever happens, happens" is really the main
statistical rule that applies to most cases.

Case in point.

In an episode of the Hana Yori Dango drama, the mother
all of a sudden used the words "senzai ichiguu", which roughly translates
to "golden opportunity" in English. There were even translator notes that
popped up.

To this day, I never heard that phrase even used in drama or anywhere...UNTIL
yesterday when I heard it used while watching a Japanese drama with no subtitles.

I immediatey recognized the phrase and that scene from Hana Yori Dango flashed in my mind for a quick second. Keep in mind that I've made no effort to remember the word since seeing Hana Yori Dango.

Of course, there are idioms, proverbs, and phrases that I DO hear all the time (like the one about hammering the nail that stands out), but I forget them as quickly as I hear them (i.e. in one ear and out the other).

I know this is only one example. But I just wanted to show how easy it can be to remember an uncommon, rarely re-occuring word with no effort and yet, screw up
on the words that I'm constantly bombarded with on a daily basis.

Or maybe I'm just doomed to a life of memorizing only the useless words...LOL....

Starting from the top...

Nukemarine Wrote:Mafried, out of interest, how much time are you (were you) spending on your reviews? How are you (were you) reviewing?

I have about an hour of discretionary time per day. About a half-hour of concentrated study time (usually in the mornings) and another half-hour of odd moments throughout the day. Sometimes it's greater, sometimes less, but generally about an hour. Immersion during the other 23 hours is simply not possible in my situation.

This started back in July when I got back from Asia, started my new job, and moved in with my girlfriend (now wife). At that time I was doing production-only SRS, splitting my time evenly between finishing KO2001/RTH and free-form media consumption. But with just an hour a day I spending all my time in reviews. I switched to recognition, but that wasn't enough. I asked blackmacros what he does (resulting in the re-examining SRS workflow thread) and religiously applied his advice. That helped, but wasn't enough. I just had too little time left in the day to devote any of it to reviews--and just the act of reviewing itself was seriously interrupting my workflow. And reviews wern't going down, they were instead leveling off at about 20-30min per day (remember, it's not an exponential when you take into account fail-rates).

I'm going to skip to the end here because I think the other questions are more interesting. My frustration with the SRS, combined with my observation of the successes of polyglots on other forums using antithetical techniques led me down the path to where I am today.

Right now I spend about 5-10% of my time reviewing previously learnt material. But I certainly do not use "review" here in the context that people on this forum do. I keep a terse journal of word lists, idioms, etc. that I feel are important to learn as I encounter them. Each day I casually review (look over) the last couple of days worth of material just to keep it fresh in my mind and move on. After just a few reviews I mark those pages as done and never look at them again.

Nukemarine Wrote:I'm not getting your push for stopping all together after some magic number of vocabulary words.

There's nothing magic about the number. In fact, let me remove the numbers entirely:

Study vocabulary and grammar hard-core until you reach the transition point where you are able to read simple, but native material (i.e, manga, light novels). Then start hard-core consuming native media, steadily increasing the difficulty as you pick up words, grammar, and idiom mostly from context.

That transition point (tipping point?) happens to be at around 4 out of 5 words on a page, which happens to be about 5,000 words for light novels in most languages. That's all the magic to it.

Nukemarine Wrote:In addition, for those of us not exactly basking in Japanese input 24/7 (for whatever reasons),

myself included

Nukemarine Wrote:having an SRS there to create of holding pattern of sorts for what we've learned thus far is vital. I spent hundreds of hours learning this stuff, I'm more than willing to spend dozens of hours to retain it via spaced reviews while I'm not in Japan or have good internet access.

Two points:

1) If your time is really constrained (like mine is), SRS isn't so much language maintenance as language stagnation.

2) It's not as efficient as just consuming more native material. 30min reading time > 30min SRS reps. I know that goes against conventional wisdom here, but that was my unexpected discovery in doing this experiment of necessity.

... I think I'll split these posts up here, as it's starting to get hideously long.

Codexus Wrote:But learning a language related to your own in many ways is not the same as learning a language that's completely different.

I took that into consideration. In fact, my first thought was "Gee, Everyone's right... Japanese and Chinese really are that hard for foreigners to learn..." But then I looked into it more, found a reasonable way to estimate the comparative difficulty (namely FSI's 50-year report, which if anything would a conservative bias), and subtracted out that effect. Even with that adjustment I'm still progressing many times the rate I was was at the height of my SRS-based studies.

Codexus Wrote:I find it a lot easier to remember words for a while in English or German after seeing them once while I usually need some repetition for Japanese words or I forget them literally right away.

Strangely I did not find that to be the case with proper vocabulary memorization techniques (speaking here to the note on Japanese). A combination of kanji meanings, word etymology, and menmonic techniques was enough to fix them in my mind. It did require developing an understanding of etymology (real or imagined) similar to what you and I enjoy for words of latin, greek, and germanic origin, however.

Fillanzea Wrote:I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'm wondering what you would say to someone in my position, where I probably have at least a passive vocabulary of 7000 words or so, but every time I read something somewhat advanced (not necessarily contemporary novels, but current events articles, certainly) I run into a ton of vocabulary I don't know, and whether I look it up or guess it from context it doesn't stick into long-term memory... specifically because it's in that long tail of uncommonly used words, I don't see it again before I forget what it means.

I would say that's exactly the situation I'm describing. Basic fluency does not in my mind mean an ability to read (and fully understand) articles on current events with all their associated specialized and technical vocabulary... I would expect that to require a more advanced vocabulary, closer to the 20k-word estimate of a college educated person's vocabulary.

To you specifically I would suggest finding something you'd enjoy that contains that specialized vocabulary, but is written to a more general audience. Maybe a political thriller?

sethg Wrote:I don't think there's any reason *not* to use an SRS, but naturally, exposing yourself to native materials is the #1 way to reinforce what you've learned.

If native materials are #1, why settle for less? (Rhetorical question.)


IceCream, I don't think SRS is useless either. I know of no better way to memorize and review bits of information that you are unlikely to ever see in context anytime soon, but nevertheless must or desire to remember. But language does not fall in that category. Geographical names would. Or if you work as an emergency dispatcher, the rare codes that you don't see on a daily or weekly basis but nevertheless must know. I'd use an SRS for that. But 2nd language acquisition? No.

I look forward to hearing what you have to say, when you have the time.


To the OP, sorry for hijacking this thread, although I don't think we've diverged too far from the original topic.

Oh good, something I can reply to without needing to think deeply about the response.

Mafried, your experience is in some ways diametrically opposite to mine. I've mentioned a couple of times the six-month period where I let SRS reviews completely lapse and just read things (mostly, but far from exclusively, manga). I made major progress during that time, but there was a definite upward spike when I pulled out the SRS again.

I'd also add that your severe time restrictions are probably confounding the issue, as aside from exceptional conditions (like the week when I burned through the due stack from that six months, or way back when when I started doing the RtK thing) I at least still spend dramatically more time consuming material than I do reviewing. We're probably talking >19:1 here, even without accounting for the fact that I use the SRS for significantly more than just language acquisition. The benefits of essentially doubling your consumption time seem obvious; the benefits of increasing it by an additional nineteenth are less so.

Edit: actually, significantly more than 19:1; I just realized I was counting reading time only.

~J

Just saw chamcham's post...

chamcham Wrote:I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that I don't believe word frequency or statistically long tails have any relation to how easy it is to memorize words.

They don't. But "word frequency and statistically long tails" do have everything to do with choosing the right words to learn, and the belief people have about what'll happen once they learn those words.

EDIT: woodwojr, I will say that I found comparing time percentages is misleading as (in hindsight) I found SRS reps to have been a huge distraction from my studies, no matter my attempts to isolate their impact. I.e, when reading I would be constantly stop and think "should I add that to my SRS?" instead of just relaxing and enjoying and learning in context. Also time spent reviewing should also included time spent adding to and maintenance work on the database of facts you accumulate, time spent tweaking the review process as you progress through various levels, etc.. But I guess we'll have to see how I feel in six months (well, 4 months as I'm already 2 months in).

Is maintenance really that much of a time drain? Adding facts is very quick in most cases (admittedly not so much if I don't have a spare bookmark on hand when I encounter the sentence), and the only recent serious maintenance that has had any major time investment involved has been my quixotic effort to maintain kanji production practice while transitioning away from Heisig. Given that that's easily avoided by not being me, I don't see maintenance as a serious issue.

(It should be said that I'm also probably fairly lighter on my sentence entry than is typical around here; I have all of 380 assuming I didn't forget to tag any.)

But yes, assuming I'm still wasting time around here then I look forward to your results

~J

I would just like to chime in, and say that I agree with mafried on this. I reached a point where I was getting burnt out on adding and reviewing cards to my sentence deck. One day, after reading some assorted articles on natural language acquisition, I realized that I was becoming far too dependent on SRS. It occurred to me that the main point of AJATT is to expose yourself to tons of native materials. SRS is just a tool that is used to supplement that, and some people have suggested that it's not that necessary.

I decided to try an experiment. I deleted my ANKI deck and spent the extra time I now had reading manga and watching dramas. I started with manga that were at my level and I gradually increased the difficulty as my reading ability grew. I can read about one a day, on average, now. I can feel my reading ability improving quite rapidly and I learn tons of new words a day from context. I also watch several episodes of dramas a day (without subtitles of course).

I can honestly say that my Japanese ability has improved more in the last month, since I started doing this, than in the entire year before that. However, everybody has to figure things out for themselves. I just think that a lot of people are getting way too caught up in the 10,000 sentence part of AJATT and are forgetting the part about exposing yourself to as much real Japanese as possible. Khatzumoto would read first and then enter sentences that he wanted to remember from what he read. This is quite different than what most people on here are doing. The standard process around here is to start mining sentences from Tae Kim, Core 2000, or KO2001. This results in having thousands of sentences really fast, but without the context and reading practice that comes from actually reading. Furthermore people are doing it with the impression that, once they reach some magic number of sentences, they will suddenly be able to read novels, newspaper articles or whatever else they desire to read in Japanese. This is not necessarily the case. You learn to read by actually reading (big surprise). But don't take my word for it. I'm not an expert or anything. To each, their own.

Reading the replies and thinking back to the original point, I guess the main goal is "forward momemtum". The feeling you're making progress feeds something primal I think. It was that feeling two years ago that had me adding new RTK cards despite having 200 to 300 failed cards. That same feeling had me change up from writing out every sentence to writing out just key vocabulary words (less time writing same stuff, more time adding new stuff). That same feeling had me tossing out Rikaichan and stop rushing to a dictionary when I read mangas, books or other material (less comprehension, but great volume). That same feeling has me supercharging the RPG characters so I can play through the fights fasters (less fights, more time for the story).

Mafried just had much more restricted time, so he noticed the drain the maintenance portion of a SRS can have on forward momemtum.

Good points Mafried, but I hope you're wrong because I fear that my SRS heavy world will collapse if you're right.

Mafried, what is your ability in Japanese like? Or did you say that you're no longer studying Japanese?

mafried Wrote:

sethg Wrote:I don't think there's any reason *not* to use an SRS, but naturally, exposing yourself to native materials is the #1 way to reinforce what you've learned.

If native materials are #1, why settle for less? (Rhetorical question.)

Rhetorical, but I'll answer anyway: you shouldn't! I don't think SRSing should be a replacement for native materials. It should simply be a tool you can use to better retain, over a long period of time, what you may have picked up and learned from said native materials.

Honestly, to me it sounds like you just let it become too much of a stress in your routine. Work with the algorithm to flatten out reviews. Only allow so many new cards per day. Don't think of it as this horrible task that you must do every day. Don't, for instance, think of it at all while reading. Just keep a notebook or a piece of paper handy when reading/watching tv and jot stuff down. Later on, after your reviews, would be the time to add things in if you wanted.

Sorry, didn't intend to pop back in, but I felt as if I was misunderstood in the above quoted statement. Here's a better way of saying it:

Native materials are how you learn Japanese. The SRS is a great tool with which you can more easily remember what you learned.

Not to get all Khatz happy, but I remember him saying that he limited himself to reviewing 100 cards a day. I think that says a lot as it doesn't take long to review 100 cards, so obviously he spent most of his time... not reviewing.

I spent a couple of years reading a ton of light novels, looking very little up in dictionaries. It did wonders for my intuitive sense of grammar and my reading speed and my ability to make smart guesses based on context. But I feel like the main difficulty you start to run into is that it's very easy to let yourself coast and say, "I can't remember how that word is pronounced, but it's okay because I basically know what it means." (I don't think I would try doing SRS vocabulary review for French or Spanish where, if I read a word, I instantly know how to pronounce it.)

My Anki statistics say that I'm spending 12 seconds per card on review. It basically works out to 15 minutes a day, scattered throughout the day when I'm doing other stuff. (You're right: adding new cards IS a time sink. But only incrementally more than looking up the vocabulary in the first place.) And if I spend 1.5 hrs a day reading authentic texts, which I do if I'm just reading Japanese on the subway, I'm satisfied with that. I get burned out if I spend too much time reading the same thing. (I don't always spend 1.5 hours reading Japanese on the subway, because I'm on a committee at the library where I work and I need to be reading a couple books a week for that also.)

Also, I don't really spend any time dithering about whether to add stuff to my SRS. I have an easy book and a hard book going, and my rule is, I put everything I don't know in the hard book in the SRS, and I don't look up anything when I'm reading the easy book.

Of course I don't expect to be studying vocabulary for the rest of my life. I'm hoping that I'll spend a month or two or three like I'm doing now, and the SRS will give that extra little boost to keep a word fresh until the next time I see it, if I'm not going to see it again "in the wild" for another week or two.

I think we agree more than disagree: heavy exposure to native materials needs to make up the core of what you study, and the very programmatic approach to sentence mining followed by some of the AJATT people can be a huge distraction from that. (And it's not actually what's endorsed by AJATT!) And if you don't have at least 45 minutes or an hour to devote to reading, that should be priority #1.

I apologize for the brevity of this post; I have just a few minutes before work.

Everyone seems to have focused on my time constraints... yes, that is what made SRS'ing problematic for me in particular. But if that were the whole story I would never have mentioned anything here. Rather, it led me to think critically about the purpose of the SRS, and what it was doing to aide my studies even when I had the time available to maintain it. What I found was that words I encountered in my readings I'd have no difficulty with during reviews. Those always got marked as 'easy' and I'd eventually remove them from the deck. What's left were those words(/phrases/idioms/grammar) that I did NOT encounter in daily use... but then why study them at all? Why spend time and effort to remember things you're not likely to encounter anyway? Why choose to do that over the things you will encounter?

That applied only to recognition reviews, of course, but I also found production reviews to be a highly inefficient use of time as well. But that'll have to wait for another time as I really need to go to work..

mafried Wrote:What's left were those words(/phrases/idioms/grammar) that I did NOT encounter in daily use... but then why study them at all? Why spend time and effort to remember things you're not likely to encounter anyway? Why choose to do that over the things you will encounter?

It's not that I'm prioritizing the things that I won't encounter. I am prioritizing the words that I can and do encounter... just not quite frequently enough to commit them to my long-term memory. The more common and more useful words, by and large, I already know.

I think that once you get to an advanced level (and I've passed JLPT level 1, so I am at a pretty advanced level), you have to find some way to intensively expose yourself to more advanced vocabulary. I just got from the library a short story collection, "Kaze ni Maiagaru Bini-ru shi-to" by Mori Eto, and I was surprised to find more advanced vocabulary than I'm used to finding in contemporary novels. I want those words. Maybe I don't want all of those words but I'm pretty sure I want some of them. And I'm not going to get them if they flit by once, and then whoosh, they're gone. うずかす、某、握力、醸す. The reason my English vocabulary is voluminous is that I read pretty fast. I can get through a hundred pages in an hour, no sweat. In Japanese it's maybe a fifth of that, if the text is otherwise pretty easy. So hypothetically, if a word comes up twice in a thousand pages, that's ten hours of reading, and it's totally conceivable that it would stick in my head, in English. In Japanese, that's fifty hours of reading, and by the time I get to the second one I've forgotten seeing it before.

I also find production reviews to, with very specific exceptions, be a waste of time; my experience with recognition reviews suggests that they've helped me with producing similar structures unassisted. It's help build the "sense" of correctness faster than pure consumption has; I know that it took me over a decade and a half to build a sufficiently strong sense of correctness in English purely through consumption—despite being a voracious reader I still have clear memories of committing horrific apostrophe abuse when I was sixteen.

I'll have to consider whether the objection is actually valid, but I have to admit your focus on frequency of encountering has been rubbing me the wrong way; this may be simply a personal issue, as I'm highly accustomed to having an extensive vocabulary at my disposal, but in general, if you encounter a word you just encountered that word (likewise for phrases, idioms, grammar). It exists, it's out there; barring pathological cases (fictional vocabulary that doesn't enter popular culture, say) that means you may be able to use it to good effect at some point, or you may encounter it again, because it is in use. That is why you would want to know it, even if you don't encounter it on a regular basis—seriously, how likely is it that you'll encounter a word/phrase/idiom/grammatical construction that isn't artificial and will honestly never encounter it again?

~J, hoping someone can piece through that mass of poorly-organized writing

Edit: I should add that part of my lack of clarity is that you're forcing me to articulate realizations that I'd never explicitly identified or examined; I appreciate the opportunity to clarify my views and hope that it doesn't look like just a big ball of barely-consistent objections from the outside.

woodwojr Wrote:I'll have to consider whether the objection is actually valid, but I have to admit your focus on frequency of encountering has been rubbing me the wrong way; this may be simply a personal issue, as I'm highly accustomed to having an extensive vocabulary at my disposal, but in general, if you encounter a word you just encountered that word (likewise for phrases, idioms, grammar). It exists, it's out there; barring pathological cases (fictional vocabulary that doesn't enter popular culture, say) that means you may be able to use it to good effect at some point, or you may encounter it again, because it is in use. That is why you would want to know it, even if you don't encounter it on a regular basis—seriously, how likely is it that you'll encounter a word/phrase/idiom/grammatical construction that isn't artificial and will honestly never encounter it again?

I think it depends on the person's level and how specialized the vocabulary is.

I've come to be really skeptical of the structure of some of the intermediate textbooks that have a chapter on environmentalism, and then a chapter on immigration, and then a chapter on some economic issue, and lead you through a lot of vocabulary on that subject... which is not then reinforced throughout the rest of the book. (Does anyone remember, I think there was one called A Graded Reader of Written Japanese or something?) And I don't think it makes sense for an intermediate reader with no interest whatsoever in archaeology to be memorizing vocabulary related to archaeology. I spent so much time trying to read about burial mounds--and what stuck with me was love and justice and whatever else I gleaned from reading eighteen straight volumes of Sailor Moon, *because* there was reinforcement built in to the reading.

But then, I also don't buy Heisig's "You'll have to memorize them all eventually, so the order doesn't matter!" either.

Fillanzea Wrote:I've come to be really skeptical of the structure of some of the intermediate textbooks that have a chapter on environmentalism, and then a chapter on immigration, and then a chapter on some economic issue, and lead you through a lot of vocabulary on that subject... which is not then reinforced throughout the rest of the book. (Does anyone remember, I think there was one called A Graded Reader of Written Japanese or something?) And I don't think it makes sense for an intermediate reader with no interest whatsoever in archaeology to be memorizing vocabulary related to archaeology. I spent so much time trying to read about burial mounds--and what stuck with me was love and justice and whatever else I gleaned from reading eighteen straight volumes of Sailor Moon, *because* there was reinforcement built in to the reading.

Do you mean Miller's "Graded Lessons for Mastering the Written Language"? (I'm guessing so from your remark about burial mounds :-)) I actually quite like that, but I'm not sure I'd call it an 'intermediate' reader: it goes from dead zero up to ludicrously advanced within sixty or so items. I tend to treat it more like a way of measuring progress than anything else -- have I moved forward enough that this difficult piece now seems easier to read? Also, the bits about and in the pre-WW2 orthography are interesting if now less useful than when the book was first written.

I agree that it's important to try to ensure that textbooks have reinforcement of what's being learnt. But I think that typically the textbooks of the kind you have in mind are doing their reinforcement on (a) grammar points and (b) the more 'abstract' vocabulary, for which purpose you need some kind of topic to actually talk about. I treat the aim as being more to try to get the student to the point where they can read an article about topic X and have the only problem be the X-specific vocabulary (which if you're interested in X you've got a decent chance of guessing). I didn't think the intermediate textbooks I used when I was taking classes (_New Approach_) did a particularly bad job on this front.

Just to add to this discussion I completely can see why using SRS maybe counter productive after a while; it doesn't make sense to me to carry on reading and re-reading the same sentences expecting to improve.

If I just re read Thomas the Tank Engine all my life I don't think my vocabulary would have much improved.

Also just a bug boo, sorry to call people out, but it is just a pet peeve, when people compare English and how many words we have to other languages. I think languages like Japanese, although maybe having different words, have CLEAR and distinct differentiations.

English derived from 3 seperate languages, therefore most of our words are interchangable, and can have 3 or more words for the EXACTLY same thing, idea or concept eg damp, moist. This is due to the fact of the way English evolved ... in ENGLAND before America was colonised. First off came the Germanic words, which was later added to by a Latin portion of the language and last a vast majority of words are of French origin, mainly because they are just across the water. Each adding another, interchangable word.

I guess this happens in Japanese too, with things such as せん and ライン (Line).

Sorry a bit off topic but, that's the only reason English has SO many words, divide it by 1/3 and you probably have the correct number of ideas, objects, etc which exist