Anyone have this type of deck? Or willing to work with me in making it ? I think, making some common kanji-vocab words to put it. Basically for me personally recently i had alot of decks. Now i have only 3 which makes my life so much easier. I will have one more for production of kana to kanji cards to help my memory of kanji. As for writing i'll be getting books on formal letter writing and writing in general soon. I might srs those as it's designed for natives for natives.

Also what do you think is most effective. Production of sentences or production of vocab, or both? Since i'll be taking my time with this deck. I won't be adding too much i can't handle. 20-30 daily would be enough. Or more depending

I do vocab production like this.

東京大阪かん (front) --------> 間 (back) ... Between Osaka and Tokyo

I don't like to do whole sentences. Only when I'm studying specific grammar points will I do that.

I ordered my old RtK deck by frequency, then went through and have added an Onyomi-based word for the first 1200 kanji (if there was a relatively often used word to be found). Out of those, about 1400 or so kanji appear (lower frequency kanji included in compounds I used).

Doing the same now for Kunyomi based words... any homophones just sorta get avoided or a one word English translation or some hint next to it to clarify which one I'm talking about.

To be honest, I haven't ran into many problems with getting confused with which word I'm wanting.. so just a straight vocab in hiragana -> kanji formula works perfectly fine, I think. If a word is especially confusing, I just usually pick another one. I find in this way, I can FLY through the deck.. easily my fastest reviews. Oh, and I put onyomi words in green, kunyomi words in red just to ease up any confusion there.

How my deck looks:
Question:

Answer:

that's not bad. For my deck i'm trying to put things that come on up often, frequency basically. So basic kanji, basic sentenes then going onto harder ones. I remeber someone on this forum said it really depends on what you want to do with the writing. Do you want to write creative level japanese? that would take around 30,000-40,000 production deck. Which is deadly lol. I'll start slowly and then build my way up to the harder things.

Yes i starting doing some major production cards today. It's pretty simple. I started with basic kanji and i just flew by them in a few minutes. It's seems all that exposure to reading has helped alot. But i want to strengthen my kanji writing from memory

I don't like having long answers or stuff with too much to read.
My decks (when I start making them) will just be vocab production decks.

Something as simple as

Question: えいが
Answer : 映画

This way I can quickly skip to another question with another word, and should I come across a word that is kinda hard in kana alone, I'd just make some shit easy sentence with it to give me a context of the word.

Ｑ：　先週《（は）医者》に行った
Ａ：歯

At uni, we continually get tested on production, and I really need to work on it. And yes you are right I agree, RTK is a useless waste of time if you don't even learn how to write actual WORDS.

It's really irritating knowing that you know a kanji for it yet can't even write it down. And this is where it takes shitloads of practice and that's why I prefer having a simple deck so I can blitz through it instead of getting carried away by all these extra words and meanings. I guess it's just a matter of preference, I'd rather have 15 cards of all separate words I know or should know for my level than have 1 card with all those answers.

Yeah, that's why I started the hiragana->kanji deck myself.. I noticed that even almost a year after finishing RtK (and sorta keeping up on the reviews), I still sucked at pulling actual words from memory. Even simple stuff, I'd stumble over...mostly because I'd just had no repetition at all with it.

Now, when I sit down to write letters (a few each week), I rarely have to consult a dictionary to see how to write a word. The difference after just a few months of studying hiragana->kanji has been rather amazing, in my opinion.

same here. That's why i want to work on production. I want to train that skill. I have a total of 4 decks now. No more no less. One is focused on production one and another has kanji+hiragana+kanji in one deck. And one is vocab and one is standard 10,000 sentences+ AJATT deck. I'm pretty happy that i can blaze through all my review 1 hour. But i think it takes bit more time to add nowadays. But adding 30-50 daily isn't a problem.

You can search this forum for a few other threads like this, but I think that many of us agree that the benefits of production are few compared to spending the comparative amount of time/trouble learning to read and understand new sentences. You will most often find that after seeing the same kanji again and again you will be able to write most of them.

If you're a uni student being tested on production that's different, but for the rest of us I think it's safe to at least suggest that kanji production doesn't yield the same degree of results vs. effort as expanding vocabulary and sentence comprehension.

yea i understand that. Expanding vocab+sentence comprehension is probably more important but for me there's no reason why i can't train both to increase as i keep learning japanese. I want them both to keep increasing. But understanding+reading is probably the most important skills. Speaking comes after and then writing. But for me i don't get a chance to practice output

coverup Wrote:You will most often find that after seeing the same kanji again and again you will be able to write most of them.

On what planet? It helps but it doesn't work that way. The hardest thing about learning to write Japanese isn't remember how to write the kanji, it's remember which damn kanji go in the word. A lot of reading helps you to remember that but doesn't do a brilliant a job it, you'll still forget time and time again word after word. You gotta train production of you want production. I'm pretty sure we all agree AJATT is great for listening and comprehension and it HELPS with speaking and you can do a little bit of speaking but without practicing speaking you can't develop it as a rounded out skill. Writing is the same.

coverup Wrote:If you're a uni student being tested on production that's different, but for the rest of us I think it's safe to at least suggest that kanji production doesn't yield the same degree of results vs. effort as expanding vocabulary and sentence comprehension.

Definitely. If you HAVE TO be able to write for some reason then do it is a good idea, if you don't then yes it's definitely a far more valuable exercise to up your vocab and reading skill.

If you've finished rounding out reading, vocab and speaking then perhaps training written output is the last thing left of the list!

yea for me i kinda want all skills for the language. I know it will take time. It may take more than 1 full year. Or if so called 18-month khatz did. But to be honest it doesn't matter amount of the time, but more of the effective study methods+immersion+practicing that will lead to quality output for Japanese as well as other skills.

Most people say that it usual takes 1 full year to become "fluent" and another one year to use that skills. Well all depending i guess

Takes more like 3 years to become fluent.

You can be fluent in 3 months by listening to anime in your sleep and eating with chopsticks.

@Jarvik7
if it were only that easy lol

@mezbup
3 years? really? Unno i think it varies. People say around 2 years is a good esitmate. One year to reach a considerable level in the language. And another year to solidify what you learned and become fully functional in the language.
Although i have heard people become fluent in 1 full year. But it depends on what they where doing. They might have been doing nothing but learning daily for majority of the day. I seriously can't wait till the summertime, so i can spend majority of my time in japanese, via learning it.

haha 2 years, that must be a very low fluency bar

Depends on which language you're studying and which is your mother tongue. I don't think after just 1 year anyone has managed to have a full command of Japanese. Functional yeah sure why not but "fluent" more than just functional.

I think it really depends on the skills too. I think one would be able to gain a high level of reading+understanding, very close to fluent, might not be fluent but close. Speaking probably be functional, writing as well.

The word fluency, is kinda sketchy lol. It's hard to rate one's own abilities. I mean, let's say English is you're native language. Do you consider yourself fluent? things like that. And plus it all comes down to what you want to do in the language. Be fluent, or native-level ability. Plus when one says native-level, that can mean alot of things. I've meet people who said they where esl, but i had no clue until they told me. There spoken language, you couldn't tell the difference between that of a native-speaker.

mezbup Wrote:On what planet? It helps but it doesn't work that way. The hardest thing about learning to write Japanese isn't remember how to write the kanji, it's remember which damn kanji go in the word. A lot of reading helps you to remember that but doesn't do a brilliant a job it, you'll still forget time and time again word after word. You gotta train production of you want production.

Well put. Here's the compromise I came to after doing all of the above - when I fail a sentence, I write the whole thing out by hand. That's good enough because it helps me with remembering the reading, which is what I'm testing, and I get the benefit of writing kanji. I try to challenge myself to write as much as possible without looking at the screen, but I'm not strict about it. Doesn't come close to what others are suggesting, but hey, it works both skills to different degrees and it's easy.

Yea i agree with mezbup exactly. I think one can memorize and reproduce all those kanji, even close to a native. But using the RIGHT kanji in context is the real winner here. Definitely exposure+comprehension+understanding will likely fix that up.

As your knowledge and familiarity with kanji deepens it becomes easier to intuitively know which せい is used in 先生 and other things like that. One thing I've come to realise is that native speakers spend their whole school lives writing kanji and they have the benefit of 10+ years of output training so it's no wonder when it comes to anything you'll generally want to write by hand, they can do it.

Even with the advantage of Heisig, that's the one thing we're still lacking. IMO it's the most important.

yea that is true. Japanese people have been writing for a very long time and therefore can write kanji in different context with ease. I do have the kanji benefit that i did from hesig. But i feel the only way to get better in writing, or at least improve it. Is to keep writing, keep doing kana-kanji production. Try writing general things, try increasing vocab,etc. Writing uses every skill in a language to write well. You must understand, you must be able to read, you must be use kanji in different context when needed. So i think bottom line is that, to get better, is to keep writing!