Ok so who would have thought there are so many ways of doing things? So many pros and cons to different methods and no perfect solution...

My current isolated vocab deck is going great in terms of helping me learn to read and pick out new words when listening and the reviews are fast. My output sentence deck and audio clips from drama seem are also helping me when I speak.

I'm still not totally satisfied with the method though if it ran it's course it would bring me the results I want. A big problem is having too much vocab that's passive... any deck aimed at recognition will only put the vocab item into your passive vocab. Then there's the notion of "translating" in your head which I thought about and thought well if how can I try and design these problems out of the equation?

Whilst the idea of having a deck with a vocab word on the front and a sentence on the back isn't brand new or ground-breaking... I haven't heard anyone suggest to use it by reading the word and knowing what it means and then using it in the example sentence from memory.

Anyone?

The only part of the equation i'm not happy with is the time factor on reviewing and adding would increase back to the level of a full on sentence deck. Though it seems it would build both solid reading recognition and train output at the same time.

Is anyone doing this already?

I think perhaps I'd put the time factor aside and use a deck like this because it seems to be killing two birds with one stone whilst not relying on English (except for a simple word definition).

Maybe you could mine sentences or phrases like normal, but instead of including the word that you want to get into your active vocabulary on the front of the card, include a simple Japanese definition for it. (You could possibly use cloze deletion for this.) You could then test the cards like normal, but you'd also have to produce these words, so that might help them enter your active vocabulary sooner than they would with recognition cards.

mezbup Wrote:Whilst the idea of having a deck with a vocab word on the front and a sentence on the back isn't brand new or ground-breaking... I haven't heard anyone suggest to use it by reading the word and knowing what it means and then using it in the example sentence from memory.

Aren't you going to end up simply memorizing the example sentences this way? That might not be very effective for improving your spontaneous production abilities.

I don't wanna go the cloze deletion route for a deck like this, I'd save that for a written production output deck but not one like this. Feels like the sentence gives away too much of the context and you wind up memorizing the sentence and sometimes missing out on the actual word. Having the whole sentence in front of you defeats the purpose of having to bring it up from memory, furthermore if you're letting the sentence do the work in helping you recall the word then I don't think that creates a very strong association. It's the perfect method for a kana - kanji type deck though.

I think that doing it this way means you have nothing to go on but the word itself and and as such it would create the strongest association. Yeah, I also feel like you'd kinda wind up just memorizing an example sentence but then again who ever said memorizing and being able to reproduce a sentence with a correct structure was a bad thing? Isn't that what output is all about?? Especially given that you could do so only having the word itself to go off it ought to mean you've got at least 1 usage mastered.

I think I might start working it into my current vocab deck. If the word I find has a good sentence that I actually want to keep then what I'll do is include it on the back but I'll put a little mark on the front of the card to indicate that there's a sentence on the back.

You could just make a mental to note to construct an origional sentence in your head and perhaps say it out loud for each word as it pops up.

nadiatims Wrote:You could just make a mental to note to construct an origional sentence in your head and perhaps say it out loud for each word as it pops up.

Can't guarantee you'll make a correct one which leads to errors. The idea is to output things correctly.

That's true, but i wonder how much that really matters. At the end of the day it's repeated exposure that will teach you how to correctly use all the nuances of any particular word, this is more about handling the word as a communicative block and laying foundations in other parts of the brain, getting used to saying it, thinking about its position in a sentence and so on. Although I have no proof of this, I wonder if doing this might speed up the process of aquiring that word and prime you to recognise it more often in the wild where the deeping learning takes place.

Yeah, laying foundations is the objective. You can only AJATT for so long before the realization kicks in that a blueprint is all well and good but a building won't build itself.

I think it would be great if anki could be set to show various random sentences taken from a google search (restricted to japanese sites) on the answer side for each vocab word. These sentences would be better than those provided by the anki sentence plugin and they could be different everytime, thereby simulating real world exposure. This would be a cool plugin if anyone knows how to make it.

There's a concept called "fossilization" which means that uncorrected errors tend to become fixed in your speech, and can be harder to eliminate than learning it correctly in the first place. Most people are not able to correctly identify all the mistakes they are making and fix them just through exposure.

When I'm truly done with learning Japanese (another 3.5 years to go) and I'm onto a new language I'll get to start from scratch with methods like this. It's kinda hard to back track so far now with all of what I know.

Even going back through the few most frequent thousand and adding in a sentence and starting the reviews from scratch would take a damn long time.

Re: fossilization
Yeah, I've read about this concept before at the antimoon site and several other sources.
I think there is only really a risk of fossilization if output massively exceeds input (which I can't really imagine ever happening) or if bad input exceeds correct input (especially for extended periods of time) as is seen in classrooms around the world. The people I know who demonstrate the worst fossilized bad English are all people who have had little contact with native English sources. This includes my co-teachers who for the most part learn English almost exclusively through the Japanese education system. Communicating with me is perhaps the only contact with real English they have ever had since completing their education. The rest of the time all the exposure they get is the sound of their own voice and recordings of the very limited textbook content. The students then echo back the teachers poor pronunciation and grammar in a kind of terrible feedback loop excarbated by the fact that students from the same background tend to make the same mistakes.

My point is though, if 99% of your input comes from native sources I hardly think occasionally outputting incorrect sentences is really going to hurt you in the long run. Native speaking children make grammar mistakes and mispronounce words all the time but eventually succumb to the influence of their environment and learn to speak properly.

The problem with vocab in the front and sentence on the back is how do you remember the word when it pops up? Do you remember the sentence? Do you still translate it in your mind? It just doesn't seem very convenient.


I think the whole translating words in your mind is just a phase. You get over it as you advance. I can see a word, learn it, then encounter it in Japanese without ever thinking about it.

As for making it more than just passive, are you talking enough in Japanese? If you're not talking all the time in Japanese then you can't expect to make use of all those words. I personally think it'll all come natural as you get better and read and speak more.

I use it.

Front:
Word

Back:
Meaning
Example sentence

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Nothing special really. I don't see any method being inherently better or worse. It just took me 25 minutes to find and add 10 vocab. cards with example sentences on the back. I guess I'm somewhat slow to begin with.

You do eventually start skipping on the sample sentence though. I tend to have 2-4 vocab cards with the same example sentence, so I've seen the sentence so many times I already know how to use it. If you want to avoid translating then go monolingual.