All,

After living in Japan for about year, I recently started aggressively trying to learn Japanese and I am seeking advice from folks in this forum for the best and most efficient way to start out. As of right now, I know ~500 vocab words, can read and write Kana, and I am about 200 Kanji into RTK. Along with independent study, I attend four hours of Japanese lessons a week.

I use Anki SRS daily, but I am having difficulty coming up with a "system" that suits me best. I have seen conflicting comments on both this site and ajatt.com regarding whether production or recognition SRS cards should be used. The general "theme" of ajatt is massive input, but Khatz seems to promote production SRS cards, which, unless I am totally off, is output. When I do recognition reps, my retention level is close to zero unless the card is presented to me. At that point, I kind of think in my head, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a big umbrella and my cat is on the roof" or whatever and kind of move one without really retaining anything. When I do production reps, my retention level is much, much higher, but progress is extremely slow. I understand that large amounts of reading is what brings you towards fluency, but, at this point, reading is far too frustrating because my vocabulary is so small. Maybe this is normal and part of the learning process?

I understand learning a language, especially Japanese, is difficult. I really enjoy the challenge, but want to go about it the right way. I guess my question to the community is, "If you had to start over from scratch, how would you do it?" Also, any specific SRS specific advice would be great.

Also, somewhat unrelated, but I recently discovered the "learn mode" plugin for Anki and love it. Learn mode is cool because it pounds information into my head. I noticed that if I used standard Anki reps, too much time would elapse between a failed card was presented to me for the rep to be useful. I add new vocab/sentences to a scratch deck and run learn mode on them for a day or so. After that, I move them to my "production" sentence deck (for lack of a better term) for long term maintenance. Has anyone messed with this much? Any advice for "learning" new words?

Thanks in advance for any advice provided!

I'm not gonna go into details because as you have gathered everyone has different methods. So if I say I do something someone will just say they do something else. But if you read a load of the posts here you will get an idea of what people are doing.

One piece of advice hopefully no one will disagree with is that you just need to absolutely maxmise your studying time. So apart from sitting down to study Japanese time have something Japanese to read when commuting, listen to podcasts / japanese music when surfing the net, making dinner, whatever. Whenever you watch a movie or read a book make it a Japanese one (start with manga for reading)

For anki if you have a way to make it portable like an ipod or a netbook that helps.

You just need to find what works for you and then put in the hours (lots of them...!)

caivano Wrote:One piece of advice hopefully no one will disagree with is that you just need to absolutely maxmise your studying time.

Don't think of it all as study time and it'll help- try to find fun things you want to do in Japanese and do them. Study for me is when I sit down and do Anki or go through a textbook- listening to music is listening to music, playing a game is playing a game and reading a book is reading a book- they just happen to be in Japanese!

Might be your different though- I know if I think of it as study I won't want to do it.

You just started out, don't stress too much about methods, just make sure you do something everyday, and try to add some new things everyday and eventually you will make it if you continue that. Eventually you will just be able to read, that's what's happening to me now, I just pick something up and can usually pretty much read everything on it, and the words I don't the meanings to I can guess the readings too usually very very easily. So just keep going, you won't notice very meaningful progress until you look back in a year or so, than you will be like wow, damn.

captal Wrote:

caivano Wrote:One piece of advice hopefully no one will disagree with is that you just need to absolutely maxmise your studying time.

Don't think of it all as study time and it'll help- try to find fun things you want to do in Japanese and do them. Study for me is when I sit down and do Anki or go through a textbook- listening to music is listening to music, playing a game is playing a game and reading a book is reading a book- they just happen to be in Japanese!

Might be your different though- I know if I think of it as study I won't want to do it.

I still think of it as study time... just not sitting down to study, study time. More studying by reading a book watching a movie. Probably because I often come across things I want to note down.

But then you seem to think of study as having a negative connotation whereas I don't. I look forward to studying (by some means more than others I'll admit).

I've gone through a lot of different sentence/vocab/production/recognition decks and methods in these past few months, and I can't find anything that I can be completely satisfied with.

You mention "The cat is on the umbrella, blah blah blah" when you go through sentences. It seems like you're like me, just memorizing the sentences, and not the words. That's why you go to production cards, correct? However, in my case, then I remember the word just for that sentence.
What I like is:
Front: Word
Back: Reading, Meaning, Sentence(s)
That way, I have to test myself on the meaning and possible uses. like 担う, to "shoulder" both physically and metaphorically (responsibility)

Although, I find that while SRS reviews may be the only real "studying" I do, I feel it is the least important -- I don't have to put effort into it, the SRS does it for me. It's to help me not forget words, as opposed to remember them (if THAT makes sense...)

What is important is actually doing Japanese things and finding vocab that I want to learn. Watching TV, reading books, real life, etc...In your case, this may be frustrating, so perhaps something structured like Core might be good.

Some may disagree with me, and I wouldn't be surprised. But for what it's worth, that's what I got.

nalcomis Wrote:Also, somewhat unrelated, but I recently discovered the "learn mode" plugin for Anki and love it. Learn mode is cool because it pounds information into my head. I noticed that if I used standard Anki reps, too much time would elapse between a failed card was presented to me for the rep to be useful.

About this, how do you use the learn plugin?
I was annoyed that it only pulled 7 cards at a time. If it took all the cards, separated them by 7 card groups (using tags?), I would probably like it better. I just don't like how it made an entire new deck for them.

I've only been doing this a few months, and I'm still feeling my way, so discount what I say accordingly. But I have found that finishing RTK1 did propel me forward much faster than anything I'd tried before -- mostly, I'd worked through Genki 1 and other texts. RTK1 demystified kanji for me and made learning much easier. By the end of RTK1 you may not know many (or any) readings, but you have a rough sense of a couple thousand meanings, and I've been surprised how much they help.

As for doing other stuff simultaneously, it's fine if you've got the time. I started in on Core 2000 when I was about 2/3 done with RTK1, and that worked fine for me, but I've got lots of time to study. I like the structure and goal-orientation of Core 2000. I don't love the vocab choices in Step 3 so far, but other than that I don't have any complaints.

As for Anki decks, I (like many people) have experimented with all sorts of different formats. I'm still experimenting. Right now my favorite is a simple JLPT1-4 recognition deck, with a sole Japanese word on the question side, and meaning plus reading on the other. It's fast, and failing a card is not a big deal. I add 50-100 cards a day and still don't seem to spend much time on it, although the early words are easy. I also have a couple sentence decks, but I do find myself relying on memory of the entire sentence, which is less than optimal if I already grasp the grammar embodied in the sentence. I'm not sure whether I'll stick with those, especially as Core 2000 itself offers plenty of opportunity for sentence review.

Finally, I echo the sentiment about doing fun stuff in Japanese. I do my study first, and "reward" myself by reading manga etc later in the day. Helps to keep motivated.

captal Wrote:Don't think of it all as study time and it'll help- try to find fun things you want to do in Japanese and do them. Study for me is when I sit down and do Anki or go through a textbook- listening to music is listening to music, playing a game is playing a game and reading a book is reading a book- they just happen to be in Japanese!

Might be your different though- I know if I think of it as study I won't want to do it.

Groot Wrote:Finally, I echo the sentiment about doing fun stuff in Japanese. I do my study first, and "reward" myself by reading manga etc later in the day. Helps to keep motivated.

Just want to say I agree with both of these statements. I've only been studying "real" Japanese since January (aka I finished RTK in January), and even though I've made abysmal progress, I think that having fun is the most important thing. I also do my studying first (RTK reviews, anki reviews, then add a new lesson in Tae Kim into Anki) and then go on to play FF13 if I have time still.

Even while playing the game after all my studying, I still find myself adding new words to my vocab deck, and looking up definitions and such. Only it doesn't feel like I'm actually "working/studying," if that makes any sense. I legitimately wanna learn what things are while playing, so I'll look it up, add a vocab card in Anki, and do a quick review of my new words quick before I go to bed. Most of the time I don't even have to do much review either. I've seen so many words repeated that they just unconciously "stick" in my mind for the most part. For example, I never saw or heard the word 使命 before, but after maybe an hour of playing, I saw it so many times that by the time I added it I felt like I practically knew it already.

For the record, I do production and recognition cards. My KO2001 deck is front: sentence, back: translation w/ furigana readings. Simple enough. My Tae Kim deck is the same way basically (Nukemarine's deck).

My vocab deck (my only production practice) is just front: reading of the word (and the definition if its a very common reading for other words) and back: the vocab word in kanji, it's definition(s), and any grammar points (i.e. n, adj-no, exp, etc.)

For me, production is without a doubt what takes the longest to review, and what I make the most errors on (even with the words I know very well!). However, it's also the deck I enjoy reviewing the most. It's motivating to finish up 20 reviews or whatever and look back at the notebook and say, "wow, I wrote that stuff?" Also, I do production because I would like to write a journal in Japanese one day. I also think production helps me retain the information a lot better.

Asriel Wrote:You mention "The cat is on the umbrella, blah blah blah" when you go through sentences. It seems like you're like me, just memorizing the sentences, and not the words.

Even though I've only done the first 100 or sentences in KO2001, I've already noticed that I do this as well. Hence why I enjoy my production practice the most ( and usually find it the most helpful for remembering!)

Sorry for the uber long post, and good luck!

Just wondering, when people talk about production cards are they talking about the reading > kanji, or kanji > reading or eng definition > reading?

I 've always thought it was eng definition > reading but I think everyone else may be using it differently :$

caivano Wrote:Just wondering, when people talk about production cards are they talking about the reading > kanji, or kanji > reading or eng definition > reading?

I 've always thought it was eng definition > reading but I think everyone else may be using it differently :$

I do reading > kanji + eng definition. I'm probably doing it wrong, but I don't really read much into the plethora of different methods everyone has on here. I just do what "feels" right and works for me. *shrug*

I don't produce sentences by the way either. Not yet, at least. I just do single words or very short phrases.

I may start adding an example sentence on the back side for each card in my vocab deck once I get a bit more intermediate. I only have 280ish vocab words right now... I'm about as beginner as you can get. I mainly produce them so I can test my ability to write them from memory as well. As I said, this seems to help me retain the words/kanji far better than just sentences do, although it does take a bit longer to review.

Asriel Wrote:About this, how do you use the learn plugin?
I was annoyed that it only pulled 7 cards at a time. If it took all the cards, separated them by 7 card groups (using tags?), I would probably like it better. I just don't like how it made an entire new deck for them.

Yeah, I went back and looked at the learn plugin last night and realized I was using built-in cram function, not the learn plugin. Sorry about that. The 7-card limitation of the learn plugin frustrated me too. I wonder why that isn't customizable. Maybe it is? The plugin for Smart FM imports is super cool. My "Japanese Lady Friend" is trying to learn English and I hooked her up with Anki, the iPhone client (jailbroken phone), and Ankionline. I also showed her how to run the Smart FM plugin to get all of her Japanese - > English content - really slick.

Thanks a lot to everyone who replied. I really appreciate your advice. I think I am going to push forward with the Core 2000 and passive immersion...

nalcomis Wrote:Yeah, I went back and looked at the learn plugin last night and realized I was using built-in cram function, not the learn plugin. Sorry about that. The 7-card limitation of the learn plugin frustrated me too.

OK Cool, then we're in the same boat. I'm currently learning the 191 flags of the countries of the world with this to see if it is a relatively efficient learning method. Doing 30/day and it seems to be working good so far. Hail cram!

There is a reason for the 7 card limit. According to the Inverson List Method, the technique of quick repetition loses efficiency if you have too many or too few cards, the limit is there to make sure people aren't using the plugin incorrectly having like 15 cards or more in it. I agree that it should be slightly customizable though, between 6-10 cards or some such. And I haven't tried it yet, but if I have 14 cards and use it twice, will it be different cards each time or is it random? Because if it's random, that's a huge drawback.

Personally I find the cram function completely useless, the spacing of the repetitions are WAY too long, giving you one repetition for each fact unless you restart it, which is stupid. It's too long to be effective like Iverson List and it's too short to be even close to decent for long term.

It's not the 7 cards that bother me. It's the whole "let's make an entire deck with only 7 cards in it, and then delete the deck and lose all our progress"
And then if that didn't bother you, then just wait until you have to do the next 7 cards. You'll run it again and get the same 7 cards (because they're the top of the deck)!!

When I would do the Iverson method, I would have groups of 7 words, go through them, do the next 7, review the first 7, learn a new 7, review the 2nd 7, etc...
If Learn imported all the facts, and presented to you in a way that was useful, that would be excellent.

This is what is good about cram. You can go to cram, and change the maximum number of newly added cards to 7, or your number of choice. Then, when you are satisfied with those, you can add on more.
OR you can set the max number of failed cards to 7, and then whenever one is memorized, you can send it through, and another one comes in its place. It's not exactly the Iverson method, but it works.

Then you can just change the settings on your Crammed deck to be the default again, effectively making it a normal deck once again.

then again, perhaps I just havent played with Learn enough... :/

I don't know, I find the Learn plug-in works just fine. I mean, you only learn something once, right? After that it's review. I just use it to learn seven cards, and then when I'm done with the Learn deck, I go ahead and do the initial review for those seven cards in my real deck. There's really no need for the Learn deck to persist, since once I've worked through it once, the standard Anki algorithm is enough to keep everything in my memory.

Incidentally, by reviewing the cards for real in between Learn sessions, you don't keep ending up with the same group of seven cards.

Asriel Wrote:It's not the 7 cards that bother me. It's the whole "let's make an entire deck with only 7 cards in it, and then delete the deck and lose all our progress"
And then if that didn't bother you, then just wait until you have to do the next 7 cards. You'll run it again and get the same 7 cards (because they're the top of the deck)!!

When I would do the Iverson method, I would have groups of 7 words, go through them, do the next 7, review the first 7, learn a new 7, review the 2nd 7, etc...
If Learn imported all the facts, and presented to you in a way that was useful, that would be excellent.

This is what is good about cram. You can go to cram, and change the maximum number of newly added cards to 7, or your number of choice. Then, when you are satisfied with those, you can add on more.
OR you can set the max number of failed cards to 7, and then whenever one is memorized, you can send it through, and another one comes in its place. It's not exactly the Iverson method, but it works.

Then you can just change the settings on your Crammed deck to be the default again, effectively making it a normal deck once again.

then again, perhaps I just havent played with Learn enough... :/

Actually, I just manually edited the "learn mode.py" file in the Anki plugins directory and changed all references from 7 to 20 (with the exception of the blobs under the Interval section) and the settings took effect. I was having issues remembering some of the 200 Kanji I have done thus far using the default Anki algorithm, but then did all of them, as a review, using the learn algorithm and they FINALLY "stuck" with me. It took several hours to do it because Anki, in learn mode, keeps throwing them at you, but it worked really well (for me at least). It almost pisses you off into thinking, "I will NOT forget this card again because I am SICK AND TIRED of seeing it..." heh. When I did the reviews, I still utilized the "stories" because, after all, if you don't , RTK is meaningless because you are using rote memorization by brute force...

Mcjon01 Wrote:I just use it to learn seven cards, and then when I'm done with the Learn deck, I go ahead and do the initial review for those seven cards in my real deck. There's really no need for the Learn deck to persist, since once I've worked through it once, the standard Anki algorithm is enough to keep everything in my memory.

Incidentally, by reviewing the cards for real in between Learn sessions, you don't keep ending up with the same group of seven cards.

This is my problem: When do you go through it and consider them "Learned"? The deck itself has a set up algorithm, which is supposed to work like Pimsleur. Also, just going through 7 cards could take as little as 30 seconds. Do that, and the cards are still scheduled to come up in 2 minutes. But you already went through all the cards, and it tells you there's none left. Do you wait until the interval where it says "comes up next day"?

Nah, I just go through it once. That is, until the first time I see the "no new cards" screen. I suppose it could be over in 30 seconds, if you rushed through it, but that kind of defeats the whole point of the plug-in, right? Since it's learning, I take my time with each rep, write out the word I'm working on, and make sure I understand everything. Granted, this does end up weighting the learning toward the words that show up first, with the last word only getting maybe three or four reps, but it never seemed to affect my overall retention much.

Then again, I'm of the mindset that getting through as much material as possible is more important than learning a little bit of material really well. If something doesn't stick after the first time I learn it, the SRS sorts that out.

Asriel, you're right. It picks the same darn 7 cards every time, making the plugin borderline useless. Sure, you COULD add 7 new cards, run it, review them for real, repeat. However:

1. SO annoying and stupid.
2. What if one actually wants to cram? I have a test in two days, I need to learn a bunch of facts until then. What I want is the Learn plugin functionality, but I want to use it over and over for a big set of cards. I would LOVE to do em 7 at a time, but not the same 7 god damnit, I need it to cover the whole spectrum.

Really disappointed that it picks the same 7 cards.