When using Rikaichan, I often notice a (P) attached to the end of dictionary entries. Recently, I found out that it means the definition being provided is one of the 20,000 words considered common in Japanese. The (P) stands for "priority". Here's the exact phrasing on the JDIC website:

JDIC Dictionary Code Guide Wrote:"Priority" entry, i.e. among approx. 20,000 words deemed to be common in Japanese

This discovery excited me. And after a quick look at the shared Anki decks, I noticed a roughly 22,000 word deck called "Girardi Kelly Word Frequency". Through some research, I found out that the Girardi Kelly Word Frequency list is the same frequency list used for the Core2/6k series. Therefore, there's no need to wait for the Core10k vocab! There's already a deck with all the words that will most likely be included in the Core10k, plus 12,000 more!

However, there's one problem with the glorious 22,000 card deck. It's sorted alphabetically, instead of from most common to least common. Would it be possible to somehow sort the deck according to the more useful most common to least common format? If anyone can find a way to do so, the result will be one of the greatest Japanese learning resources available. Who's ready?

But I like Smartfm because of the audio, pretty pictures and dictation. :3

Actually there may not be a way to organise them by frequency. I'm afraid that you will have to study in a different order.

hmm, still good to know 20,000 common words none the less.

gyuujuice Wrote:But I like Smartfm because of the audio, pretty pictures and dictation. :3

You can get audio with thurd's Anki plugin. Pictures are nice, but they're problematic when reviewing on an iPhone or Anki Online. I've never used Smartfm's dictation feature, so I can't say anything about it.

As for organizing the deck, I'll wait for some more feedback before I give up hope.

I couldn't find anything about Gerard Kelly, but if you're talking about Alexandre Girardi, I found this:

Quote:In 1998 Alexandre Girardi produced a word-frequency list based on 4 years of the Mainichi Shimbun. It contains about 300,000 words. Another version, which Charles Kelly at Aichi Institute of Technology tidied up, is available.

* wordfreq.zip (1817440 bytes) the archive with the file
* wordfreq.README (1569 bytes) a short explanation
* wordfreq_ck.gz (741045 bytes) The same data, tidied up by Charles Kelly.

Which has not 20,000, but 300,000 words, apparently from here: http://ftp.usf.edu/pub/ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/
Since it's "Alexandre Girard" and "Charles Kelly" i can see where "Girard-Kelly" comes from...

I haven't played around with it, but I think it should be able to be sorted by frequency.

edit: These are sorted just from Mainichi Shimbun, but on the site they also have frequency lists from novels, the Goo pages, and some other stuff apparently

Would something like this even be useful? They're not in or from any context...
I think you can easily gather enough words from reading the things you're actually interested in.

yukamina Wrote:Would something like this even be useful? They're not in or from any context...
I think you can easily gather enough words from reading the things you're actually interested in.

I've wondered this myself from time to time, but some people just like learning words from list.
Perhaps you have heard of the "Iversen Method" of learning vocab? Take 7 words, write them in columns, etc...
Well, when the guy came up with the method, he was reading a dictionary straight through, and learning every word. The kicker is, he "speaks" 11 languages and "studies" 9 more.

I don't think context is the do-all end-all of vocab learning. If you've gone through and learned the word from a list, you'll at least be acquainted with it when it comes in the wild. Then the context falls into place.

If you look at the Japanese CorePlus deck, recently posted on the Anki site
It has over 20,000 vocab words = all the (P) words. But for those words in Core 6000, it also has sentences with audio (and references to online images if you want to use them). If you want 10,000 words, adding the words tagged JLPT1-4 to the basic core list should give you about that number - not strictly the same extra 4000 words, but what words are frequently used differs from person to person anyway.
I haven't tried it, but you you can set up your cards so that anki requires you to type in an answer, and you tell it which field (probably a sentence field) is required
= dictation.

Yes, there's thurd's plugin, TTS (if you saw my thread on hotkeying Textaloud so you don't have to do any switching or pasting), and I'm pretty sure C6k doesn't have images anyway, no?

Good to know there's already a deck with those extra words--I only unsuspend those words/sentences when I come across them in subs2srs anyway (thus I already have multimedia context), but I figured I'd eventually run out of stuff from the C6k/KO2001 decks-as-corpora and wouldn't want to spend a lot of time making individual word cards for them all when I come across them in native media.

Asriel Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:Would something like this even be useful? They're not in or from any context...
I think you can easily gather enough words from reading the things you're actually interested in.

I've wondered this myself from time to time, but some people just like learning words from list.
Perhaps you have heard of the "Iversen Method" of learning vocab? Take 7 words, write them in columns, etc...
Well, when the guy came up with the method, he was reading a dictionary straight through, and learning every word. The kicker is, he "speaks" 11 languages and "studies" 9 more.

I don't think context is the do-all end-all of vocab learning. If you've gone through and learned the word from a list, you'll at least be acquainted with it when it comes in the wild. Then the context falls into place.

From the time I hung around a forum he frequented, I never saw any proof that he could speak 11 languages. He claimed to be able to write in Danish and wrote a forum post in Danish as an example. While it was certainly impressive, even I, being a swede, found it riddled with errors, as is to be expected from someone who knows words but haven't learned the language.

Tobberoth Wrote:From the time I hung around a forum he frequented, I never saw any proof that he could speak 11 languages. He claimed to be able to write in Danish and wrote a forum post in Danish as an example. While it was certainly impressive, even I, being a swede, found it riddled with errors, as is to be expected from someone who knows words but haven't learned the language.

Ah, I see. I haven't even read the full vocabulary thread, where the "Iversen Method" was introduced, so I really don't have a clue.

I still don't think that not having context is the ultimate killer of language learning. Yes, it's certainly helpful, and you should have it when you can.
Taking a reading, learning the unknown vocab beforehand, and then doing the reading is quite helpful, I've found. The pre-learning ("stockpiling") gets you used to the words, so you can read it without stopping to look in a dictionary all the time. Then the reading gives you the context you need.

Tobberoth Wrote:From the time I hung around a forum he frequented, I never saw any proof that he could speak 11 languages. He claimed to be able to write in Danish and wrote a forum post in Danish as an example. While it was certainly impressive, even I, being a swede, found it riddled with errors, as is to be expected from someone who knows words but haven't learned the language.

Iversen is Danish. (笑)

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...=1&TPN=235

To those against vocab, I recommend taking a look at Mezbup's "goodbye sentences" thread. In short, vocab speeds up reviews, which frees up time for immersion. Of course, more immersion means more exposure to context.

In addition, vocab cards are unmatched when it comes to learning concrete nouns, which I can often immediately understand when I encounter them outside of reviews.

Abstract words are more of an issue, but I've found that vocab cards make the first time I come across an abstract word while not reviewing much less intimidating.

vileru Wrote:To those against vocab, I recommend taking a look at Mezbup's "goodbye sentences" thread. In short, vocab speeds up reviews, which frees up time for immersion. Of course, more immersion means more exposure to context.

In addition, vocab cards are unmatched when it comes to learning concrete nouns, which I can often immediately understand when I encounter them outside of reviews.

Abstract words are more of an issue, but I've found that vocab cards make the first time I come across an abstract word while not reviewing much less intimidating.

I didn't realize anyone here was 'against vocab' -- Tobberoth is actually a supporter of the vocab ideas in Mezbup's thread, no? So I'm not sure if striking up that discourse in this thread is necessary.

Although, I disagree that 'vocab cards are unmatched' when it comes to learning concrete nouns and that doing single word cards = speedier = better, or that single word cards + immersion for context is the only way to go. I also think people who say they have trouble with learning words in sentences are simply not doing sentences right, trying to memorize them and relying on a half-hearted recall of the first few words or the prosody of the sentence only. I made recommendations to counter this but there's also those who choose to just grade individual (edit) words even when the sentence is right there, and that works too. There's no functional difference between the two types of cards, except the presentation allows for different strategies. It just seems that some people apply one strategy, a bad one, and when it fails, they say sentences don't work for them.

Personally I still think doing both is good, words are great as long as you keep them close to the context they're used in, but SRSing sentences is great because you get these little SRSable microcosms to work out the structure of the language as it's used, in context, making use of the levels of processing effect (more elaborate = easier) and maintaining the same environment for encoding and recall, which is how people best remember.

And of course, to add to my old caveat, it's natural that as you progress you'll need sentences less and less. But I think that's an individual progression where the effort involved in getting a sentence into the SRS also comes into play.

@nest0r

I'm writing from my iPhone, so I didn't edit my previous post for tone. Let me emphasize that I'm not trying to start a sentences vs. vocab war, but to point out the advantages of vocab cards.

Anyway, I agree that parsing a sentence has it's advantages. However, repeatedly studying the same sentence structure can be tiring and of limited use. Even if you're trying to determine the function/s of the unknown word/s through sentences, it is a bit overboard to do so for every new word. Therefore, I use a combination of both, like you suggested.

Overall, I prefer vocab cards simply because they're less daunting than sentences. I can push through hundreds of vocab cards at a rapid-fire pace, whereas sentences are more drawn-out and tedious.

@vileru - I see. Although, I actually find sentence easier, more enjoyable, and do them much more quickly than individual words, and I'm able to use words in the sentences better in new contexts. ;p

On the Googledocuments sticky, there is a spreadsheet with 15,000 words listed by frequency derived from scanning the internet. Probably more useful than using the newspaper frequency.

yukamina Wrote:Would something like this even be useful? They're not in or from any context...
I think you can easily gather enough words from reading the things you're actually interested in.

I thought the same thing too, however posts by Jarvik and IceCream on their success of just doing vocab cards changed my mind. While sentences are great for context early on, they can become counter productive when you get into area specific and less common words.

Pretty much, all you need is the word and what it means so that you then know what it is when you do see it elsewhere (ie you don't need to rush to the dictionary). This is what IceCream experienced when she did Core 6k as just vocabulary only. The context came from the exposure, and having a solid vocabulary she got even more from her exposure to Japanese media.

Personally, I like doing vocabulary as kana to kanji, in which case I use the sentence to make sure I'm doing the correct word. Problem happens on those where it's the sentence giving away the answer. Still, it's easy as a card type edit to change up my vocab deck to be vocab only.

janettek Wrote:Does anyone else find it annoying when reviewing japanese sentences in an SRS deck, to know what is coming next? eg. if the baby is holding something red, it must be a balloon (it was last time). I may think I know words when in reality I don't. The sentences help pin the word in my memory (and understand its uses), but to test whether I will remember a word out of its familiar context, I need to test myself on the word, and then perhaps listen to the sentence for reinforcement. A sentence only deck would not feel right for me.

This is exactly where I think people go wrong when doing sentences and the most common complaint for those who don't want to do them. They're memorizing the sentence as a whole and/or relying on the familiar pattern, aural and structural, etc. in order to grade/test themselves. I never do that. I focus on the actual words in the sentences as discrete elements comprising the sentence... how they sound, what they mean, what kanji they're composed of, and how they're used. The rest, the prosody and collocation, the usage/conjugation/etc., that stuff acts as scaffolding that you use/discard as desired. It's all about how you mentally approach the sentence and use the information before you.

Especially when you progress to where you need sentences less and less in the SRS, it should also matter less and less whether they're sentence cards or not, because your attentional focus/mental parsing should be so adept that you can easily grade specific elements of the sentence.

There's also a place for cloze deletion of targets in sentences with specific graded elements.

That said, I think half of my vocabulary cards are single word cards, but they're always tied to where I was exposed to them, in some way or another.

Still waiting on Blahah to make that 'reminder' plugin that I'm too lazy to look up my thread for. ;p

Tobberoth Wrote:He claimed to be able to write in Danish and wrote a forum post in Danish as an example. While it was certainly impressive, even I, being a swede, found it riddled with errors, as is to be expected from someone who knows words but haven't learned the language.

I didn't understand. Danish is not a language he learnt with his method, Danish is his native tongue!

Either he has a problem with his mother tongue, or I am not fluent in Danish.

janettek Wrote:Does anyone else find it annoying when reviewing japanese sentences in an SRS deck, to know what is coming next? eg. if the baby is holding something red, it must be a balloon (it was last time). I may think I know words when in reality I don't.

But there is no problem with that. You can set up your SRS to be the hardest it can be and feel that since you are punishing yourself that must mean you're learning better.

Does it really work like that? I don't think so.

I think what's important for remembering in the long term is making connections between words. Once you get the word in your brain in a certain context of a sentence you'll be able to add more connections to it later.

So if for example, you find an unfamiliar word in a book you're reading, look it up and then realize you have it in a sentence in your SRS with already an interval of 7 months. Should you feel bad that somehow you failed to remember it, that you deluded yourself into thinking that you knew that word when that wasn't really the case and that studying that sentence was such a waste of time?

Of course, no. That's just an emotional reaction. You needed to make more connections to be able to remember that word in a different context. Now you won't forget it as easily. You should feel good about that opportunity to learn no bad because you didn't remember.

That you can use the context of a sentence to help you remember a word more easily instead of repeatedly trying to force it into your brain is a good thing not a problem.

I'm not arguing for sentence cards over vocab cards. I just don't like the idea of bulk learning an endless list of words that may or may not be relevant to one's goals.
The words aren't "in context"= sentence card
Nor are they "from context"= vocab card that is from your readings
Personally, I think a combination of sentence and vocab cards that are gathered from what you're reading is ideal. Not only do you know they are important for you (even if the words aren't coming up in other places, you can reread the original), but they'll have a better connection to meaning in your mind. I also think that you should spend more time reading and listening than SRSing.
For example...recently I found the word 師匠 while reading and had to look it up. Turns out I've heard this word a zillion times in anime and just never knew how it was written. So I just made a vocab card. Meanwhile, I found a new word (物色) while reading and thought it wouldn't stand alone very well on a card, so I put the original sentence in.

Vocab lists I've obtained through smart.fm add up roughly to these values:

JLPT4 = 700
JLPT3 = 600
JLPT3&4+Core2k = 2100-2200
JLPT3&4+Core2k+Core6k = 5500
JLPT3&4+Core2k+Core6k+JLPT2 = 6600

That last step is probably exaggerated and after some "cleaning" it will be closer to 6500.

For those looking for a reason behind using lists vs personally adding words its efficiency!!
My first vocab word was added 14th January and right now I'm finishing Core 6k (I'm exactly @ 4.4k words), thats almost 4.5k words in 5 months, beat that with slowly adding each card

It's just impossible in the beginning to do anything more "efficient" in terms of acquiring basic/useful vocab (In my case even more so since my goal is passing JLPT2 in December). I agree that later on a more personalized and specialized approach will be better but that happens after you "learn" the basics (Core6k if you ask me, Core2k is just too small).

My results using this method are fantastic: the deeper I go into Core6k the less unknown words appear in native reading materials. I've been looking at songs lyrics for some time and its really rare that I stumble upon a word not already covered (and I still haven't finished). My teacher is constantly surprised with how many words I do understand compared to my atrocious speaking ability (and she is even more amazed when I ask her to write a word in kanji to help me understand, cause I sometimes get mixed up).

How long does it take to get to the words that aren't boring and/or business words in Kore6k (KO2001 order)?

Asriel Wrote:How long does it take to get to the words that aren't boring and/or business words in Kore6k (KO2001 order)?

Well, what do you expect. That's the frequent stuff. I don't really know what you would consider "fun" words though.

I'm just following the default order in smart.fm. I thought the most "boring" words were in Step 3, although Step 4 had its share too. Maybe "boring" is the wrong word; lots of abstract words for a business setting. Anyway, Step 5 has a greater variety of words, and they seem somehow easier and more fun to study. *shrug*