I'm aiming for taking JLPT1 next year, and for that I've been working through 完全マスター 2級 (moving to 1級 later, about 3/4th of the way through). My overall understanding of sentence meaning is pretty good, but I'm terrible at distinguishing between similar grammar forms. What's worse, I don't even frequently encounter a lot of this grammar while reading, thus I don't think I can "naturally" learn it through immersion.

Is grammar efficiently SRS-able? If so, maybe someone can share a couple of example cards? I don't really have a good idea of how to split up the grammar fact between the question and the answer. Should the question be the grammar point, or example sentence(s)? What kind of other additional information is helpful? How much do you have per card? Etc, etc.

I humbly await your collective wisdom

=D I am re-doing my technique.

どんな時どう使う sounds like the perfect text for you. It has N2 points but shows the difference between N1 points. It gives a nice transition -- though I have yet to actually use it as I finished kanzen 2 first.

Hah, I actually have どんな時どう使う, but I haven't gotten to it, as I'm doing 完全マスター first :p I haven't actually had a chance to look through it much, but I'm glad to hear that it will actually address the differences in grammar.

As far as setting up a deck, here's what I got so far as a template (take that, forum layout!):

I had pretty good luck with using SRS for grammar. You can use sentence cards and also fill in the gap question cards similar to what they have on the exams. The question style is good for learning the difference between similar forms.

I see you have all of your example sentences in one card. I think changing it to have one card for each example would help your retention of each case.

Ah! That's an excellent idea! I didn't even think about using blanks. I'm totally doing that.

Yeah, that's pretty much how I do it, except for some stupid reason, I didn't put formation notes on my KM2 cards. I suppose I just figured I'd get it by osmosis or something. That didn't really happen. I found I don't read the notes that much, though, so that's kind of a wash. I need to practice sentence formation more than read about it.

Reading the example sentences got me good at reading the example sentences and knowing what the grammar means when I see it. It did not get me good at distinguishing between really nitpicky grammar points, like when to use だけの or だけあって. I think the best solution for that is cloze deletion, as Vos said. That, and writing outside of Anki.

I've got a pile of N2 prep books I can now mine for lots of cloze deletion problems, so I can just chunk those in for the next JLPT, whichever one I wind up taking.

Too bad Anki doesn't have a way to have references to unduplicated data (meaning, formation, etc). Maybe I can create them as links to "external media" inside iframes or something terrible like that. Worth a try

edit: Bah, while Anki allows me to do iframes to external sites, it doesn't allow local ones (probably default QT security options on the browser control). I guess some duplication of data can't be avoided.

Hmm... I did my kanzen deck much differently.

I had the sentences on front (all of them from 5 to 15) and the vocabulary, usage and definition on the back. I wonder if this will help me or slow me down? Interesting.

gyuujuice Wrote:Hmm... I did my kanzen deck much differently.

I had the sentences on front (all of them from 5 to 15) and the vocabulary, usage and definition on the back. I wonder if this will help me or slow me down? Interesting.

I think not doing complete sentences on the front is probably a better way to go... Before I went straight to vocab, I had a huge amount of sentences (around 12k). The problem was that if you have the whole sentence, you just end up memorizing it as a unit, as opposed to remembering what a particular grammar point (or vocab for that matter) means.

I'm hoping that cloze deletion will actually stimulate some thought process as opposed to simply remembering the entire sentence meaning (ah, it's *that* sentence again). This way, I think remembering sentence meaning will work to guide you to associate meaning with grammar, as opposed to just glossing over it as a set unit with the rest of the sentence.

Yeah, what I meant was that I had whole sentences on the front like Vos had, with the grammar point highlighted in red. I started doing that in February, and I haven't noticed any amazing recall of those grammar points, just the ability to recognize what they mean when I see them in sentences.

I think I wound up memorizing the sentences more than the grammar. But sometimes I still have to figure out what they mean by the context, and that's no good.

I'd say that isolating the grammar points or using cloze deletion would be a good thing to add to the sentences, because it makes different bits of your brain work. Better still would be to write/speak in Japanese, using those grammar points on a regular basis to reinforce those points.

If you see ように just sitting there, you don't have any context or wiggle room to figure it out, you either know it or you don't, so it's probably a better way to memorize it.

EDIT: I have found that sentences are great for a few things thing: 1) Vocab, and 2) they help for that general "Getting a feel for the language" thing, which is really squishy and hard to pin down. I'm at around 12,600 sentences, and that's the sense I'm getting about the whole thing.

I have noticed that my sentences are getting shorter and shorter, though, and are becoming more and more like phrases, to speed things up.

When I'm done with the JLPT, I'm going to become a cloze monster, most likely.

I've actually thought about doing just grammar points (like ように) as the question as opposed to cloze deletion too, I think it would "probably" work better, but it's not something that can easily be graded.

Like you might have an explanation for ように that you think works, but is actually incomplete. Or what if there are multiple uses for that grammar (like ように actually), which one is the correct answer? Both?

However at the same time I'm concerned about memorizing the sentences, but I guess no way to tell other than to try.

rich_f Wrote:Yeah, what I meant was that I had whole sentences on the front like Vos had, with the grammar point highlighted in red. I started doing that in February, and I haven't noticed any amazing recall of those grammar points, just the ability to recognize what they mean when I see them in sentences.

Yeah, the sentences are mainly for comprehension but I think that's a good thing; answering grammar questions is just for tests which is secondary.

I'd recommend the 日本語総まとめ grammar books. I found them really helpful for learning the repeating rules in the grammar patterns.

@FooSoft: Just having "grammar point" cards with a description is pretty unnatural. I think it will help you talk about the grammar but not really know it in practice or tell it apart from other similar grammar; it's hard to tell what makes a point different from another by looking at them in isolation.

The cloze deletion type questions on the exams have multiple choices that are similar but you need to discard the ones that don't fit because they don't match the pattern, eg. the pattern doesn't fit with a noun/verb/adjective, or the verb is in the wrong form, or missing a "na~" or "da~", or using the wrong tense, or whatever the patterns are. By doing those type of questions and making mistakes you can learn to tell them apart.