Tobberoth Wrote:Personally, I don't read the kind of stuff where JLPT2 and especially JLPT1 vocabulary comes up because I think it's boring as hell. Economic news and crap like that. That's where the SRS comes in for me, to learn words that I can't be bothered to expose myself to but need to know for a career in Japan or whatever.

When I read manga, I sometimes put words I want to know in the SRS to be sure I get enough exposure, but generally I just ignore it and keep reading.

You need to find books on subjects you like written in Japanese - whatever you would normally read in Swedish or English. Biographies, psychology, science, philosophy, history, whatever... ...I think most of JLPT2 and even big chunks of JLPT1 are actually pretty common knowledge/vocabulary for a high school graduate.

Do you have stores like a Book-Off near where you live where you can browse a book before buying?

I still can't say much about JLPT1 but you can see the vocabulary for JLPT2 everyday.

I have not made anything special to measure it, but I'm getting my vocabulary from almost exposure only and I'm very comfortable with the JLPT2 test.

I also could solve some questions in the JLPT1 test I cheked.

I still see tons of vocabulary without having to search much. All I have to do is pick some text with a different subject. Other day I picked an article about pregnancy and I got at least 15 new words.

kfmfe04 Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Personally, I don't read the kind of stuff where JLPT2 and especially JLPT1 vocabulary comes up because I think it's boring as hell. Economic news and crap like that. That's where the SRS comes in for me, to learn words that I can't be bothered to expose myself to but need to know for a career in Japan or whatever.

When I read manga, I sometimes put words I want to know in the SRS to be sure I get enough exposure, but generally I just ignore it and keep reading.

You need to find books on subjects you like written in Japanese - whatever you would normally read in Swedish or English. Biographies, psychology, science, philosophy, history, whatever... ...I think most of JLPT2 and even big chunks of JLPT1 are actually pretty common knowledge/vocabulary for a high school graduate.

Do you have stores like a Book-Off near where you live where you can browse a book before buying?

It really doesn't help much, tons of the JLPT1 vocabulary is very specific. Words used only in economic situations etc, words used in business. It's the same as TOEIC, where business English is the main goal, lots of words and sentences not really used in everyday sources outside of news. Tons of keigo knowledge is included in JLPT1 for example, how often do you see that used outside of formal texts? Not often.

There's definitely tons of vocabulary needed for JLPT1 that I would never see from just normal everyday exposure, I have to plan for it. I want to work in Japan in the future so I need to know business lingo... but that doesn't mean I like reading magazines, articles etc about business.

You gets tons of keigo from dramas and manga.
This season there is a dorama caled mei chan no hitsuji. The buttlers use almost only keigo.
How often I see keigo outside the textbooks? Whenever I want.

The same for business lingo. I'm specially interested in computer related lingo. Slashdot.jp has tons of it. And so the comments.

If you want to work in japan, in an area related to economy, and you don't like to read about economy, its better for you to switch your goals.

mentat_kgs Wrote:You gets tons of keigo from dramas and manga.
This season there is a dorama caled mei chan no hitsuji. The buttlers use almost only keigo.
How often I see keigo outside the textbooks? Whenever I want.

The same for business lingo. I'm specially interested in computer related lingo. Slashdot.jp has tons of it. And so the comments.

If you want to work in japan, in an area related to economy, and you don't like to read about economy, its better for you to switch your goals.

No, I'm into IT. However like I noted in another topic, slashdot.jp only has translated articles, I don't consider it a pure enough source to actively mine from.

The point wasn't that I need to read boring stuff for work, it's more that to pass JLPT1, you MIGHT need tons of terms for areas you might not be interested in, depending on what areas you're interested in.

Well, generaly slashdot articles are a short translation of around 4 lines lenght, followed by a comment. And then the tons of comments from the readers. These comments are genuine Japanese.

Also, secially if you are into IT, you must get used to translation. I don't know about you, but here in Brasil we use English terminology all the time. In Japan it looks like it is even worse. You need to know the broken english that japanese use while dealing with technology.

I find it discouraging, too, when I have to learn vocabulary in subjects I am not interested in.

However, I try to remind myself that these words are probably common terms that any reasonably educated Japanese person would know.

Why should I deprive myself of that knowledge?

That usually gets me back on track.

pm215 Wrote:

phauna Wrote:A good example comes from my three year old daughter. She has some plastic animals, a great variety of them, and she can name every one of them.

Clearly what we need is a set of plastic animals with their Japanese names painted on their sides. Scatter them around your house/desk at work/whatever, and I bet in three months you'd know them all :-)

Actually, that's a great idea!

Just replace the plastic with paper and you can create lots of learning materials. As you may know, pictorial dictionaries do exist. You could use one of those, or take images from internet and create your own pictorial glossary and flashcards. You could even stick them over your wall and play around with them. They could even be used in a classroom context to get people play with the words and concepts and learn them at the same time.

People could even create a sort of wiki-style pictorial dictionary using open source material and online spreadsheets like Zoho or Google Docs. Then someone could create an Anki deck from the data and share it with the world.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Well, generaly slashdot articles are a short translation of around 4 lines lenght, followed by a comment. And then the tons of comments from the readers. These comments are genuine Japanese.

Also, secially if you are into IT, you must get used to translation. I don't know about you, but here in Brasil we use English terminology all the time. In Japan it looks like it is even worse. You need to know the broken english that japanese use while dealing with technology.

Well, you're certainly right about that. Swedish IT generally has Swedish terms for everything but it's often very obvious that it's more or less direct translations from English. The things I've read about IT in Japanese on websites, slashdot for example, has of course been full of katakana. However, my neighbour (a Japanese couple) is a system architect at sony ericsson and he has several japanese IT magazines and when i looked at those I was really surprised to see that the katakana usage was WAY less than I expected. I'm guessing that while actual technology uses english terms, it seems software engineering and management lingo generally has real jukugo words.

Though I guess you're right, in a field where English has such a high impact it makes little sense to be a complete purist.

What gets in my nerves sometimes is that there are times the katakana word comes from the pronunciation, sometimes from the spelling. You can never guess it right.

pm215 Wrote:

phauna Wrote:A good example comes from my three year old daughter. She has some plastic animals, a great variety of them, and she can name every one of them.

Clearly what we need is a set of plastic animals with their Japanese names painted on their sides. Scatter them around your house/desk at work/whatever, and I bet in three months you'd know them all :-)

This is a >GREAT< idea for vocabulary that doesn't stick. I'm going to try it!

Another option is look for a Manga in that area you're trying to learn. I think they have one for an animal hospital, sushi chef, zoo, business, tennis, go, baseball, medical surgery, etc. Bound to have area specific vocabulary with illustrated descriptions on many things.

Should save on the post-its.

For full immersion, RevTK should have a Japanese language setting.

Question..

Sometimes I find a sentence that contains a new way to mix up grammar, or has a word I know but used in a way that I am not familiar with. Or maybe it has some katakana I don't know, but is immediately recognisable. In other words, that I can easily understand what is being said using my passive knowledge of grammar and vocab, however I couldn't produce such a sentence.

EG. いや、日本にとってガンに等しい存在です。- No, from Japan's perspective he is the equivilant of cancer.

Now I know all the words in this sentence and understand the grammar. However, before reading this sentence I didn't know 等しい which I have learnt in a maths context could be used figuratively.

It's nice that I understand it easily, but I will never fail this card and so it will quickly become highly spaced and I am not going to see it much. In which case, I am not likely to be able to get it into an active usable state. How do you guys work around this problem?

I am thinking about having blanks where possible as a way to get around this problem. EG. いや、日本にとってガンに___________存在です。Have you guys tried using this technique?

You won't see it much in your SRS but at some point you'll just see it a lot when you read real Japanese and hear people use it. So it will get reinforced like that. Then at some point, you will need to express exactly that idea. It may not come very easily that first time but it will get more natural and easier from that point.

This is a case of trying to use a SRS when it's not needed.

Don't really see that as a problem so I wouldn't try to solve it.

I think you are overreacting. Let the impressive amount of vocabulary that you need to memorize before 等しい do its job.

Maybe you won't be able to produce it by now, because you are not doing production, just recognition. It would be good to do production, but we have so much vocabulary to learn first that we need to spend a lot of time doing recognition. By the time we are good at recognition, we can begin to study production. I suppose (hope) that at that time, we will be able to pick up things just by exposure.

Interesting. So do you guys primarily focus on vocab with your SRS?

thermal Wrote:Interesting. So do you guys primarily focus on vocab with your SRS?

Definitely. Grammar can be trained with production and stuff but I find the only really realiable, fast and fun way is to expose myself to tons of Japanese. I have JLPT grammar points in my SRS but other than that, I use it purely for vocab. Me reading books and watching movies and series will teach me how words are used and stuff like that, I don't think an SRS is all that effective for it.

The more vocab I know, the easier it becomes to expose myself. When you know all the words in a sentence, your brain can relax and you'll probably learn the flow of conversation instead of being stuck on the vocab.

Grammar: ~500 - 1000 grammatical patterns
Kanji: ~3500 characters
Vocabulary: at least 20'000 - 30'000 words

You should be able to draw you own conclusions from that

Quick question abut the sentence mining method using SRS:

I'm kinda confused. Do i do it like this?

Example sentence: その通りだ！
kana: その とおり だ !
Translation: That's exactly right!

I put the sentence in the question field and the kana and translation in the answer field, right? Then he suggest later on that I only do Japanese to Japanese, both japanese in the question field and in the answer field. How do i do that? Do i put the example sentence in the question field and then in the answer field i try to explain in Japanese what 通り means? Can someone give me an example with the japanese to japanese cards.

I hope i make any sence.

I think they usually do Kanji one side ー Kana the other and forego English translation for Japanese-Japanese cards.

So your example sentence would be on the front and on the back the kana with definitions and whatever else information you need. No English.

Oh I think I understand. Can someone link me to a good site I can look up definitions?

http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/

Select the 国語 button when you are searching and then on the brown bar when you get your result, pick 大辞林