Jarvik7 Wrote:Also, if you have a Mac there is an excellent built in J-J, J-E dictionary.
Here is an example of the J-E:

やる【遣る】
1 〔送る，行かせる〕send
医者を呼びにやった｜We sent for a doctor.
秘書をやって書類を取って来させた｜He sent his secretary for the papers.
2人の息子を大学へやるのは大変だった｜It was not easy for him to send his two sons to college.
時計は直しにやってあります｜My watch has been sent to be repaired.
娘を弁護士のところへ嫁にやった｜He married his daughter to a lawyer.
2 〔他の場所へ移す〕
辞書をどこへやった｜Where did you put the dictionary?
3 〔向ける〕turn
彼の方に顔をやった｜She turned toward(s) him.
入ってきた男に目をやった｜I looked at the man who had come in.
4 〔進ませる〕
車に乗り込むと，急いでやってくれと運転手に頼んだ｜I got into the cab and asked the driver to drive fast.
5 〔与える〕give
金魚にえさをやりましたか｜Have you fed [given food to] the goldfish?
あの子にお駄賃をいくらやったらいいだろうか｜How much shall I [give the boy as a reward / pay the boy] for his trouble?
死んでもおまえにやるものは何もないよ｜I've nothing to leave you when I die.
欲しかったらみんなやるよ｜You can have them all if you want them.
毎朝植木に水をやる｜I water the plants every morning.
6 〔行う〕do
やるべきことはちゃんとやりなさい｜Always do what you [are supposed / have] to do.
よくやったね｜Well done!
今宿題をやっている｜He is doing his homework now.
やってみたらどうですか｜How about trying it?
どんどんやれ｜Go on [ahead]! / ｟口｠ Go to it!
うん，やっているね｜You are really going hard at it, aren't you?
チェスをやろう｜Let's play chess.
この役は誰がやるのか｜Who will play this part?
3日もあればやれるでしょう｜I think I can finish it in three days.
ドイツ語を週2回やっている｜I take lessons in German twice a week.
大学では数学をやりました〔専攻した〕｜｟米国用法｠ I majored in mathematics at the university. / ｟英国用法｠ I read for a degree in mathematics at the university.
あいつならやりかねない｜I wouldn't put anything past him.
7 〔開催する〕hold; 〔上演する〕stage
その展覧会はいつやるのですか｜When will the exhibition be held?
明日から歌舞伎座で「忠臣蔵」をやります｜Chushingura will be staged at the Kabukiza beginning tomorrow.
あの映画館で『風と共に去りぬ』をやっている｜Gone with the Wind [is showing / is on] now at that theater.
8 〔経営する〕keep, run; 〔従事する〕｟文語｠ be engaged ｟in｠
父は薬屋をやっています｜My father keeps [runs] a drugstore.
何の商売をやっている人か｜What does he do? / What line of business is he in?
弁護士［医者］をやっている｜He practices law [medicine].
9 〔飲む，食う〕
まあ，一杯おやりなさい｜Well, how [what] about a drink? / Won't you have a drink?
酒もたばこもやりません｜I neither drink nor smoke.
10 〔暮らす〕
そんなわずかな収入ではやっていけない｜We can't live [get along] on such a scanty income.
新しい同僚となんとかうまくやっているらしい｜She seems to be getting along all right with her new colleagues.
11 〔「?してやる」の形で，他人のために行う〕
子供たちに本を読んでやった｜He read a book for [to] the children.
面白い話を聞かせてやろう｜I have an interesting story to tell you.
子供をいすに掛けさせてやった｜He helped the child onto a chair.
そいつをたたき出してやれ｜Throw him out.
好きなようにさせてやれ｜Let him do as he likes.
12 〔積極的にする〕
絶対に優勝してやる｜I intend to win no matter what.

quite impressive.... does it come in pc version ?

Nope, that is the dictionary application built into OSX. It has E-E, J-J, J-E, English thesaurus, dictionary of Apple terms, and Wikipedia.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Nope, that is the dictionary application built into OSX. It has E-E, J-J, J-E, English thesaurus, dictionary of Apple terms, and Wikipedia.

But I'm sure that Apple must have taken all of that from an existing dictionary. I doubt they wrote all the entries in-house...

Mighty_Matt Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:Nope, that is the dictionary application built into OSX. It has E-E, J-J, J-E, English thesaurus, dictionary of Apple terms, and Wikipedia.

But I'm sure that Apple must have taken all of that from an existing dictionary. I doubt they wrote all the entries in-house...

Well, I thought that was pretty obvious It's not data in a standard format that could be loaded into anything else anyways. If you're interested in which dictionaries they actually are, here you go:

New Oxford American Dictionary
Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus
Apple Dictionary
大辞泉
プログレッシブ英和・和英中辞典
Wikipedia

The J-E/E-J dictionary is the one that is the most common on recent denshijisho from most brands. It seems to have mostly replaced the Genius dictionary.

Wow, thanks Jarvik7, I hadn't noticed the J-J and J-E dictionaries on OS X (I had to turn them on in the Dic. app though). And you an use it with Ctrl-Cmd-D in other apps (probably not all of them). Cool.

Is the dictionary on Leopard or is it on Tiger as well?

It wasn't on Tiger, it's one of the new features of Leopard.

I've noticed that when you try to paste entries onto Anki that the hiragana doesn't come up on the readings when you take entries from the OSX dictionary. Too bad.

If it doesn't, that sounds like a toolkit bug. If you hit space afterwards, does it come up?

Well I've been practicing with the AJATT method for something like a week now and something 's bothering me . If you could share your experiment about the following questions it would be of great help .

-how many sentences in a day are able to "learn" (in the khazu meaning of learning of course) ? what is a slow , medium and quick pace according to you ?
how many times it is normal to fail a sentence and how much time can you reasonnably spend on a single sentence ?
- how much time do you spend a day just putting in the sentences : searching a good sentence on a web dictionnary or denshi jissho, maybing taking a translation of all the words on Jim Breen server OR putting a japanese definition taken in a dictionnary for japanese kids
-how do choose your sentences ? especially how do reach a balance between the understanding/quickness and the ambition of learning something new (1 new word ? 2 new word ? more ? difficult structure ? maybe you even don't learn new words at all focusing on the yomikata ) ?
if you could give me as many examples of the phrases you've chosen as you can
- I bought the チャレンジ小学国語辞典（チャレンジ-しょう-がく-こく-ご-じ-てん）/The Challenge Elementary School Japanese Dictionary, published by Benesse, and edited by 湊吉正（みなと　よしまさ）, and I didn't find those juicy sentences nac_est have been talking about .
It's rather expressions , like in the sanseido online dictionnary .
For instance if it's かぶる (to wear ) the dictionnary will give me ぼうしをかぶる (to wear a hat)
By the way are those the kind of sentences you put in your SRS?

who are you asking these questions to? I don't think there is any fixed way of doing it. You should go along with what feels right to you. The words you choose, how many, where you get them....

it's all relative my friend. I may choose to input 10 words a week or 10 words a day, but by me telling you what I do, how will that change what you do?

Put sentences in your SRS that are slightly challenging. Like for instance, if you didn't know that かぶる was the verb you use when talking about wearing a hat, stick that phrase in there. If you knew that already, why are you trying to learn it? You could also learn other things about that sentence that might challenge you, such as the kanji for ぼうし.

Do as much as you can and that doesn't make you feel like you are wasting time. I find that when I encounter the words I learned the SRS way in real life, I can recall them pretty easily, so I feel like it is working for me, but I have a hard time getting new sentences in, mostly because 時間がない....

I think if one is following the "AJATT method" it might be worth reading some of the background. The dude on the site seems to have a few links that take you to some of it. Or googling "Krashen, comprehensible input" might be worth a try.

yorkii suggesting that you do what you feel is right seems to make sense. Although I too like to hear about how other people do things so I can potentially improve my technique (I'm talking about language learning here)!

Personally I try not to be too militant in excluding any options, e.g. using English on one's cards; having sentences rather than vocab cards, etc.

The phrase ぼうしをかぶる seems perfectly valid. I'm sure you know, but for clarity, the verb for "wear" changes depending on what one wears, e.g.

セーターを着る　（きる）
ズボンをはく
ネクタイを着ける　（つける）

So knowing what nouns verbs for strong partnerships with is definitely worthwhile in my opinion.

With the flashcards I'm making just now I just try to choose language chunks that I find interesting. As far as this goes, I reckon that size really doesn't matter.

While memorizing a dictionary would probably work wonders for your language skills, it sounds kinda boring. If you are reading any other, more interesting, authentic texts perhaps you could take some chunks from them, e.g. newspapers, internet sites, books, advertisments, etc.

ghinzdra: While not every example sentence in チャレンジ is a gem, there's a lot of good ones. Here's one I found the other night under the definition for 傑作:
自分でほった落とし穴に落ちるなんて、傑作な話だ。

Recently, I've been re-evaluating the sentences I put into Anki. I'm finding it hard to do, but I've been leaning towards scrapping cards that I don't "get" 100%. It's hard to throw out a card after you've recursed through a few dictionary entries only to conclude that you're still not quite sure what something means. A lot of times I get half of a dictionary entry, and am fuzzy on the other half. This is one reason I like チャレンジ - both the definitions and the sentences are expressed in simple language such that I have a better chance of getting everything.

The other night I really wasn't quite grokking the Sanseido and Yahoo definitions for 傑作. The チャレンジ definition made sense, and that example just drove it home. I actually laughed at how funny that example sentence was. A good number of チャレンジ's examples are more than just expressions .. a lot of them sound like sentences I could imagine kids saying. As such I've gotten the impression that they tend to avoid essoteric or unusual expressions.

Outside of normal written materials, I've been going for transcripts of dramas (such as you can find on dramanote) so that I can read a physical action, and then see someone do it. It takes all of the doubt out of what a certain physical action is actually referring to. I've also been entering a lot of the example sentences and pictures from http://nasaibai.blog9.fc2.com/blog-category-13.html That blog has ~50 posts showing characters doing various actions.

yorkii Wrote:who are you asking these questions to? I don't think there is any fixed way of doing it. You should go along with what feels right to you. The words you choose, how many, where you get them....

it's all relative my friend. I may choose to input 10 words a week or 10 words a day, but by me telling you what I do, how will that change what you do?

considering this point I m already aware that we work in a different way ....
But if you read with attention I didn t say "tell me what to do" ... I wrote "share your experiments" .
As synewave said it can give better insights on problems to hear about how people do things .... After all thanks to this policy I ve chosen REMTK , REVTK , AJATT and Anki . If I weren t interested in what other people are doing I would have stuck to the classical method . Curiosity is of prime importance when it comes to studying.

For instance danieldesu seems more focused on learning new vocabulary .
Because I am considering putting words that I already know just for the sake of yomikata . Boshi is a kanji that we ve already studied through RTK1 (risk) so his suggestion implies for me that he doesn t focus on yomikata . Not as much as katzhu at least . This is interesting for me as I m still considering wether I ll use RTK2 with kanji chains or not and use the SRS just for learning new voc .
He s also acknowledging that it can be hard to put new sentences for lack of time . So he has basically the same problem as me . If I just put the word of Minna no Nihongo for instance or let say an expression like those you can found in sanseido or the dictionnary advidsed on katzu webiste it s quick while if I have to search true sentences it takes me a hell of a time to complete all the steps ( find a good sentence , definition of all the words I don t know , sometimes translation of the sentence, learning of the yomikata , of the meaning of the new vocabulary)
Synawave seems to be an advocater of the expression method if you do not know a word . At least if you also pick up sentences in real life . So he s for a mix .

To what extent do they succeed in what they re doing ? what are their expenctacy ? etc... I can go for a policy if it has a lot of good reviews maybe change it a bit and eventually drop it if I m not satisfied . Sharing those experiments spare me times and give me ideas . That s my point.

So if some people could give me their insights about the questions I raised I would be happy to read their opinions.

Well, since I'm mostly reviewing what I forgot in my first 4 semesters of Japanese, grammar-wise, I've been mostly putting in stuff from UBJG, using that (overpriced) scanner pen. I'm not too picky about picking up new words; I'm more interested in sentence construction. UBJG is not interesting--the sentences are a bit dull--but they're all good Japanese, and they're presented in a very "Anki-friendly" manner, and they have useful grammar points built into them. With a scanner and OCR, you can probably chunk in about 20-30 sentences an hour, depending on what you're putting on the back side of your cards.

I also stuck in some stuff from Genki, and from a phrasebook. (Because those canned phrases are very nice to have command over.) But I want to finish UBJG before I go back to those, and before I go back to UBJG, I need to finish RTK1. I'm about 500 away from finishing up RTK1 in the sense of being able to move everything into at least the first pile. I still review what I already have in Anki, but a lot of it is moving into the 1.5 month pile.

The downside of using textbooks is that they are dull. And tedious. They're useful, though. So when I reach a point of boredom saturation, I'll start putting in more interesting stuff from things I'm actually reading. If you're reading anything in Japanese, like manga or novels or, well, anything, if you come across a sentence with a word you don't know-- stick it in to Anki.

As for dealing with onyomi, uuuu... I haven't thought that far ahead yet. I may just drill RTK vol.2 with Anki... or maybe I'll try to dig up sentences with some of the kanji compounds... ooof. I'm trying not to think of that right now. Right now I'm trying to focus on RTK1... I should get back to work.

" I've been mostly putting in stuff from UBJG, using that (overpriced) scanner pen. I'm not too picky about picking up new words"

So, Rich_f, now that you have had that scanner pen for a while and (if you anything like me) gotten over the initial excitement of a new gadget, what are your thoughts on the pen? I notice that you say 'overpriced', so I am guessing that you are not so enamoured of the thing now?

Thanks,

Mark

Yeah, now that I'm over the initial excitement, I can say a few things with confidence:

First, $300 is too much to charge for the Asian Executive version. For use with just scanning text, get the $200 Asian version. The extra $100 feels like it was spent on... nothing but fattening their profit margins, really. I can't see it.

I don't think there's any hardware difference between the models. I'm pretty sure it's all in software.

Recognition can be very bad if you don't hold the pen right. Learning to hold the pen right takes time. It's kind of a pain sometimes, but it's solved by focusing on holding the pen properly. Also, recognition with dark text on dark backgrounds? Ain't gonna happen. Light text on dark backgrounds is fine with the proper presets.

It sometimes just decides the pen is no longer connected, but that's solved by just plugging/unplugging it in the USB port. Minor annoyance there.

The buttons on the side of the pen are very handy. I use them for 'Return' and 'Tab.'

If you scan in English sentences while it's in Japanese mode, sometimes it kind of freaks out. Just scan it again, and the software will figure it out... although the letter 'e' sometimes gets translated into 巳. Switching between modes it too much of a hassle, so I just rescan if I have problems. It's not like it takes more than 5 seconds.

Workflow is fine. Just make sure you have plenty of room to work.

All that said, do I regret buying it? No, not really. Well, my only regret is spending $300 for the executive instead of $200 for the basic Asian version. (Which is still $80 more than the basic non-Asian version.)

If you don't already have a scanner with OCR (which I didn't), and you plan on scanning a lot of individual sentences (which I do), then yes, it's worth it. If you already have a scanner with OCR for Asian languages, you don't need it. If you're going to scan whole pages at a time, I'd suggest a scanner with OCR if it's not any more expensive than this. One advantage this thing has is its sheer portability. It's about the size of a fat marker, so if you travel a lot, you can take it with you. And since it runs off the USB port, you don't need to worry about batteries or extra power cords for it.

So yeah, like anything, it's a mixed bag. Useful for those who will use it, not useful for those with different needs.

Does that help?

Yep, that helps a lot - cheers.

Mark

I've been going through 2001.Kanji.Odyssey. I'm finding this to be a pretty good way to learn kanji readings, vocab, and practice grammar. It seems productive to me.

With RTK2 you get systemization that helps to memorize onyomi, but there's a lot it doesn't do for you. You're not going to get much vocab, and its up to you to do the footwork to use context to learn the vocab properly, and the readings & vocab you learn are not prioritized by frequency.

With picking sentences that interest you as in AJATT you are learning what you need when you need it, so what you learn is in the ideal priority. However with that you are lacking systemization that may help to memorize words & vocab more easily. The material you learn may be quite isolated unless you go an look for associations yourself.

2001KO has that systemization. For example when you learn 最高 it introduces 最低　最近　最大　最小　最初, and other words that use 高, 低, 近, 大, 小, 初, in close proximity. IMO the effort is reduced over learning readings and vocab in an ad-hock manner. Plus they have the example sentences there; you don't have to search. They have a translation there if you need one. The kanji are grouped by frequency and logical relations. They have every kanji keyed so you can find its definition quickly.

I've done at least one page of the book per day since I finished RTK1, and I haven't gotten bored, but I have learned a lot of readings and vocab, as well as brushing up quite a bit of grammar in the process.

PS, I also OCR my material, but I just use a cheap HP all-in-one printer. Their free printer software (a lite version of Readiris) does a good enough job of Japanese OCR for sentence extraction. It makes mistakes once in a while but overall it saves me quite a bit of time on typing the question and translation. I do coversion to kana myself since it helps with the learning process. It works ok on the KO books because they're fairly easy to lay flat on the scanner, but I wouldn't do it on all my books as it would damage the spine.

vosmiura,

Do you find that the sentences in 2001.Kanji.Odyssey are too simple? I remember using their Kanji 555 system (which I think is the basis for Kanji.Odyssey) before using Heisig and it seemed like the sentences were real simple.

Vosimura, I haven't used 2001KO (great acronym) but I have used Kanji in Context, which likewise introduces words based on a certain kanji in batches.

I've personally found it counterproductive to do more than linked word paris, so [kana]saitei & saikou[/kana] together has worked, but learning a big long bunch all together w/no context is about the same as trying to memorize a stack of flashcards.

Does 2001KO gives more context than I'm picking up on, or should I just stay away?

Hee hee... I revel in the crushed spines of books I've devoured.

When I'm done with RTK1, I'll be done with it. So I won't care too much if the spine or the book is ugly. (It already is, anyway.) By then I will have extracted every drop from it. Of course, it is troublesome when pages fall out all over the place, so I understand, but I'm more worried about me than my books.

I find the sentences in 2001KO are quite simple. It's about JLPT3 level stuff, so if you're at or below that level it could teach you something, but if you're way past JLPT3 then it's all easy.

billyclyde, the sentence method in 2001KO is similar to KiC, so it doesn't have more context than that. There's almost no context running from one example to another; they're each usually one or two self contained sentences. Each one is usually written such that multiple compounds from the current group are covered.

The groups are smaller than KiK, with only 5 kanji each, and then 15 examples that cover the most common compounds for those 5 kanji, plus spice.

I am of the mind that all grammar is easy... assuming you already know every single word in the sentence, and have seen each word used multiple times. I find a simple sentence can be baffling for me with even one unknown word, even if I can guess the meaning because with the uncertainty and doubt, I end up losing concentration on the sentence and everything falls apart.

That is why I always put in a sentence into Anki with a single unknown word, and for the answer side of the card, I just put sentences that use that unknown word. If I am desperate for sentences, I will sometimes pick one with a few unknown words, and then spend a little extra time gathering sentences for each of those words. The only problem with that is I don't have an accurate count of how many new words I have learned, although I rest easy knowing it is typically more than the number of cards I entered.

Since January, I have learned over 340 new words (I already knew a bunch though), and with just that small set, I've markedly noticed my ability to guess pronunciation has gone way up. Something like 2001KO sounds really good to me, where the learning of new words is systematic.