Joined: May 2009
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I just want to know others' opinions of this book "Common Japanese Collocations", if you have bought it. (NB: Collocation means a common grouping of words, I had to look it up). I am about to place a rather large amazon order for a number of Kodansha books which I think will be very helpful to improve my Japanese (namely: Onomatopoeia book, Kanji affixes, Idiom dictionary, and slang dictionary). The Collocation book is the only one I'm not sure if it's actually worth getting. A reviewer on amazon said that it is a waste, and the information could be found in any dictionary, and having looked at the amazon preview, I'm starting to become convinced that this is true.
Thanks if anyone who has used this can share their view. The reason I wanted to get the collocation book was to boost my vocab past the 2500 or so words introduced in my Japanese textbook (JFE). If there are books that perform this function better, I'd appreciate if you could inform me. If not, I'll just stick to Core6k I guess.
Joined: Feb 2009
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I got this one, it's useful if you can find what your looking for. But yeah, it's not exactly organized in a useful way. I just flip through it on occasion. If someone built a real index for it, it could be great.
Which actually might not be too hard, just listing all the header words and their page numbers. A Google spreadsheet anyone?
Joined: Oct 2007
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You can also use AntConc to find collocations/clusters and collocates, in case you've missed my rambles across a variety of random threads.
Right now I'm just looking at generating all clusters frequently occurring in a smallish range of texts grouped by various means, but you can also use much larger corpora and specific searches, including batch searches of lists.
I also forgot to mention in one of my rambles that to get the settings to stick, you need to export settings once you've set them (e.g. language and search settings) and save the resulting .ant file to the .exe's folder (at least that's what works for me).
Joined: Mar 2008
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Hmm, just noticed this old thread and see some people got a start on keying the phrases into a spreadsheet. I've actually done the whole first section of the book (about 860 collocations), but I'm tired of typing everything in and don't know when I might make further progress on it.
I think this is actually a really nice book, and one of the better sources of SRS material that I've come across. I think it would probably be more useful to beginner and intermediate learners than something like core6k.
Most of the vocabulary is actually relevant in real life, as opposed to training you to read a newspaper or whatever. And the phrases are all really short, typically just a noun, particle, and a verb. LOTS of repeated vocabulary across the phrases, and almost everything is i+1.
Joined: Mar 2006
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I have bought "Common Japanese Collocations" some time ago and I was disappointed by its lack of usability, at least as a book (sentence mining is another story). I got the feeling that it was packed with useful stuff but I would be bored to death trying to read it cover to cover, and looking up information is a pain without at least a word index.
But I agree that it would be great to have it in the form of an Anki deck.
Too much work for me to type in so many sentences, though…
