So, we have the antimoon and AJATT camp saying that it's a good idea to create "passive learning" cards like the following:

Q: Sentence in the target language
A: Definitions of difficult words (in target language preferably)

But as seen in Resolve's (or should that be Damien's?) notes about learning, and reading into the Supermemo "20 rules of formulating knowledge in learning", my interpretation is that using cards that help you actively recall the data that you want to remember, you will find that many more words will enter your active vocabulary in a shorter time.

An example card may look like the following:

Q: Telephone
A: 電話

Using this type of strictly one word E>J or J>E card though is warned against in antimoon and AJATT's theories. For people that are wanting to step away from using there own language, is there a better way to actively recall vocabulary? The close-deletion technique as mentioned on the supermemo site seems to suggest a good hypothesis, but for sentences that could possible be completed by multiple words, is this the best idea? It seems to me that the close-deletion way of learning vocabulary could result in something like a definition>word card. Again, something which should be avoided due to ambiguity on what the "correct" answer could be.

Also from the supermemo site:

Quote:Active recall does not, however, guarantee passive recognition

therefore, how do we get the best of both passive and active cards? Create multiple cards around the same word/phase that you want to learn? For example, a complimentary card for the above 電話 example could be:

Q: What is 電話 in english?
A: telephone

From Resolve's writings, he has an example card that forces you to make a sentence based on a few keywords.

Quote:Q: he went to the station
A: (彼は)駅に行った
or
Q: he, station, went
A: (彼は)駅に行った
or even
Q: 駅、行く　(過去形）
A: 駅に行った

I can see that this is helping you to actively use grammar, but the vocabulary is presented to you in a passive form.

Sorry for the sloppy writing style also. I merely wanted to get my thought's down quickly. I think what I want to know is how to create the perfect set of cards for learning most effectively.

I started my deck back in the day with one word E>J // J>E cards

then I moved to

Q: Definition (in Japanese) + Example sentances (with the word I want to learn "..." out)
A: The word I wanted to learn + similar words

now I am using the antimoon / AJATT method:

Q: Example sentance with the wors I want to learn in bold and interesting grammar underlined.
A: Definitions of the words I want to learn (japanese)

what should I (we) really be creating for the best possible recall rates and learning efficiency?

Good question!

I have a variety of decks in Twinkle (with the benefit of multiple sides)

Kanji Kentei:
準＿はいいですか。 備 び

JLPT:
今日は秋＿＿＿暑い。 にしては ～にしては　＝　～（な）のに　～だが

Kanji readings:
渋滞 じゅうたい

Sentences:
忙しいのにメールの返事お願いして悪いね。 Sorry, I shouldn't have demanded a reply to my e-mail when you were so busy.

I'm quite happy with my decks. Hitting things from various angles strikes me as sensible. Certainly, from experience I find it easier to produce stuff from my JLPT deck for conversation as opposed to my sentence deck.

yea, your "JLPT" deck sounds excellent. reviewing grammatical pieces has always been something that I have been doing passively. \

yorkii: I started using single words with both active and passive recall, and have gradually changed to using full sentences or collocations, in both active and passive review. Only for very simple nouns do I still use single words.

For your above example, let's have a search for that word in my deck. I have some simple examples:

call s/o
人に電話をかける

the phone rang
電話が鳴った

And also some more complicated ones:

a do-not-call registry
電話勧誘辞退登録

i can't count the number of times i called the school building
校舎に電話した回数は数え切れない

I practice all of these sentences in both directions - one for kanji (speed) reading, the other for production of the sentence.

I'm not a particulary big fan of cloze exercises, as I find them too easy. I'd rather produce an entire sentence so that I know all elements are in the correct order (yes, Japanese word order is flexible, but certain word orders are more common than others). When I want to review a grammar point, I pick one or more examples and memorize them. It's not hard for your brain to generalize the sentences into a general rule - I find it happens automatically.

As an aside, I wouldn't describe にしては as either のに or だが - the end result is similar but they are not the same. I would use something like として or "hot for autumn" which I think communicate the real meaning better. But that's just an aside :-)

Resolve, thanks for the reply. much appreciated.

so your deck keeps away from the "only use Japanese" rule that is presented as almost gospel on the antimoon/AJATT sites. Do you not think that technique keeps a bond between English and Japanese though? and should such a bond not be avoided if one wants to be fluent in Japanese?

resolve Wrote:As an aside, I wouldn't describe にしては as either のに or だが - the end result is similar but they are not the same. I would use something like として or "hot for autumn" which I think communicate the real meaning better. But that's just an aside :-)

Point taken. I used the '=' sign as I couldn't think of anything better to signify or 仲間。

The sentence as well as the "meanings" were taken directly from the UNICOM ２級　文法編 book. Who am I to argue?

Whether or not として is appropriate in this case I'm not sure.

Off the top of my head the only usage of として I'm familiar with is something like:

留学生として海外に行ってきました。

This really highlights the importance of card quality. I don't have any review cards that haven't been taken directly from a Japanese text (written by a Japanese).

Well, I haven't found it adversely affecting my Japanese at all. As a teacher I'm well aware of the dangers of one's L1 language influencing their second language, but as Krashen states, this is often a product of insufficient input. I am sufficiently comfortable with "thinking in Japanese" that I don't fear some English will somehow pervert my Japanese. As I said in the other thread, the English is just a tool.

To take a very simple example:

彼は背が高いです
He's tall

The way this concept is expressed in Japanese and English is very different. Japanese has no "be-verb", English has no topic or subject markers nor politeness markers. From a grammar perspective, they are quite distinct.

But the idea is the same. And provided one doesn't make assumptions about the way the grammar elements in language A work in language B, there will be no problems. You "read" the idea (just like you "read" an idea from a picture), then express the idea in Japanese based on natural sentences you've been exposed to.
For me, the idea in English pops into my head, the idea in Japanese pops out. There is no conversion process - any delay in my response is me trying to recall the particular phrase I've memorized before.

It is not asking yourself "how do I put these words together in Japanese to express the idea?'. That's something a person with no input data might do. But we've already studied the correct expression. Here we are reviewing. We know the correct way to say it in Japanese and we have read in our textbooks or materials about the finer points of the Japanese grammar. We have already seen a number of other examples in Japanese which make it clear the grammar is different to English.

I acknowledge that for people new to the language, it may be difficult not to try and make assumptions about L2 based on their native tongue. But I think pictures lead to similar assumptions. If you show a Japanese person two pictures, entitled:

do a homestay
do the laundry

Then you show them a picture of someone preparing for work, their likely answer is going to be something like "do a preparation". In the absense of enough information, people will make assumptions about language no matter which way it is presented to them.

But it does seem to me like the cards that you are creating are saying: This is how you say (English) "X" in Japanese. exactly this:

Resolve Wrote:"how do I put these words together in Japanese to express the idea?".

You may have English as a tool to help you express yourself, but is the goal to not have to rely on such tools in the end? Or am I deluding myself?

Synewave:

今日は秋にしては暑い is fine.

some more examples:

小学生にしては、背が高いね。

コレはこの店の一番辛いカレーにしては、あまり辛くないね。

Ok, so I found the idea the answer to my question here:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=8374#pid8374

I wasn't suggesting the example sentence was wrong, I was suggesting the association with のに and だが were misleading. It seems like it's a fault of his textbook, anyway.

yorkii: If I were looking up the Japanese translation of English sentences, perhaps that would apply. But that's not the case. I'm finding natural Japanese sentences and then either using a provided definition, or writing my own. I already understand the sentences when I add them, and thus it's not hard to write my own cue if I need to. When I look at the cue, it reminds me of a natural Japanese sentence I have learnt, and I produce that sentence. It is no different to using a photo as a cue.

(except in cases where a picture says a thousand words - obscure bird species, things in Japan which have no English equivalent, etc)

Yes, thanks for putting me straight about that.

So we have the models above for studying sentances/grammar from synewave and resolve. but neither of them use definitions of the words, or seem to be geared towards learning new vocabulary other than the straight E>J example provided by resolve. This seems to be based on the fact that one should know the word before adding it to the SRS.

This SRS stuff is trickier than I thought.

resolve, your above examples for 電話, do you think this describes most fully the way you learn a new word then? using a mixture of styles to fully test your passive and active knowledge of the word in question? seems pretty full to me anyway.

yorkii Wrote:So we have the models above for studying sentances/grammar from synewave and resolve. but neither of them use definitions of the words, or seem to be geared towards learning new vocabulary other than the straight E>J example provided by resolve. This seems to be based on the fact that one should know the word before adding it to the SRS.

Again, this is where Krashen's L+1 comes in. Not saying that definitions are out, but sentences like:

笑いすぎて、顎がはずれそうになった。

might be useful if you get what's going on but maybe don't know the kanji 顎。 From context there aren't too many things it could be. Admittedly I knew the word あご prior to this sentence going into my SRS however I didn't know the kanji.

That said, assuming the sentence is about the right level, if you knew neither the word あご nor the kanji 顎 it should be easy enough to pick them up from this sentence. Although one might want to make a story for the kanji

One thing I wonder:

Let's assume your active japanese is some percentage, X, of your overall Japanese knowledge.

i.e. people can actively produce 10% of their japanese knowledge. (or 40% or whatever)

Do you think X can be greatly increased? Or do you think it is some natural result of how our brains work?

Of course, if you don't practice enough output, you might not reach X.

I don't really know, but it seems like your view on this would shape the relative amounts of imput and output in your studying.

Taken from
http://www1.harenet.ne.jp/~waring/papers...tract.html:



The thesis is not so interesting in itself, but it cites previous research which found that for a given frequency band, the gap between active and passive vocabulary remains quite stable.

Such studies are done in the context of regular learning, and I'm pretty sure that with appropriately formed cues, it would be possible to achieve an active vocabulary that is very close to your passive vocabulary, _based on the material in your deck_. Of course, in the real world we pick up words outside of study, and these may never make it into our active vocabulary. But in answer to your question, johnzep, I don't think there is any fundamental limitation on active vocabulary if it is being actively tested.

yorkii Wrote:This seems to be based on the fact that one should know the word before adding it to the SRS.

Adding material you already know can be useful to convert it from passive knowledge to active knowledge. But most of the time I follow the L+1 principle - I pick sentences that have 1 (or at most 2) new elements. A single new word. Or a single new grammar point. Sometimes I create more than one fact for a given word. Say during the course of my studies, I encounter a new word, 農薬. I have a vague idea of what it means because a student used it in class a few weeks ago. But that's not so important - even if I'd never heard it before, it doesn't change anything. I look up some example sentences and find

農薬をまく

but まく is new to me too. So I look up まく, and pick a simple example, like:

畑に小麦をまく

where all the vocabulary is already known. This leaves me with two sentences:

畑に小麦をまく (target is まく)
農薬をまく (target is 農薬, but also reinforces まく)

I don't codify these targets, just by looking at the sentence I tend to remember what I'm focusing on.

So this material is new to me (but only one step above my current language level), and by using active recall it is rapidly able to enter my active vocabulary. Based on my ability to answer active vs passive sentences, I'd say that the two are quite close. For new information the gap might be up to 30%, but after a couple of reviews, my ability to produce the sentences is about as strong as my ability to understand them.

I'm currently working through the sentence method using Assimil as a starting point. The nice thing about Assimil is that it comes with short audio transcripts of each dialogue. It is relatively easy for me to break up the dialogue into each sentence using an audio editor. My question is how useful is it to have the audio for each Japanese sentence with the cards? Should I bother, or is it just a waste of time?