I have the 2001 Kanji Odysseys books along with their online workbooks. Im having trouble getting into a routine studying these books. How do you do it? Are you typing them in to anki making a deck as you go? Are you writing them on paper. What have you found to be the most effective way to learn? I looked for a deck online..the one I found was fairly new and didn't match what I had in my book if my memory serves me correct.

When learning the sentences should my goal simply be to be able to read and understand them?

Background:
Pimsleur 1-2
Genki
RTK 1

Thanks

There's a 2001 KO deck floating around somewhere, but honestly I prefer to type them myself as it gets me more "familiar" with the sentences. It does take a lot longer. I do make an Anki deck, yup. There's a sorted 2001 KO deck that's sorted to make it easier for people.

What I do, if there's multiple vocab I don't know, I make multiple different cards with a different kanji word/compound highlighted. That way, I learn all the readings and am able to understand the sentences.

Hope that helps. I'm only about 30 kanji in, and once I'm able to remember all the readings better I plan to stop making multiple cards.

This is going to sound hyper-complicated, but it's the method I settled into after a lot of trial and error. It's what worked best for me. It might not work best for you.

At first, I used the sentences in KO, then I changed my approach because the sentences were too long, they introduced too much new vocab all at once, and reviews had too many failures because of all the new vocab in the new sentences. I got frustrated after a while.

So what I did instead is go through all of the new vocab words in the book, 10 kanji at a time, wrote down the ones I don't know, (usually 15-25 per 10 kanji chunk), then headed over to dic.yahoo.co.jp and eow.alc.co.jp and just grab *short* sentences that I could figure out quickly and easily.

For each vocab word, I would add 2-3 sentences, depending on how "easy" it felt. I would just dump them in a UTF-8 formatted .CSV spreadsheet in OpenOffice to make it easier to just import them all at once.

Before I would import them into Anki and review, I would take a piece of paper, fold it into 6 columns, and write the kanji, kana, and meaning for the words I was learning, 7-10 words per page. This way I would pre-review at least 1 or 2 times before I start chunking it in Anki, and I found that reviews go a lot smoother for me. (This is the word list thing that people sometimes talk about. Some people call it Iversen's method. It's kind of a pain in the butt, but it improves my overall recall.)

I fold the paper over so that just the kanji show, then try to write the kana. Then I might fold it so just the kana show, and write the kanji, etc. You can fold it all kinds of ways.

So on day 1, I might fill up the spreadsheet, and mess with the word list, and on day 2, I'll import it, breeze through the reviews (you really DO breeze through them after you play with the word lists), and start prepping the next spreadsheet/word lists for the next day. Getting a rhythm *really* helps.

EDIT: yahoo.co.jp and ALC are handy because that way you don't have to type anything out-- it's all cut and paste. They even come with EN translations if you haven't progressed to the all JP phase yet.

"Getting a rhythm *really* helps."

Yes this is what I want more than anything...Right now Im just spinning my wheels trying to find a constant approach.

Thanks everyone.

rich_f Wrote:....in a UTF-8 formatted .CSV spreadsheet in OpenOffice ....

I was just wondering, how do I actually get a UTF-8 formatted .CSV spreadsheet.

Your method looks interesting and actually seems great for my lifestyle. I don't always have access to my laptop and I don't have an iphone so this way, I can be productive while I'm on the tram or waiting for the train.

You'd do something along these lines:

- find an anki deck of 2001 vocab/sentences in the original book order (might have to edit it a bit)
- create a new sentence field in anki
- use an anki plugin to grab sentences for your vocab automatically
- replace complicated sentences with more concise ones, if desired
- export 'cards' as a csv file
- open with OO Calc or MS Excel and edit away the unwanted columns*
- highlight the column(s) that you want to study from (eg 18 words from kana column, 25 words from kanji, etc.) that day and select print selection
- follow rich_f's description of the Iverson Method


*Actually, you may need to do some editing in a program like notepad++ to remove formatting that anki adds to the csv file. Just use the 'replace all' function.
hth

When you're in OOO Calc, go to File>Save As..., check .csv, then make sure you check the box marked Edit Filter Settings. That enables you to change the encoding to UTF-8, and set the field spacing to TAB, and the field markers to " .

Kind of a pain in the neck. I can't remember if Excel does UTF-8 or just Shift-JIS.

Also, when you copy a single line of text in JP to Calc, you only need to select the cell. If you copy two lines of text with a CR in them, you need to double-click the box to get a cursor, or else you get an annoying pop-up box, because OOO Calc is annoying that way.

I find that the best way to do a lot of this is to move all of the stuff I find for each vocab word to a good Notepad-replacement before I dump it all into OOO Calc. I like Edit Pad Pro, but there are plenty of others out there. I just want something that's a plaintext text editor to strip away any text formatting.

If you want to generate kana readings, you can just dump the sentences into the Anki input box and copy/paste into OOO Calc. (I don't use furigana, just straight out full kana, because I have a really old deck.) This gets around some of the bugs in the old kana generator in Anki, if you use it. (I still do.)

Yes, I could just enter the sentences into Anki that way, but then I'd run into the reading generator bugs again. Importing gets around them.

rich_f Wrote:When you're in OOO Calc, go to File>Save As..., check .csv, then make sure you check the box marked Edit Filter Settings. That enables you to change the encoding to UTF-8, and set the field spacing to TAB, and the field markers to ".

It worked perfectly, thank you .

Oniichan Wrote:- use an anki plugin to grab sentences for your vocab automatically

rich_f Wrote:This gets around some of the bugs in the old kana generator in Anki, if you use it. (I still do.)

There's a plugin for grabbing sentences and a kana generator? O_O, I've been typing the kana myself into the 2nd field and Copy and pasting everything manually.

If I had the KO2001 deck that's floating around, which I don't because that would be wrong, I would suspend all the cards, then periodically search the deck for words I encounter via subs2srs and unsuspend those cards, studying and grading only the word, using the audio and sentence-level context to enrich the memory encoding process.

If I were doing Core2k at the time rather than subs2srs stuff, I would unsuspend cards that contain words in Core2k sentences.

PensukeD Wrote:There's a plugin for grabbing sentences and a kana generator? O_O, I've been typing the kana myself into the 2nd field and Copy and pasting everything manually.

If you go to the Anki wiki and look at the Japanese Language Support page:

http://ankisrs.net/docs/JapaneseSupport.html

Scroll down to Reading Generation, and the subheading Changes. I prefer Kakasi to Mecab, so I followed the instructions on "If you prefer the old behavior" to reactivate Kakasi as the reading generator.

Kakasi is buggy, but I don't mind choosing the correct readings myself. It's just double-clicking, it's not rocket science. I use the spreadsheet/import to get around the other bugs.

To generate readings, you just have to have a field called "Reading" in your deck, IIRC. It will create a reading from the Japanese in the expression field. Of course, you need to make sure that Anki knows that your deck is a Japanese deck, too.

Anyway, Anki questions are probably best answered in the Anki forums. Damien can help you over there.

Hello, I've been studying 2001 Kanji Odyssey too, but I'm close to reaching the end of part 2, and as you know, no sample sentences have been provided for part 3. Has anyone here made their own list of sample sentences for part 3? If so, would you be willing to share it? Thank you in advance.

I recently completed RTK, and have purchased the 2001 Odyssey kanji Odyssey books (along with the CD's). Since I have completed RTK, I realize how valuable constant repetition is in our quest to learn Kanji. I would ultimately like to place the sentences on my cell phone while using the anki software. I would much rather prefer downloading the KO deck on my anki device instead of spending time to type in each sentence . Does anyone have a link to download this information, or even some sort of directions for placing the sentences on the cd to the anki device. I have a long commute everyday and feel if I had these sentences on my phone with audio I woud be able to make another huge gain with my studies. Thanks a million to anyone that can help me. I'm confident in the future I may be in a position to help return the favor. I'd greatly appreciate it.

There is a deck on the wiki here. It's an Anki 1 deck so you need to convert it first. It uses images from the CD instead of text so you won't be able to search through it, but I preferred it that way since you get a nice font and the character is highlighted for you.

says permission denied by uploader? can anyone share the the deck?

Hmm, it worked last month. Maybe it's time to update the deck to be Anki 2 compatible and reupload it. I'll see what I can do.

It looks like Rapidshare made all files private by default recently and they have to be explicitly made public. The original person who uploaded those files is xaarg. You can try emailing this user to ask him to make them public again, but he hasn't posted in a while, so you might not be so lucky.

I have the files myself, but I hesitate to upload copyrighted material (and 330MB would take me a very long time anyway).

Anyone help to a fellow kanji learner (in a kanji forum)?