Thanks for the ideas everyone, very helpful!

To clarify, I'm not against using my own lists. Making them just seems too time-consuming. I guess you could say I'm lazy, or obsessed with efficiency or something. But it sounds like there are faster ways to make anki decks. A couple people have mentioned fast methods. Could someone elaborate on one of those, or point me to a helpful thread? If it's really as simple as clicking on words I come across online to save them to a deck, I'd be totally down for that. Not sure I'm totally clear on how that works though (especially as far as definitions and example sentences).

kuma: I hear you... I'm sure jumping into reading real things earlier is better for some people, but it's just not what I'm looking for. I want to get good at reading someday, but I'm focusing way more on conversation and listening now. I do save random unknown words from conversations and what I can catch from TV, but that's not fast enough for me.

zigmonty: I know a lot of people cringe at the idea of drilling lists of thousands of words for weeks, but it feels pretty efficient to me. It's not like I'm held up in my apartment doing just that. I speak Japanese every day. And after these anki vocab sessions I definitely start hearing the words around me right away, so I think it's helping. I can understand that it's not a very appealing style to some people though.

Couple questions about things people have mentioned:

> Someone mentioned the Japanese Sensei app... did you mean that has vocabulary beyond Core6k?

> The Core10k deck sounds a little messy... does anyone know if the audio works? And if the example sentences are reliable (as far as being natural)?

thenewpollution Wrote:> Someone mentioned the Japanese Sensei app... did you mean that has vocabulary beyond Core6k?

> The Core10k deck sounds a little messy... does anyone know if the audio works? And if the example sentences are reliable (as far as being natural)?

Yes, the Core10k Anki deck (not to be confused with the Core10k.exe virus!) has vocabulary beyond Core6K:

"This application [Japanese Sensei Deluxe] has not been developed using free dictionary data available on the web, but rather has been built using quality dictionary data produced by Jack Halpern’s CJK Dictionary Institute. Halpern is the editor-in-chief of several kanji dictionaries for learners, which have become standard reference works."

and

"Japanese Sensei comes loaded with nearly 10,000 of the most frequently used Japanese words as selected by a committee of experts on Japanese language education."

As far as the messiness of the Core10K, are people referring to the initial deck release or the later release, which includes English translations for the example sentences? As far as I can tell, the later revision has better fidelity, and even fixes some JSensei errors. Audio works as far as I can tell.

@jettyke: Why not just finishing it? I mean the last 1000 words from core6k. It will certainly give you more boost, motivation and perhaps you know a lot of the words included in the 'small' rest from reading and reading so much.

Don't ask what's in your mind and in your memory, but rather what your srs knows.
*keep it backed up, duh* That's what I say always

Thanks for the info mmhorii! Much appreciated.

The Japanese Sensei app sounds more promising than I'd thought. Have any of you checked it out personally?

Couple questions...

You said one version of Core10k fixes some Japanese Sensei errors. Is that Core10k list based on the Japanese Sensei app then? Sorry if I'm confusing something...

And is the later version of Core10k available with the normal shared Anki decks? Will it be obvious which is the later version?

Thanks again for the ideas and info.

See here for the development of Core 10000 and raw data: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7104 - Lots of hard work from overture. You can see where the complications arise; I'm not sure what's been done to it via the deck revisions (vs. corrections from our forum users, e.g. brianobush), precisely, but it was never so far off it was unacceptable, just... imperfect.

Could've sworn there was another comment in that thread, guess it was deleted? Anyway.

thenewpollution Wrote:Thanks for the info mmhorii! Much appreciated.

The Japanese Sensei app sounds more promising than I'd thought. Have any of you checked it out personally?

Couple questions...

You said one version of Core10k fixes some Japanese Sensei errors. Is that Core10k list based on the Japanese Sensei app then? Sorry if I'm confusing something...

And is the later version of Core10k available with the normal shared Anki decks? Will it be obvious which is the later version?

Thanks again for the ideas and info.

Yes, the Core10k deck has all the Japanese Sensei app material. You should be able to find the deck in the shared Anki repository--there's only one Core 10000 deck there now, which is the latest updated version, so it should be obvious which one to get.

I highly recommend the Japanese Sensei app--it's way better than the Anki deck because it has multiple ways of testing: Word Quiz, Sentence Tester, Particle Quiz, Memory Test, and Word Match. Sentence Tester is great fun: you're presented with a list of words in scrambled order, and you need to put them together to form a valid sentence. The other tests are nice, too. Highly recommended app.

Highly recommended.. thinking of getting an iPod Touch for the sake of japanese learning since my Symbian^3 smartphone is quite inhandy when it comes to language learning. -.-

Thanks for the info about 10k and that app. I have an iphone, so I'm definitely going to try it. Sounds like great practice and variety.

I think I'll get the deck too, since I like Anki. Doing both sounds good to me.

One last 10k question: Is there a way to suspend all the 2k/6k cards since I'm already learning them in a separate deck? I didn't see any tags. Sorry if I'm missing something really obvious... still pretty new and clueless with Anki.

thenewpollution Wrote:One last 10k question: Is there a way to suspend all the 2k/6k cards since I'm already learning them in a separate deck? I didn't see any tags. Sorry if I'm missing something really obvious... still pretty new and clueless with Anki.

EDIT: There's now a shared Anki deck called "Japanese Core 10,000 sans 2K6K with audio" that, as the name suggests, only has the sentences and words that are not in Core 2K and Core 6K.

These instructions should work, in theory:

1. Download the deck, and open in Anki.
2. Open the browser. You should see a list of cards.
3. Near the top right of the browser window there should be a "Sort:" selector, where you can select from the different fields. Select 'MasterIndex'.
4. Now the cards at the beginning will either be empty or contain -1 in the MasterIndex field--these are the cards you want to keep. Keep scrolling down through the cards until you get to Masterindex fields that are not zeros or -1.
5. Select all remaining cards in the deck (on a Mac, you can mouse-click on a card, scroll down to the end of the cards using the scrollbar, and then shift-mouse-click to select a block of cards).
6. Suspend these remaining cards by pressing the "pause" button.

thenewpollution, the raw data (google spreadsheet) linked in the thread Nest0r referred to also has the non-core6 marked with -1. You'll be able to see how much of the audio matching had been double checked. (Note that the anki deck was posted before audio checking. Also, the notes to the deck indicate that audio duplicates were removed. I'm not certain what that means since some word and sentence audio duplicates are intended.)

Since you are primarily interested in spoken Japanese at this point, you might want to tweak your strategy. :-) Spoken generally uses fewer and different words than written. The advanced vocab decks contain a lot of kanji compound words more typically found in writing (and sometimes included to cover jouyou kanji, not b/c they're common.) I think you'd make better progress by focusing on resources designed for spoken Japanese.

Focus on spoken sentence patterns, grammar, common expressions, situational use, immediately useful vocab, etc and get lots of active listening practice. You can do a lot with the right patterns and a relatively small vocab. Then build on that foundation with videos, podcasts, etc in areas that interest you to acquire the appropriate vocab and usage. Check out the threads on spoken Japanese resources (beginner?) and the "Living Japanese" DVD and transcripts (intermed?)

This might inspire you: I know people who after a one-year very intensive spoken Japanese course (no kanji at all) had astonishingly good spoken Japanese in their areas. (They needed enough spoken Japanese to function at work and most of them learned to read later.) This forum tends to focus on kanji and heavy vocab at the outset, but I don't see that as the optimal approach for your stated goals. You did mention efficiency... ;-p With all the fantastic multimedia stuff available now, you can design your own spoken Japanese course. Good luck.

edit: added link

nest0r Wrote:Could've sworn there was another comment in that thread, guess it was deleted? Anyway.

I think I recall the one you mean. If I'm not mistaken, it basically questioned the wisdom of:
・ Posting the anki deck containing core6k with some remaining audio mismatches given that an accurate core6k deck is already available.
・ Posting core7k-10k at anki even though people here were in the process of correcting the audio. (kinda kills the motivation to keep working.)
・ Not mentioning to unsuspecting users that such audio mismatches exist or where accurate or corrected versions might be obtained.

Possibly a case of great intentions executed a tad early. (Or a desire to redirect efforts to the proposed KIC project?) Oh well, I suppose one could always post a core7k-10k (corrected) deck.

mmhorii, thanks for the clear instructions! That's what I was wondering how to do.

Thora, thanks for the advice and inspiration!

I am studying a lot of grammar and sentences, and I do a lot of conversation practice with people, but I think that's a good point about focusing on listening and multimedia stuff more.

That also makes sense that these big decks cover words that aren't used much in speaking.

I guess the desire to tackle a big chunk of vocab came from being frustrated in listening and conversation. My ears are improving enough that I can break down what I hear a bit, but when I only know half of the words in a given sentence I don't have much hope of piecing it together. In conversation practice too, everything is so slow. Every few sentences I have to stop the other person and ask what a word or phrase means (not that you have to understand every word in conversation... but if it's stopping you from following the topic, that's a problem).

So I'm not totally sure how to approach that problem. My idea was to keep up the conversation practice, but learn a big vocabulary list in my free time. But maybe I don't need as much as I thought, and Core6k is plenty for now. I guess I should finish that and see how things feel.

Anyway, thanks for the ideas! I'm definitely going to take your advice about taking advantage of that multimedia stuff.

I've had a similar problem like the OP. I've been hovering around 7.6k vocab (after core6k and a few other lists) and still can't comfortably read anything without Rikaichan. I'm too good for textbooks but bad for real life reading. So I spent some time to compile a list of popular verbs, adjectives, adverbs (left out nouns on purpose since there was too many of them and they are easy to pick up on the way) and added them to my current deck (it filtered around half). Now I'm standing at 11.4k and have a lot of words to cram and I'd like to get it done in 2 months before I head for Japan.

PM me if you want that list, its pretty simple but from what I've checked correct (kanji, kana, part of speech, meaning).

I just found out that JDIC (my main source) takes its sentences from Tatoeba so I decided that its a good time to check out Tatoeba plugin instead of manually looking up sentences (it takes sooooo long if you do it this way and I've 3700 vocab cards to go through). So I downloaded the plugin, updated the csv files from today's dump (over twice the size than what the 1year old plugin has), adjusted the amount of sentences and levels (shame there is no option to choose languages) and so far I'm loving it. Its so fast now to go through many cards, more sentences mean more context so the words stick better, I also changed my new cards to appear before my reviews so I'm less tired and more willing to learn something new.

So far 100 a day, we'll see how quickly the reviews will kill me

Tatoeba = still Tanaka, right? I don't think it's all bad, but not something you want to be looking at too deeply, no?

Seems like with all the web dictionaries out there using other sources for example sentences and stuff (Weblio uses a few different ones in addition to Tanaka, I think, including Japanese WordNet) there could be other options (which is perhaps related to recent suggestions [by Hashiriya?] for cb4960's Rikaichan mod).

Edit: That Online Lookup plugin seems to use Daijirin for examples and then refers back to Tanaka/Tatoeba as a backup?

thurd Wrote:So far 100 a day, we'll see how quickly the reviews will kill me

Ouch! I had been doing this for a while as well and after 14 days I was so burnt out. Watch out, man!

nest0r Wrote:Tatoeba = still Tanaka, right? I don't think it's all bad, but not something you want to be looking at too deeply, no?

Seems like with all the web dictionaries out there using other sources for example sentences and stuff (Weblio uses a few different ones in addition to Tanaka, I think, including Japanese WordNet) there could be other options (which is perhaps related to recent suggestions [by Hashiriya?] for cb4960's Rikaichan mod).

Edit: That Online Lookup plugin seems to use Daijirin for examples and then refers back to Tanaka/Tatoeba as a backup?

It's not just Tanaka, they seem to have lots of other stuff too (quite impressive growth). With time I want to switch to Online Lookup and go full J-J but for this new set of words I'd rather stick with this half-baked J-E strategy.
I won't be dissecting each sentence or try to remember expressions but rather get a feel on how each word is used. I need to improve my initial retention rates even if it means using some kind of mnemonic device (like those sentences for context) if I want to cope with that huge amount of words.

Tori-kun Wrote:

thurd Wrote:So far 100 a day, we'll see how quickly the reviews will kill me

Ouch! I had been doing this for a while as well and after 14 days I was so burnt out. Watch out, man!

14 days is impressive, I doubt I can endure it for so long. But still its some progress and since consistency isn't my thing I have to burn as much as possible before burning out

@thurd

For monolingual transitioning, in case you missed it, I think this is great (I've always said transitioning to monolingual ought to come organically once you've got a solid base, & this might resolve and improve that): http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid140024

Perhaps there's a way to extrapolate this idea so one can find monolingual example sentences/definitions that are always sorted by the most minimal i+N.