Nest0r your last post doesn't make any sense.

You're hiding behind this idea of ‘It's not either/or, you can do both... ’ as if to say it's all good, do what you like, but at the same time basically declaring that if you're not SRSing you're crazy and illogical.

nest0r Wrote:but the SRS really is *that* effective. It's many, many times more effective than any other method of memorization. Spaced retrieval (with relational strategies) is the most effective way to memorize information, period, short of jacking in, Matrix style.

You see this is where you yourself are being either/or. Either you're using the SRS (the greatest thing since sliced bread) or you're being inefficient. Stop being a hypocrite. Or these:

nest0r Wrote:If people want to decide to learn only through passive input or less efficient and effective methods of deliberate learning, that's one thing.

nest0r Wrote:so you end up with proclamations against the SRS that have no logical backing. Such as stronger conclusions than yours above but with the same out-of-the-blue (il)logic: that you can learn without the SRS,

And I did explain my logic for abandoning the SRS. By default settings, it forces a high number of closely spaced reviews which I have found to be unnecessary in the long term. But hey why not try it for yourself. Everything I have said is testable. Go write a list of 30 or so words (or sentences or whatever you feel like learning). Ignore that list for at least two weeks then check which items you still remember. Maybe it will be zero, maybe it will be ten. However many you remember it should prove to you that for at least those few items the close spaced reviews you would have done in the SRS are in fact unnecessary. Rewrite the items you forgot, and repeat the process, and you'll be pleasantly surprised to realise you'll have learned some more of the items again without forcing unnecessary short term review in the SRS.

nest0r Wrote:The same thing occurs for grammar. It's tied to negatives, generally. When you're declaring something must be banished. Sentences, deliberate learning of grammar, SRSing, the use of English.

Nest0r please calm down. No one is calling for anything to be banished we're just offering alternative strategies in a thread asking for advice. You just don't like people disagreeing with you.

nest0r Wrote:What's funniest is you'll get the best advice from those of us who are just as passionate about all the aspects, seen in their nuance and how they fit in a continuum of learning, and some of the better advice makes it to the all or nothing folks, but they don't even realize it and just bastardize it and dilute it.

Yes nest0r we're all stealing your ideas and should be ever grateful.

Ginmanm Wrote:Guess what?

Hmm, I don't know, can I have a hint? I—

Ginmam Wrote:You're not fluent,so you shouldn't be giving advice anyway.

Wait, don't give me the answer! Actually no, I honestly never would've guessed that anyone capable of using a computer would write something like that. Good call on answering your own question.

I can also understand why fluency is of concern to you, but listen, plenty of other posters with English reading and usage difficulties manage to get by on this forum every day without the juvenile, nasty name-calling attitude you've demonstrated in the Silverspoon thread (I presume that was you calling Silverspoon users/AJATTeers idiots and frauds), so I don't think you should worry about whether you're fluent when it comes to giving and receiving advice here. It's you, not the fluency. Keep working at it!

I mean doing RTK is sorta like learning about the radicals. as long as you know about them radicals it should be easier to learn kanji.......

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:I mean doing RTK is sorta like learning about the radicals. as long as you know about them radicals it should be easier to learn kanji.......

I agree, radicals are the key; if you take nothing else from RTK it should be a desire to become highly proficient at recognizing radicals and assembling them quickly into gestalt wholes to view the kanji as icons from the bottom up. Systematically it becomes efficient to reduce overhead per encounter by learning a certain group/amount of kanji up front so that they've already become icons in your mind in this fashion, so you've got the twofold benefit: having preloaded to a desired extent the kanji you will encounter so you can focus on other elements, and also the skill to learn new kanji per encounter using the skills you've developed; I think multimodality (handwriting) and relational strategies, mnemonics, for the assemblage/placement aspects, using weak cues (such as keywords) for spaced retrieval, is best for learning this way, and decades of studies demonstrate the superiority of these methods as well.

It so happens they're already put together in a little something called RTK. Once you understand this basic framework, its components, it can be customized and deconstructed in all manner of ways. But at the core is the radicals. Not strokes, which according to research contribute to kanji recall and recognition only indirectly, through radicals.

Please People, calm down. Advise should be taken with a grain of salt when asked for. Advisors should not feel obligated to coerce the advisee to follow their advise. Afterall, it is called an ADVISE and not COMMAND. People are free to have their own opinion and act on their desires but NOONE has the right to force any adult of sound mind to adapt others' beliefs. It is ok to give your opinion on techniques but please don't let it escalate to name-callings and insults. Anyway, whatever you people have to say about your techniques, the advisee will follow what she really wants to do or not to do. Then again, please take my opinion with a grain of salt...and have a margharita!!!

did a whole bunch of posts from this thread get deleted?

nest0r Wrote:...

It so happens they're already put together in a little something called RTK. Once you understand this basic framework, its components, it can be customized and deconstructed in all manner of ways. But at the core is the radicals. Not strokes, which according to research contribute to kanji recall and recognition only indirectly, through radicals.

I thought the term was primitive term used with RTK, which is different from radicals. Who knows I might be totally wrong, just learning about RTK last week. I am trying to learn all the terminology and acronyms can be difficult. However, there has been a lot of really good suggestions.

nadiatims Wrote:did a whole bunch of posts from this thread get deleted?

Probably. I was tired and being snarky. Oops. Now, time to go deal with the crayzee who thinks CPS is trying to poison her...

Right now I'm working on doing Core6k with a dabble in RTK and grammar.

Omoishinji Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:...

It so happens they're already put together in a little something called RTK. Once you understand this basic framework, its components, it can be customized and deconstructed in all manner of ways. But at the core is the radicals. Not strokes, which according to research contribute to kanji recall and recognition only indirectly, through radicals.

I thought the term was primitive term used with RTK, which is different from radicals. Who knows I might be totally wrong, just learning about RTK last week. I am trying to learn all the terminology and acronyms can be difficult. However, there has been a lot of really good suggestions.

Yes, RTK uses primitives, which is a set that doesn't perfectly overlap with radicals, but suits the order Heisig uses. Generalizing beyond RTK into the composition of kanji, it's best to think in terms of radicals, I think.

Edit: Found this, which you might find useful. Katsuo strikes again: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid11360

Many books and people prefer to reserve the term "radicals" to refer exclusively to the dictionary classification system. Each kanji has exactly one radical. Knowing which component of a kanji is *the* radical is generally not very useful because it's often unpredictable and these days there are much better ways to look up kanji than via radicals.

"Components" is a common term to refer to any part of a kanji, and RTK uses "primitives".

tokyostyle Wrote:Anyway, since I don't abuse SRS programs I don't really have a frame of reference for this. I barely use my SRS because in the end it's not that important. I would much rather read, watch, or listen to something than mess with Anki. However, the nice thing about it is that you can do it almost anywhere and anytime which includes situations where listing to audio isn't acceptable.

I think that's one thing that's somewhat mis-thought about when these kind of discussions take place...yes, it's awesome to abandon SRS when you can, but for beginners with a not-very-high vocabulary or bad grammar usage, they /can't/. They don't understand enough to push their SRS off for a week and just read books instead. Well, theoretically they could, but it'd probably be more frustrating than anything else.

I do eventually intend to abandon SRS, but only when I'm good enough to read things I want to read on my own with little to no dictionary look-up. At that point I'll be getting enough exposure that I may not have to SRS (depends what I'm doing - work (two jobs), plus school - may SRS since I probably won't read much).

For now, though, it's a very useful tool.

I recently finished rtk and I can tell you this. The best thing RTK did for me was making me comfortable with kanji. When I started RTK I was a complete beginner and whenever I saw kanji I would panic, now I recognize shapes and forms, even in non RTK kanji. That's the biggest thing it did for me, but not the only thing.

I did RTK mostly on it's own. I did a little grammar on the side, but nothing to extensive.

I love anki too. Makes reviewing rather mindless, and before anki I never did flashcards of any kind. In fact, I loathe flashcards...but anki takes care of my complaints, and as for that thing about too many short intervals. Isn't the point of anki so tha you don't forget? It pushes your ability to remember a fact farther and farther with each increased interval. If you're waiting so long that you forget a word or sentence or anything else you're actually wasting time because now you have to re memorize the word, a longer process than simply jogging your memory.

If you're seeing words in the wild of course it will make anki seem redundant. Anki is a stand alone tool that assumes you aren't seeing them anywhere but anki. If that is the case then tailor your intervals to suit your needs. No two people are the same, and as such no two people's memory work exactly the same way. Anki is a tool, a useful one,
but used the wrong way it becomes useless and a waste of time.


That all said, Nestor, I love reading your posts, even the uh...angry ones XD.

Also, excuse the typos. I'm on an iPod and it makes it difficult to correct things.

@nohika

To make a *shudder* nest0r-like statement, it's not all or nothing. I recommend against SRS's programs (especially as they're used by default) for efficiency reasons, not against the idea of spaced repetition, or more simple put scheduled review. As lack of vocabulary is one of the things that holds back a beginner, it makes sense to know an efficient way of moving a large amount of it into your long term memory.Whether you're getting it from reading or word lists or whatever. Another way to read early is to make use of translations, such as in phrasebooks, and parallel texts.

I think the hardest thing is that I'm not a total beginner (I can follow pokemon, most simple manga, and some other stuff), but not advanced enough to have a large enough vocab to read without assistance and whatnot. I kind of like Anki - it's something I can carry around and do quickly, most of the times because I don't have the time to sit there and read (or I can't at work).

Eventually I hope to being able to read/pick up words in context. I just don't have the skills right now.

@nohika

Are you using pre-made decks? If so chances are you'll be getting reviews on vocabulary you already know.
If you are creating your own decks, and imputing or importing your own data anyway, I see no reason why it can't be done more efficiently on paper. Or, if you do stick with anki, try pushing the default spacings much further apart, so that a failed card is not seen for a good chunk of time (I suggest 2-3 weeks). Mainly what I'm suggesting is a paradigm shift away from this idea of clinging onto something and then spacing it into long-term memory, and towards the idea of allowing it to enter effortlessly after a minimum number of re-exposures or re-learning events. This makes use of a concept Hermann Ebbinghaus calls "savings".

(from wikipedia)"The other important discovery is that of savings. Savings refers to the amount of information retained in the subconscious even after this information had been completely forgotten (cannot be consciously accessed). To test this, Ebbinghaus would memorize a list of items until perfect recall and then would not access the list until he could no longer recall any of its items. He then would relearn the list, and compare the new learning curve to the learning curve of his previous memorization of the list. The second list was generally memorized faster, and this difference between the two learning curves is what Ebbinghaus called “savings”."

"Ebbinghaus also described the difference between involuntary and voluntary memory, the former occurring “with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will” and the latter being brought “into consciousness by an exertion of the will”."

One thing to point out about SRSing methods. If you don't enjoy the act of studying with SRS it ain't gonna amount to a hill o' beans (crazy world or not). Most of everything they study will be forgotten because it's not interesting enough to them, so it's not interesting enough for the brain to remember it.

@darkauras

Thanks. ;p

tokyostyle Wrote:

nohika Wrote:I think that's one thing that's somewhat mis-thought about when these kind of discussions take place...yes, it's awesome to abandon SRS when you can, but for beginners with a not-very-high vocabulary or bad grammar usage, they /can't/.

Since I never used an SRS to get to the level I'm at I really don't understand this comment. Seeing the same words every day many times a day really is enough. I completely understand how an SRS can be a great tool to accomplish the goal of seeing certain Japanese every single day, but it is not better or worse for beginners just because of the fact that they are beginners.

I agree with this, I never even heard of an SRS when I started learning Japanese, and a lack of one certainly didn't stop me from getting where I am today.

nadiatims Wrote:@nohika

Are you using pre-made decks? If so chances are you'll be getting reviews on vocabulary you already know.
If you are creating your own decks, and imputing or importing your own data anyway, I see no reason why it can't be done more efficiently on paper. Or, if you do stick with anki, try pushing the default spacings much further apart, so that a failed card is not seen for a good chunk of time (I suggest 2-3 weeks). Mainly what I'm suggesting is a paradigm shift away from this idea of clinging onto something and then spacing it into long-term memory, and towards the idea of allowing it to enter effortlessly after a minimum number of re-exposures or re-learning events. This makes use of a concept Hermann Ebbinghaus calls "savings".

(from wikipedia)"The other important discovery is that of savings. Savings refers to the amount of information retained in the subconscious even after this information had been completely forgotten (cannot be consciously accessed). To test this, Ebbinghaus would memorize a list of items until perfect recall and then would not access the list until he could no longer recall any of its items. He then would relearn the list, and compare the new learning curve to the learning curve of his previous memorization of the list. The second list was generally memorized faster, and this difference between the two learning curves is what Ebbinghaus called “savings”."

"Ebbinghaus also described the difference between involuntary and voluntary memory, the former occurring “with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will” and the latter being brought “into consciousness by an exertion of the will”."

Yeah, using pre-made (core6k), but right now I don't mind since it's been like two months since I've studied vocabulary and I've forgotten quite a bit, even the basics - and by study, I mean pretty much seen any Japanese at all.

I don't have much time to devote daily to Japanese, so Anki is convenient. Right now I'm blazing through the first 400 vocab and then shifting to a different mode of study - unlocking vocab words I've seen in books/whatever I've read so I'm studying/learning the vocab for the stuff I want to read.

I'll admit, I'm kind of a technology fan. Not very big on paper-learnin', to be totally honest. Anki is easy, convenient, and portable. :/ And extremely useful for when I don't have enough time to study conventionally. I will admit, I hate using it for grammar and probably won't much longer. But I do like using it to study vocab.

@nohika

Sounds like you got the gist of it right to me (since this earlier comment, actually: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid143962)

I do see the argument for using conventional studies - it's more traditional, people have long done it, whatever. But I don't have that much time to study. I'm working 30-40 hours a week on top of full-time school. Anki is convenient, portable, and allows me some time with the language. :/

It's also something I can do at work if things are particularly slow...whipping out my gameboy or a novel isn't quite exactly as subtle, though admittedly I could probably read a text file...it's just easier for me to parse sentences when looking at them on paper. I do like yomichan, though. I just think getting that base set of vocab is useful - that first 6k.

Right now since school hasn't started, I am trying to "immerse" more...I downloaded a couple dramas to watch with subtitles, will unsuspend that vocab, am playing Pokemon in Japanese (burakku with kanji). Still a little intimidated about trying the dramas, but I'll get there in a couple days. Eventually hoping to strip the audio and put it on my phone or iTouch (when I get it back from my brother) to play at work during breaks when working on paperwork. I definitely can't do AJATT...but I can try a little bit to immerse. Even if it's an hour a day while doing Anki reviews. I definitely won't progress very fast. :/ It sucks. But...for what I have, it's not bad.

There's so many different learning methods and everyone has their own that appeals to them. That's the biggest thing that is so useful about this site - you get so many different opinions and ideas and can try those that suit you - or even those that don't. The way I'm looking at allows me to get reading "quicker"-ish and developing a vocabulary related to reading specifically, which is my goal. Even listening, too, which I think I've heard helps with reading.

And aww, Nestor, I'm flattered. Coming from you that's an awesome compliment. (Which I probably just ruined due to my rambling).

That's just my way of concurring in a general way while being too lazy to elaborate. ;p

Also, I meant to link this comment, for the record, not the top of the page: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid143962

nest0r Wrote:That's just my way of concurring in a general way while being too lazy to elaborate. ;p

Also, I meant to link this comment, for the record, not the top of the page: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid143962

Yeah I was a little confused there. It makes more sense. Laziness is useful at times. Sides, that's what summer is trending towards, anyways...

It depends on what your goals are. But it seems like the more extroverted you are the more you will pick up the language. One of the things I've noticed at college was that the international students who were extroverted and had American friends spoke fairly good-fluent English. These people don't even know what anki or rtk even is. They just make friends and talk to the natives. Whereas the international students who were introverted and had no English speaking friends still had problems with understanding/ comprehension.

So when in doubt just make friends and talk to Japanese people. ( or try to)

I've only just started using RTK, and have known up to 1700 kanji to recognize and read in the past (but back down now, I estimate, to about 800). Anyway, RTK is not -necessary- by any means, but I have a -terrible- memory, and Japanese with its list of Kanji and all... the only worse language I could've chosen to take an interest in would be Chinese!

Still and all, if you learn your radicals (or components) you can decompose kanji without RTK. Also I recommend highly, one of the huge advantages to RTK that shouldn't be thrown out with learning by a non-RTK system: Learn the meanings of the Kanji first along with their writing.

Pick up phonetic readings as a separate exercise, getting the kanji pinned down, in proper stroke order, solidly fixed to one meaning gives you a hook to hang other readings and meanings on later.

(Or, to digress.... at least (perhaps even the best way) pick up only one phonetic reading - ideally the kun reading when the kanji is a word by itself or with phonetics, but not all kanji -do- that at all, and some have more than one reading like that, and choosing a common reading is hard when you're learning a new character.)

As for the great SRS debate - I've written my own 3x5 flashcards and used traditional flashcard programs as well as SRS programs. Absolutely, if you are going to use flashcards, SRS is the way to go to date (my anecdote being backed up by some not particularly contested studies). Maybe some evolution of SRS will be even better, but still... the alternative to SRS is to flip through 100% of flashcards periodically and pick and choose what to drop into your repeat pile, an arduous procedure that is often neglected. SRS takes care of putting cards back into your repeat pile after a week or a month or whatever instead of letting them collect literal dust in your closet or figurative dust in your database of 'marked learned' cards. Now, you don't -have- to use flashcards at all - it -is- a terrific memory aid, but maybe you have a memory that doesn't leak like a sieve the way mine does and don't need it. But -if- you need flashcards, SRS is far more efficient than any other flashcard system that I know of, certainly more efficient than periodically doing a 100% review and dropping things back into a repeat pile.