I was listening to a broadcast about women's rights after WWII and other stuff on CBS radio, then I was reading about people that served as translators of Japanese (both written and spoken) during this time and finally the question arose, how did non-native Japanese people learn Japanese 50 or 40 years ago?

Go even further back, people like the british guy translator in The Last Samurai, what about them?

40 or 50 years ago isn't too much different from 15-20 years ago; they had textbooks and teachers.

Travellers.
A few months ago I met an old guy from Poland. When he was young he travelled across Europe and learnt the language of the places he went to and then took up work translating

bcrAn Wrote:how did non-native Japanese people learn Japanese 50 or 40 years ago?

Basically the same way we do today minus all the electronic dictionaries. They had plenty of books, teachers, audio materials and dictionaries available.

bcrAn Wrote:Go even further back, people like the british guy translator in The Last Samurai, what about them?

From books written by missionaries and/or directly from missionaries who were very busy trying to translate the bible into Japanese and spread Jesus around. In fact, nearly all of the first generation of university "Japanese studies" specialists were the children of missionaries who came to Japan immediately after it opened in the Meiji era.

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I agree that paper and pen is best, but Lazy is good . It makes you stingy with your time. Anki just gives you extra work, and is bloated and constraining. I'm kind of tempted to write my own study application actually minus 99% of the features of anki...

nadiatims Wrote:Anki just gives you extra work, and is bloated and constraining.

Care to elaborate?

I think SRSing is immensely valuable for language learning, and Anki is the best SRS out there. The problem comes when people try to use an SRS to remember every word/sentence they've ever seen, and wind up spending more time reviewing than learning.

nadiatims Wrote:I agree that paper and pen is best, but Lazy is good . It makes you stingy with your time. Anki just gives you extra work, and is bloated and constraining. I'm kind of tempted to write my own study application actually minus 99% of the features of anki...

Agreed. Anki is awesome, but I wish it was simpler. I only use a subset of its features, its basic premise, add, review and schedule is all I need. Surely that wouldn't sit well with the minority that uses it to its max, but a stripped version would be cool.

JimmySeal Wrote:Care to elaborate?

imo the default spacing intervals used in SRS's are based on dubious theory that results in forced over reviewing. And if you want to change that, you need to then fiddle with settings. Even then you are forced to review material according to some algorithm. If you don't want to see a card again you've got to suspend or delete it. You want to change the structure of your cards a bit and you have to make a new card model. You're forced to grade your recall in a rather arbitrary way. Then there's problems that occur sometimes with deck syncing and other technical issues. SRS's lead someone to spend too much time reviewing too little information by their very design. People waste time adding audio, video and pictures to cards because they can, creating sentence or fill in the blank cards etc because some guy said so. They download decks of dubious quality because they are available.

I think if you have anki in some portable format (eg iphone app), and you're just using it for vocab review then you're probably not wasting that much time, but there are still faster and lower tech methods imo.

Anki lite.

nadiatims Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:Care to elaborate?

imo the default spacing intervals used in SRS's are based on dubious theory that results in forced over reviewing. And if you want to change that, you need to then fiddle with settings. Even then you are forced to review material according to some algorithm. If you don't want to see a card again you've got to suspend or delete it. You want to change the structure of your cards a bit and you have to make a new card model. You're forced to grade your recall in a rather arbitrary way. Then there's problems that occur sometimes with deck syncing and other technical issues. SRS's lead someone to spend too much time reviewing too little information by their very design. People waste time adding audio, video and pictures to cards because they can, creating sentence or fill in the blank cards etc because some guy said so. They download decks of dubious quality because they are available.

I think if you have anki in some portable format (eg iphone app), and you're just using it for vocab review then you're probably not wasting that much time, but there are still faster and lower tech methods imo.

Disregarding the bugs in the software, how is that different than pen-n-paper review?

You still need to adjust your review schedule, you still need to put away cards you don't want to see any more, etc etc.

Anki offers a way to do the Leitner method without having to manually do each interval and manually touch each card. It's just a computer interface to something you'd do by hand. Like Klondike Solitaire.

I don't use the Leitner method (or an SRS) because I don't get enough out of it for the time spent. It doesn't do a proper up-front review, and it reviews the words too often or too seldom, never the perfect amount. Instead, I find that reading and using the language review things that are important, and if I forget a word, looking it up again is enough of a kick in the pants to keep it fresh for quite a while.

But I don't blame that on Anki. Anki does its job. It's the Leitner system I don't like.

I remember seeing a video about an American author/film critic?(don't recall exactly) that lived in Japan right after the war and he learned Japanese from some old ladies who told him he'd never learn kanji as it's too difficult for non-Japanese. I believe to this day he can't read Japanese.

I think the tools make it easier for you and me to do self-study, but the method is the same: dedication and hard work, and a positive attitude.

As much as I love self study I have known people from other countries that spoke perfect English who learned in school. Also had a girlfriend that spoke 5 languages fairly well all learned in middle and high school (in Europe). Also my best friend growing up learned Spanish to a high degree in high school, although I managed to pass the same class and can barely order from taco bell correctly.

wccrawford Wrote:Disregarding the bugs in the software, how is that different than pen-n-paper review?

You still need to adjust your review schedule, you still need to put away cards you don't want to see any more, etc etc.

No, because I'm not just doing SRS paper version.

wccrawford Wrote:But I don't blame that on Anki. Anki does its job. It's the Leitner system I don't like.

hmm...It seems you're saying anki is good at... being anki. SRSes perform their function of being SRSes very well. That's all good and well, but people here use anki because they see it as a useful tool towards the end goal of language acquisition. It's with that goal in mind that I'm questioning its optimality. It seems to me that for many people here using anki or similar is a kind of unquestioned precondition that isn't really thought about all that deeply, it's just assumed as necessary from the outset. I guess partly because a lot of us started our studies by SRSing the kanji here on the site or with Anki or similar. If you consider the basic premise of an SRS, to manage timely repetition of items in order to learn (learn?retain? same difference) them, I don't think Anki or similar systems are optimal at all.

I think anki/SRS is study's ultimate weapon. I do however agree that it's sub-optimal when u get a deck with 15k+ cards. Though, it's golden in terms of efficiency -especially in the beginning. You don't NEED it but sure does wonders for me.

nadiatims Wrote:

wccrawford Wrote:Disregarding the bugs in the software, how is that different than pen-n-paper review?

You still need to adjust your review schedule, you still need to put away cards you don't want to see any more, etc etc.

No, because I'm not just doing SRS paper version.

wccrawford Wrote:But I don't blame that on Anki. Anki does its job. It's the Leitner system I don't like.

hmm...It seems you're saying anki is good at... being anki. SRSes perform their function of being SRSes very well. That's all good and well, but people here use anki because they see it as a useful tool towards the end goal of language acquisition. It's with that goal in mind that I'm questioning its optimality..

Sometimes the end goal of total language acquisition isn't the only thing on people's mind. Sometimes it helps to get some short term memorisation satisfaction then to wait every 2 weeks to retain 20%. In terms of efficiency, even if in SRS is less efficiency than your method, what do you lose out of SRS each day, 1 hour?

And what was an interesting thread has devolved into yet another fight over SRS and Anki.

I imagine most of them were either part Japanese, native Japanese or had just lived there for a long time. I remember reading that there was a special Dutch settlement in Japan in colonial times. I think a lot of mixed children lived there that would grow up with both languages and thus be able to act like translators. Anyway, obviously language acquisition is not an academic excercise at all, if you are stuck in a certain environment for a long time and are forced to interact with others in a different language, you will eventually pick it up quite naturally.

was the world as industrialized back then? i feel like they would have more time to pick up something like this.

i also wonder what the textbooks were like.

yudantaiteki Wrote:40 or 50 years ago isn't too much different from 15-20 years ago; they had textbooks and teachers.

I remember in the 1990's that computers weren't big as they are now(and powerful), I remember those 1995 windows pc's haha. A lot has happened in these last decade

JimmySeal Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:Anki just gives you extra work, and is bloated and constraining.

Care to elaborate?

I think SRSing is immensely valuable for language learning, and Anki is the best SRS out there. The problem comes when people try to use an SRS to remember every word/sentence they've ever seen, and wind up spending more time reviewing than learning.

I noticed the key to using anki successful is to not let it take more than 1 hr. It's because the ratio of using anki to immersion should be a big difference, anki is the base but immersion is the key. So if it's done within 1 hr, you won't grow to despise it/frustrating(so making it easy is key).

I'm guessing they didn't use Anki.

prink Wrote:I'm guessing they didn't use Anki.

without anki it would have honestly taken a decade to learn japanese back then, even more. We are really fortunate to have anki+powerful pcs/laptops

you can do spaced repititions without a computer, just sayin'

Kyosys Wrote:you can do spaced repititions without a computer, just sayin'

very true but it's easier to it electronically nowadays plus it keeps increasing and you don't have to worry about organizing it.

No offense nadiatms but what you seem to be saying is better than SRS is basically rote memorization, going through word lists and stuff.

I'm not saying that doesn't work - it's worked for students for thousands of years - but that doesn't mean it's better than Anki (or worse)

Anki is for people who want to avoid rote memorization and word lists and have other priorities while studying. Anki allows you to have a diverse spectrum of questions and answers that cannot really be done with pen and paper.