wrightak Wrote:I think that the best thing to do [...]would be to add another column. (Sorry, I hate adding more columns). Here we can label kanji with kun-yomi as "yes" and ones without as "no".

Could we put "no" in the existing onyomi column and filter it that way?

For the koohii list: if I'm understanding Fabrice's vision correctly, he wants to drill kun readings and practice writing kanji with kun readings with one prompt. (ie. not entire RTK1 kanji). Is the idea, then, to have more than one prompt for kanji with multiple kun readings?

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I don't have time right now to post a diatribe on the keyword versus word/part-of-sentence prompts, which I was about to post a few times this week, postponing each time to give it more thought.... but in the meantime... I hope not to confuse anybody or give any false hopes regarding the "koohii" list : I don't think I will create a special mode for it.

However the list could turn into a pre-set vocab list that will "hit" every possible kanji from RtK1, and as such, could be used for reviewing the characters. If you set the vocab items as "active", they have a flashcard, so you can make sure you're test all of them. It might be rough for beginners, since you're adding a vocab list of 2000+ items, but certainly worthwhile.

The result will be similar, when reviewing that vocab list in "write test" mode. At present, the writing test mode prompts the writing for one character at a time (eg: 新ぶん ). It might be doable to create an exception where for this list, instead of choosing the obscured character at random , the same character will always be obscured (the one associated with the compound, in the list discussed here).

As a vocab list, it doesn't matter then whether the entries are on-yomi or kun-yomi, and the original english keywords are irrelevant, so the most common/practical compound to illustrate each character is possible.

PPS: within this system then, it is possible to have a preset list also of exemplary sentence(s) tied to each compound, however let's not get ahead of ourselves

Thora Wrote:Could we put "no" in the existing onyomi column and filter it that way?

Yeah, I think something like that would be better. In fact, what I've been trying to do over the past few days is to use Jim Breen's kanjidic file to generate the kun-yomi readings for all of the kanji. That way, if the cell is blank, there's no kun-yomi reading.

Unfortunately, the file isn't the easiest thing to work with and I'm struggling with it. Hopefully I'll have it sorted out soon.

wrightak Wrote:...trying to do over the past few days is to use Jim Breen's kanjidic file to generate the kun-yomi readings for all of the kanji. ... Unfortunately, the file isn't the easiest thing to work with and I'm struggling with it. Hopefully I'll have it sorted out soon.

Why not use the XML version, that should be pretty easy to work with.

EDIT: Bad grammar

What happened to this project guys?

I'm still working on it mate. I've decided to concentrate on creating my own list first and if there's still demand for a list to be incorporated onto this site then I can make any amendments that are necessary afterwards. The guidelines I use for my list are pretty similar to those Fabrice stated earlier in the thread so it shouldn't be much of a problem.

As I'm working through the list, I'm adding it into Anki and it's going pretty well. I'm at the 1400 mark now so only another 600 to go...

The data I'm assembling is available on the google spreadsheet, so anyone is welcome to it. You can choose the words I have or the ones suggested by the other people who are working on it with me. Of course, anyone that wants to add suggestions for Japanese keywords is welcome to send me an email and become a collaborator on the spreadsheet.

I still think this is the way to go. I have started reviewing on this site again recently (200 failed 700 to review) and it bugs me when I slip up on a kanji that I knew, but had forgotten the damn keyword for. If all is going well with Trinity (which we havent heard about for a little while now...) we might should be able to review from 熟語.

As a side note, wrightak, could you share your anki deck that you made from the data you created from that google document spreadsheet, please. I would like to have a look at it,

yorks

I used the spreadsheet to generate a deck of cards with most of the keywords that I have so far. I uploaded that deck to

http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/ExtraDecks

So you can see what it looks like when I review. I also have another card for the same facts, which asks for the reading, given the keyword. I also have extra fields for notes/stories etc.

The number of cards in this deck doesn't represent the state of progress on this project. I think I'm currently sitting at around the 1500 mark at least and there's probably another 100 where I haven't had time to take a look at other people's contributions. So we're getting there...

thanks a lot, I'll check it out.

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I've made the project topic into a sticky until I can look at it later and see how to implement kunyomi review and RtK review with japanese prompts (if you're still fine with me using the data of course).

This will be done in Trinity. You can probably see this a little better now with the alpha version available.

For the kunyomi progress indicator, and study area, I will need to provide a chosen compound or short expression for each character from the RtK set that has a Japanese reading.

ファブリス Wrote:I've made the project topic into a sticky until I can look at it later and see how to implement kunyomi review and RtK review with japanese prompts (if you're still fine with me using the data of course).

Of course, no problem at all. As synewave pointed out earlier in the thread, the number of kanji with kun-yomi actually isn't as large as you might expect. If you want to take that subset out of the main list I'm compiling then I don't think it will be that long. If you want, I can go through the spreadsheet and label all of the kun-yomi keywords.

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Ok I think that's the post from synewave you mentioned :

synewave Wrote:Looks like there is somewhere between about 700-1000 RTK1 kanji without kunyomi.

What do you think is the best way to deal with these bad boys?

I have 1560 kanji from RtK1 with a matching japanese reading and corresponding entry using said character+reading in EDICT. Many of those could be non-priority/relatively rare entries though. I will have to look in details later..

No need to mark the kunyomi entries. I think when the time comes to use the lists, I will match the entries in the dictionary and manually check the rest, thanks.

ファブリス Wrote:Many of those could be non-priority/relatively rare entries though. I will have to look in details later..

I think you'll find that a great deal of them are. I encountered quite a few EDICT kun-yomi readings which don't even appear in the Kenkyusha dictionaries.

I can include the list in the "Substitute keywords" script if that would speed up things. I think the original aim was simply to have a hiragana keyword per kanji that in kanji form includes that kanji, but it seems to be turning into a kun-yomi learning vehicle. A list that would prioritize one common reading for each kanji would be just as useful and perhaps easier to construct. But please do whatever is your fancy.

ファブリス Wrote:I have 1560 kanji from RtK1 with a matching japanese reading and corresponding entry using said character+reading in EDICT. Many of those could be non-priority/relatively rare entries though. I will have to look in details later..

RtK2 contains an index with general use kun-yomi readings for all RtK1 kanji. RtK3 I believe does the same for its kanji. Could be used as a sieve if you need one.

woelpad Wrote:A list that would prioritize one common reading for each kanji would be just as useful and perhaps easier to construct. But please do whatever is your fancy.

This is what I and some other forum members have been working on. Perhaps it could be incorporated in your script but I tend to review with the Japanese keyword and a short example sentence. This might be too lengthy. The example sentences are for when the word is new to me or for when there are synonyms.

I think the idea was that Fabrice would take the kun-yomi ones out of the list that we're working on. Alternatively, he could use RTK2 as you said. Sentences to go with the words are very useful though and my opinion is that one of the weaknesses of RTK2 is that it doesn't have sentences. How are you supposed to learn a word without seeing how it's used?

wrightak Wrote:Sentences to go with the words are very useful though and my opinion is that one of the weaknesses of RTK2 is that it doesn't have sentences. How are you supposed to learn a word without seeing how it's used?

That sounds similar to someone saying

Quote:one of the weaknesses of RTK1 is that it doesn't teach you readings.

While being into fairly in to sentences myself, I think we can get too wrapped up in needing a sentence rather than just getting on and learning vocab. Perhaps it's more about strong collocations rather than sentences...just that words often appear with strong collocates in sentences.

Hm, yes, you could work towards a unique set of keywords, no homonyms, or you could do the short sentence approach. What I was thinking of doing is to add a field on top of the keyword in the study page (in a slightly smaller font) that would serve to display and edit the furigana/short sentence part. On review you would be shown this furigana line and on clicking 'Show' be presented with both the kanji and the actual keyword (in kanji). Does that come close to your current review method?

synewave Wrote:

wrightak Wrote:Sentences to go with the words are very useful though and my opinion is that one of the weaknesses of RTK2 is that it doesn't have sentences. How are you supposed to learn a word without seeing how it's used?

That sounds similar to someone saying

Quote:one of the weaknesses of RTK1 is that it doesn't teach you readings.

This is probably going to push things away from the topic title but what the heck!

Surely what you said would only be true if there was an RTK4 or something that did sentences. RTK1 doesn't do readings but RTK2 does. RTK2 does words but nothing does sentences and context.

What I'm saying isn't something unique to RTK, it's a problem for me with many kanji text books. With simple concepts like car, fridge, hot etc. you may be fine without a sentence but for me at least, I usually need one for new words. My rule is simple. If I can make a sentence using the new word then I'm happy, if I can't then I go off looking for sentences (which is pretty difficult) or I learn a different word.

In Japan, I encounter new words all the time but they're always in context. In a text book, if I'm just given a word by itself then its value is pretty low to me. I'd be better off learning the words that I'd actually encountered in a book, a film, a conversation etc.

EDIT: you're right, it's not about sentences as such, it's just that some context or background is necessary.

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woelpad Wrote:I think the original aim was simply to have a hiragana keyword per kanji that in kanji form includes that kanji, but it seems to be turning into a kun-yomi learning vehicle.

I'm sure it looks simple on the outside but I can't just implement one thing and then another and not think ahead you know. In Trinity I'm sure people don't want to review the words one time with the Japanese keyword original idea (one word as a prompt for each character, on or kun), and then review the word once again during their normal vocab review. I'm trying to find a solution that fits both.

My best idea so far is that the kunyomi list in Trinity, which is like a preset list of kunyomi flashcard, will cover a part of RtK1 + substitute keyword review, and then another list will fill in the gaps. That way people who add one word that happens to be in the kunyomi list will count towards kunyomi target, and will have one unique flashcard that is updated through the RtK1+Japanese keyword approach.

What I'm trying to avoid is the person reviewing 2000+ common words through the RtK1+Japanese keyword option, and then inevitably will review those same words in their main vocab because they happen to be common words..

ファブリス Wrote:What I'm trying to avoid is the person reviewing 2000+ common words through the RtK1+Japanese keyword option, and then inevitably will review those same words in their main vocab because they happen to be common words..

Of course, I'm happy for you to do whatever you think is best but I must admit that I don't understand what the problem is.

The idea of Japanese keywords is that you continue to review the writing of the kanji as everyone already is, but you do it using Japanese prompts instead of English ones. If a person is doing this, and one of the Japanese keywords is ねこ (cat) for example, why would they want to add ねこ to their main vocab list? Why can't they just exclude it? If it's common and appears in sentences then that's great, it's one less word in the sentence to worry about.

Can you describe what the problem is again?

I've actually been doing my own way similar to this. I've been using Anki (SRS from it rules) and getting stories from here

Everytime I reach a new card, I go to http://www.mahou.org/Kanji/?k= and search it, and I input one 音読み and one 訓読み reading in for the kanji, if there is no 訓読み, I'll use the 名乗り if one exists and I try and get all the popular readings.

When I finish, I plan to copy the deck with no cards known, and then I'll try and learn all of the 音読み, once I finish that, I'll hit the 訓読み

This way I follow the idea of learning only one thing at a time, and don't get on/kun mixed up. This doesn't teach me all readings but I figure it teaches more than enough to get me started with reading.

I wouldn't try to learn the readings like that. That's too boring and I don't see how that's going to be useful. Once you're done with Heisig, learn in context. Learn whole words that use those readings and then you'll remember the readings naturally.

The readings are mostly useless if you don't know the words, even if you guess the pronunciation of a unknown word, it's still an unknown word. And you'll still need to learn the kanji for each word.

I've recently been doing my RevTK reviews with some Japanese friends. They're impressed at my ability to do the correct stroke order. It's fun when the English keyword brings about the right concept for them to try the kanji. The problem obviously being that not all the keywords are a 1 for 1. Still, they wanted to learn more about the site.

It was dismissed early on in this thread, but there is merit to a Japanese version of "Remembering the Kanji". Now, seeing that I doubt such a book will get produced, that opens up a possibility of a group effort to create a list of keywords for the RTK1 and RTK3 list. Again, I'm assuming hiragana keywords, each and every one unique is the list. Those that have unique kunyumi takes precedence, while unique onyomi word containing the kanji will do for the rest. Granted, there's the chance that such a book (and keywords) does exist, and we just don't know about it.

Nukemarine Wrote:It was dismissed early on in this thread, but there is merit to a Japanese version of "Remembering the Kanji". Now, seeing that I doubt such a book will get produced, that opens up a possibility of a group effort to create a list of keywords for the RTK1 and RTK3 list. Again, I'm assuming hiragana keywords, each and every one unique is the list. Those that have unique kunyumi takes precedence, while unique onyomi word containing the kanji will do for the rest. Granted, there's the chance that such a book (and keywords) does exist, and we just don't know about it.

There is indeed an ongoing group effort to do exactly this for RTK 1. This thread was started by Fabrice after reading a post on this topic by wrightak who had also done a large part of this work by himself before getting people to join in.

Read some of the earlier posts in this thread to find out about this project.

BTW, I would also be interested in continuing the group effort to come up with a Japanese keywords list for RTK 3. (Once we finish with RTK 1, of course.)

Anyone else interested?