I finished RTK about a month ago, and consequently loaded the deck that combines core2k and 6k in my SRS. After doing it for a month, I'm bothered by the speed it's happening at - I only add 20 words a day. I'm 500/6000 in at the moment, which means it'll take me until the end of this year to complete, if I up my reviews a bit. A year isn't bad, but it isn't good either.

My correct rate is awful. I eventually pick out the readings of common kanji, and some words I know from the outset (generally those with kun readings), but most of the cards that pop up get returned to a one-day interval, and stay there for as much as a week. I have set up failed cards to reappear during reviewing, and some cards show up as much as a dozen times before I get them correctly. Though a dozen repetitions of a single card in a day are rare, and only happen with one or two cards a day, 4 or 6 repetitions are sadly commonplace. The good news is, when a card is finally sent for a 4-day interval, it usually matures quickly or at least doesn't fall into the "5 fails until correct" loop. Usually. Basically, I'm rote-memorizing.

Even with only 20 new per day, I still do 100+ reviews a day (100 isn't much, but they take a lot more time than my usual 300 review deck, due to half of the cards being repeated at least thrice until I get them correctly). I really want to increase my retention rate, and thus new cards/day. Could I get some tips in this direction?

Also, it's worth noting, I use the core deck by itself, with no supplements. I know that it originated from some site that later added a subscription, and while I don't mind using additional resources, I'm unwilling to pay for that particular site.

just appreciate that you are pushing yourself and praise yourself when you get it right. I would recommend forming contextualized examples that influence you with the language you are learning.

are you doing the default order ? If so, the bit you're at (around 400-800 or so, can't remember) is absolutely horrible with all the politics/business related words. It will get easier.
What worked for me was, if a word was too hard (all of the kanji were new, for example) or uninteresting, I would just pause it and work on it's sentence audio instead. That way I could still learn the meaning of the word/sentence without worrying about readings. After I was done with core2k, I went through the deck again and did all the previously difficult words that I had paused, in a slow pace. That way they were a lot easier.

Yup, I'm doing the default order, and you're right, they're all politics/business words. Knowing that they get more interesting later on, at least I can hope to increase my speed once I'm done with those

Why on EARTH are you doing the default order holy cow. You need to be doing Nukemarine's modified i+1 excel sheet. I can help you keep your scheduling data + modify the deck to Nukemarine's but I need to know one thing. Is there a field in your current deck that has the index number? Filtering out the cards you have done and reordering is possible but it'll take a few steps but you should do it trust me.

I'm going through that same deck, but at a much slower pace.
But what I do is, when each new word comes up, if I think its a really difficult word, or a word that I probably don't need to learn right away, I just suspend it and skip it. No point learning stuff that feels useless to me right now. And its still there if I wanna learn it later. I probably skip at least 1/4 of the words, and it seems to help things go much smoother for me.

Nope, no index number. Also, a week ago, I noticed that I stopped getting new cards, at 400/6000, it was because only 400 of all 6000 cards were unsuspended. I unsuspended everything from core2k and went back on track. A few hours ago, I noticed that I had missed some core2k cards (funny, since, I should've noticed that I had less than 2k words unsuspended), and unsuspended them too. Now, since apparently they were supposed to go first, even before the initial 400 unsuspended set, I have a hundred or more very easy cards which cut in line before the politics words, so I upped my cards/day a lot, until I reach the business set again. To avoid a repeat, I just unsuspended all cards.

I have no clue why 5600 cards were initially suspended. Do you think what you suggested can still be done, even without index numbers, vix?

I haven't done 6k, but I had the worst time learning politics and business related words until I was actually advanced enough to read politics and business articles on a regular basis.

No reason to learn them all just because they're in the deck, or learn them all in the exact order of the deck. Suspend those suckers.

Fadeway Wrote:Do you think what you suggested can still be done, even without index numbers, vix?

Here. This is a VERY VERY Long post.

There might be a more efficient way to do this but I haven't had the time to think it through to find it. I'll try and do this with most ease as possible. I reordered my cards but I did it by manipulating the SQL database in the deck and I don't recall the full process to how I did it. We CAN however do it with Excel though. I hope you have Excel. You can probably do the same thing on OpenOffice etc but you'd have to look up the matching function names for it.

Lets get started.
BEFORE YOU START MAKE A COPY OF YOUR CURRENT CORE6K DECK AND PUT IT SOMEWHERE IN CASE YOU SCREW UP.
Getting the spreadsheets.
Go these links:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...l=en#gid=0
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...l=en#gid=0
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...l=en#gid=0
1. On each link click File > Download As.. > Excel and save them to your computer
2. Open a new excel sheet.
Now open each of the downloaded ones and copy and paste the entire sheet into the new excel sheet. MAKE SURE YOU DO IT IN THE CORRECT ORDER. The order is: Beginner > Basic > Intermediate.

Tagging
1. MAKE SURE YOU ARE BACKED UP!
2. Open up your core6k deck.
3. Open the card browser
4. Theres a Filter drop down and a Sort drop down menu. In the SORT drop down select REPS. Hit the sort button to make sure it sorts.
5. This should have changed the far right column to Reps.
6. Start from top or bottom, which ever way its sorted, and select all the Reps with a rep > 0. These are all the cards you have reviewed. You can select by holding down SHIFT and using the UP/DOWN arrow keys or the PAGE UP/PAGE DOWN keys to go faster.
7. After you have selected all the cards you have reviewed. Double check by scrolling up and down with the scroll bar, careful not to click in the window or you'll have to reselect. You can double check too by looking at the title bar, it says the number selected and it should match how many you know you have seen.
8. After you know you have selected all your cards you have reviewed. Click the ADD TAG button up top. It'll give you a dialog box. Enter a unique tag name like "reviewedcards" or something. Hit ok.
9. In the FILTER drop down box, look for the tag and select it. Either that or type "tag:reviewedcards" in the search box. In the title bar it says # of 6000 cards shown or something like that. Make sure that # matches what you expect. If it doesn't then you missed a card in selecting, find it and add the proper tag to it.
10. Not done yet. Repeat the same steps above but this time select all Reps that are 0 and tag that something unique like "notreviewed." Again, FILTER and double check the numbers add up.
11. Close browser.


Keeping the data & Exporting
1. Still in Core6k deck. Do File > Export.
2. Make sure Export Format is ANKI DECK.
3. Tell it to limit to the tag you just named everything for the 'reviewedcards'
4. CHECK THE BOX THAT SAYS INCLUDE SCHEDULING INFORMATION This is VERY VERY important. You want to keep your current interval data.
5. Export. Save it somewhere. We'll be back for it later. Anki should say something about Export success! And close the export dialog.
6. Do File > Export again.
7. Export Format is: "Facts in tab seperated text File (*.txt)"
8. Make sure Limit to tags is BLANK! We are exporting the entire deck including the cards you have already started.
9. Make sure to check "Include tags" we're going to need it.
10. Hit Export and save the file somewhere.
11. You can close Anki for now if you want.

Setting up Excel w/ Exported facts
1. Open Excel.
2. Click open and browse to where the text file is. Hit open.
3. Excel should bring up an import option thing. I'm on Excel 2003 so this might look different on newer versions. Basically you need to click through and tell it to Deliminate by TAB only. If SPACE is checked anywhere un check it. If it fails to open properly go to 3b.

3b. With excel open, open the text file in Notepad. Note, this will take awhile depending on your computer and you might think the program crashed. Give it time, notepad has to load the entire text into memory and the file can be big.
Once open, select all (CTRL+A), and copy (CTRL+C). Go back to excel make you are in cell A1. Do paste (CTRL+V). If you are lucky Excel will auto space stuff out properly. If you still can't get this step, reply and let me know and we'll figure something out.
4. At this point you should have your facts deck imported into Excel and displayed properly in each cell.
5. Since you said there was no number representing a card's "index" in the core, we need to make one.
6. Right click Column A and do Insert. This will add a new blank column. This will be the index row for us.
7. Row 1 SHOULD be the first card entry and the first card you ever reviewed (*crossing fingers*) . Put a 1 in A1.
8. From here we are going to fill all the boxes. If you know a bit about Excel then this should make sense. Fill all the way to the last fact. If you don't know then here are two ways,
Easiest way is to Select the entire column from A1 to A6000. Find the option to do Fill (on excel 2003 its under Edit > Fill, don't ask me where it is in Excel w/ ribbons I don't know) and tell it "Series", set "Series in" to columns, "Type" to 'Growth.' Hit OK. It should auto give a number from 1 to 6000 for all the facts. This is the index for the current card.

Second way that should work in ribbons too. Select A1 cell where you put the 1. In the bottom right corner of the cell, the outline should have a black box. When you hover the cursor over it it becomes a + sign, Click while its there and drag ALLLLLLLLL the way to the last fact. If you accidently lose it mid way, select the last cell (iex 3053) and start pulling from there again.
9. Ok, you should now have a column with indexs 1-6000 or whatever.
10. Go up to A1 again, do CTRL+F ( Edit > Find ). Search for the tag you used to label the "notreviewed" cards. The row right above it should be the cards you have reviewed.
11. Select the column with the tags for that last fact you HAVE reviewed (make sure you don't pick the "notreviewed" one).
Do: CTRL+SHIFT+HOME.
This should select from that facts all the way back to Row 1. Go up to Edit > Delete. Tell it to delete "Entire Row" and "Shift cells up."
12. You should now be left entirely with only cards you have NOT reviewed yet.

Setting up Excel the Sorted Core6k excel sheet.
1. You need to delete the header line for this but FIRST. There is a column we need in the file. "Core 2k/6k index" This is the original index number. Select this column and bold it (CTRL+B). That way you won't accidentally confuse it with the KO index next to it.
2. Delete the header line for the Sorted Core6k Deck (right click the row 1, delete).

Reordering Time.
1. Ok at this point you have have the excel document open for the cards to be sorted and the Sorted Core6k reference excel sheet, there should be an index # for each card and you should have deleted the headers from the Sorted Core6k deck.
2. Go to the Facts deck sheet. The one we are going to reorder.
3. Right click Column A do insert. You now have a blank column. This will be the column to tell us the new order.
4. In Cell A1. Go up to the bar up above (don't type in the cell it might make clicking difficult) and Type =MATCH( this will give a small pop up with "lookup_value" bold.
5. Click B1. This is the index cell. This will put a B1 in the box so now it says something like =Match(B1.
6. Type a comma ( now its =Match(B1, ). Now we are in lookup_array.
7. Go over to the Core6k Sorted Excel sheet and click the bolded column we had and type a comma. If it worked right you should now have something like " =Match(B1,[SomeFilename]Sheet1!$N:$N, "
8. Now its asking for matchtype. Type in 0 and type a close parenthesis ')' and press enter.
9. If it worked right it will have given you a number. This number is the ROW that matches the core index. If you go over to the Sorted Core6k sheet and go all the way to that Row # you should see the matching entry (hopefully).
10. Once you have confirmed this is true (hopefully). You need to FILL the entire column all the way to the last fact. Refer back to how to do this if you don't know. It works the same way.
11. You now have a cross reference telling you what order you need to resort this sheet in.

Sorting
1. If everything went well you now have a full column showing the new order for the columns in the facts sheet.
2. Select All. (Ctrl+A) Make sure EVERYTHING is selected.
3. If you are on Ribbons this might be a pain. Find the Sort. On 2003 its in Data > Sort. Tell it to Sort by Column A, ascending. This will resort all the cards to match this.
4. Ta-Da you now have stuff in i+1 fashion. Go ahead and close the Sorted Core6k deck, we don't need it anymore.

Clean up
1. Delete Column A and B, we don't need them.

Saving
1. Delete column A and B, we don't need them any more. Either do it via right clicking the row or select the 2 rows and Edit > Delete. Make sure you tell it to slide stuff to the left so everything is starting from column A.
2. Time to save the new fact sorted doc.
3. File > Save As.
4. Make sure Save as Type is "Tab deliminated Text File"
5. Choose an appropirate name or simply overwrite the old file name. You'll probably get messages about "losing features" etc. Read them and select the options that basically say "yes, I know I'm losing features, save as text anywhere."
6. Close the document.
7. Still not done. NOW, hopefuly you are on Vista or Win 7. XP MIGHT be able to do this but I can't recall. Open up "notepad."
8. Open the fact document you just saved.
9. File > Save As...
10. In the "Encoding" box select UTF-8. This is important. Save. Again, you can overwrite just fine.
11. Close the document.

Reimporting
1. Open Anki and open up the EXPORTED REVIEWED CARDS deck. This is the deck with the cards you have reviewed and kept the scheduling information.
2. File > Import > Select Browse to the saved resorted tab deliminated file we just made. Hit Open.
3. Anki should have auto-detected that its Tab delminated. It should have also selected the apporiate Model and Card type.
4. In the "Field Mapping" section you have numbers 1-#. These correspond to the columns. Since we reset the columns back to their original order, this field mapping should match exactly what it needs to. The very las field should be "Tags" since we included Tags in fact exported text file originally.
5. Cross your fingers.
6. Hit Import.
7. This may take a minute while it imports everything. If everything goes according to plan though it should import everything without fail and tell you X number of facts were imported.

Cleanup
1. Open browser up on the file. FILTER for "notreviewed" tag. Select all (CTRL+A)
2. Click Remove tags and tell it to remove "notreviewed." You don't need that tag anymore.
3. Repeat for the "reviewed" tag.
4. You can delete the exported facts deck, the downloaded excel sheets, and the combined sorted core6k thing. You're done.

Now save your deck. Congratulations. You now have a Core6k deck sorted from what you already know up to i+1. Now bask in the ease with which you blow through Core2k (most of core2k is katakana and if English is your L1 these should be give-mes for you).
The deck should be showing that you have reviews do. You can also pull up Graphs and see all your review data till now. If this all looks in order then go ahead and delete the backup deck you had. You can rename this deck back to whatever again too. Also don't forget that because you exported and copied and what not, you must now reset Syncing for this new deck if you use Syncing. Also go online and clear out the prior deck to free up the space and help Damien a bit (after all syncing is FREE).

If any part of this didn't work out or something let me know. I think I hit everything correctly. Let me know if something doesn't make sense. Don't delete you backup till you know everything is A-ok.

vix86 Wrote:

Fadeway Wrote:Do you think what you suggested can still be done, even without index numbers, vix?

[Wall of information]

This worked perfectly for me. Thank you!

Ryajinor Wrote:This worked perfectly for me. Thank you!

Phew, glad to hear that it worked. I wasn't sure if it worked. To be honest I just sort of worked it out in my head and tested that the MATCH() worked in Excel like I thought it would.

EDIT: One of the things I also forgot to add in the Wall-o-Info was that on the new deck make sure you have it to "Show new cards in order added." That way you make use of what you just did. But I hope this was a bit obvious.

[s0apgun]

What is the Nukemarine's i+1 difference? I haven't started Core6k yet so just curious... so I know how to start correctly!

s0apgun Wrote:What is the Nukemarine's i+1 difference? I haven't started Core6k yet so just curious... so I know how to start correctly!

The original Core6k card order was done somewhat haphazardly. You often run into cards where they are i+2, i+3 etc. Meaning there are 2-3 words in a sentence you don't know (including the word you want to know).

Studies show that learning in a i+1 fashion makes picking up new vocab easier and lets you use context reading too. Nukemarine's excel sheet takes the original core6k and resorts it into a i+1 fashion, or as close as is possible to get to i+1.

[s0apgun]

Oh thats super neat, is there a pre-made Anki deck like that? Or is the only option to save those 3 excel sheets and create a deck with that? Sorry n00b question

Reminds me of Heisig method a bit with the primitives!

Looks like it. In the shared browser put in "i+1" you'll get Beginner, Basic pt1 & 2, and the Intermediate decks. These are based on the sheet I imagine. Simply down them all and start from Beginner and start Importing the decks to make a giant 6k deck. The ordering should be maintained, but I haven't d/led and tried to see.

[s0apgun]

Just downloaded the i+1 beginner deck from Anki. It appears the order is different, first card I am shown is これをください vs the excel sheet. It probably doesn't matter I just don't want to get started on the wrong deck. Thanks vix86!

s0apgun Wrote:What is the Nukemarine's i+1 difference? I haven't started Core6k yet so just curious... so I know how to start correctly!

While it's not a true i+1, it should come close. The reason is it was sorted by kanji so it stands to reason that you're not getting new words using new kanji multiple times a sentence. It's still possible to get two or three new words a sentence, but that's more rare in the Core2k/6k case. In addition, the kanji order used to sort came from KO2001 that has a more intuitive order with kanji that means the vocabulary words using them have closer association.

On the idea you should be studying vocabulary using the sentences and definitions to supplement that, I offered two types of kanji sorting. One is sorting the sentence as a whole. This was the original method. Recently, I offered another sort where just the vocabulary list is sorted. Don't worry about new words in the sentence since the sentence is there as a supplement. In time you might intuitively learn it, or just have it come up as it's own vocabulary word. On top of that, I evenly spread out the kana only words otherwise the first 500 words of Core 6k would have been only kana.

Either way, there's an index list for original Core, sentence sorted and vocabulary sorted. Its more important to give the individual the tools they need, then they can pick the path that works for them.

Nukemarine Wrote:

s0apgun Wrote:What is the Nukemarine's i+1 difference? I haven't started Core6k yet so just curious... so I know how to start correctly!

While it's not a true i+1, it should come close. The reason is it was sorted by kanji so it stands to reason that you're not getting new words using new kanji multiple times a sentence. It's still possible to get two or three new words a sentence, but that's more rare in the Core2k/6k case. In addition, the kanji order used to sort came from KO2001 that has a more intuitive order with kanji that means the vocabulary words using them have closer association.

This makes sense. It really is close to i+1 though. If there was ever a word in the sentence I didn't know, i could be assured in the next 10-20 cards it would be introduced. I really struggled with some of the groupings they used though 恨む・憎い・惜しむ in particular continue to give me a hell of a time due to them showing up at the same time. I really liked the reordering of the upper 4k (ie: core6k), they were so much easier than the original layout. Now I'm working on the other ~1500 that were part of the core10k (which isn't really another 4k cards as far as I can tell, its just rehashes of older cards that didn't use Kanji).

vix86 Wrote:

s0apgun Wrote:What is the Nukemarine's i+1 difference? I haven't started Core6k yet so just curious... so I know how to start correctly!

The original Core6k card order was done somewhat haphazardly. You often run into cards where they are i+2, i+3 etc. Meaning there are 2-3 words in a sentence you don't know (including the word you want to know).

Studies show that learning in a i+1 fashion makes picking up new vocab easier and lets you use context reading too. Nukemarine's excel sheet takes the original core6k and resorts it into a i+1 fashion, or as close as is possible to get to i+1.

Is this also true for the code 2k beginner and basic decks you also posted? That Nukemarine has reordered it to a i + 1 fashion?

pikagrue Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:

s0apgun Wrote:What is the Nukemarine's i+1 difference? I haven't started Core6k yet so just curious... so I know how to start correctly!

The original Core6k card order was done somewhat haphazardly. You often run into cards where they are i+2, i+3 etc. Meaning there are 2-3 words in a sentence you don't know (including the word you want to know).

Studies show that learning in a i+1 fashion makes picking up new vocab easier and lets you use context reading too. Nukemarine's excel sheet takes the original core6k and resorts it into a i+1 fashion, or as close as is possible to get to i+1.

Is this also true for the code 2k beginner and basic decks you also posted? That Nukemarine has reordered it to a i + 1 fashion?

If you look an the right most columns, there's an original index (Core) and an optimized index (KO 2k1). I messed up changing the optimized index in that it's now optimized based on the vocabulary word instead of the whole sentence. If you're savvy you can take this overall master list and add the particular index you want so the best sorting is used.

Optimized Kore List has index to all the sorting orders.

[s0apgun]

In your opinion Nukemarine, would making an Anki deck out of that optimized spreadsheet be the ideal way to dive into Core6k?

s0apgun Wrote:In your opinion Nukemarine, would making an Anki deck out of that optimized spreadsheet be the ideal way to dive into Core6k?

I don't know anyone that's complained about the optimized deck. Now, the words chosen by Cerego have been panned as the list was based on 10 years of newspaper articles. This gives you political terms before you get useful words like dog and cat. On the other hand, in exchange for that problem you get sample sentences, native audio, pictures and the optimized list.

Definitely use the Kore list, but no need to import from the spreadsheet. There's been an anki deck available for quite some time.

Is the "Kore list" based on Kanji Odyssey ordering? Thats what I had always assumed when people said Kore instead of Core.

Fadeway Wrote:I finished RTK about a month ago, and consequently loaded the deck that combines core2k and 6k in my SRS. After doing it for a month, I'm bothered by the speed it's happening at - I only add 20 words a day. I'm 500/6000 in at the moment, which means it'll take me until the end of this year to complete, if I up my reviews a bit. A year isn't bad, but it isn't good either.

A long time ago I was exactly in your position and my call was "I'll add 100s of words a day to finish faster". Result was I did finish faster than one year, but I spent the reminder on getting my reviews in check without adding new ones.... But since initial workload was so huge my ratio was abysmal and I didn't actually learn most of those words till much much later.

Recently I finally started adding new cards and this time I'm doing 20/day, my reviews are slowly getting close to 200 but I'll keep adding and see where it gets me.

On another note 6k words/year is a really good number to be aiming for, you're not going to learn Japanese in a year anyway so might as well organize information you're going to digest. Based on what peoples experiences are and my estimation by 15k words you're going to be pretty comfortable with the language and new vocabulary won't pop as often, so with that pace you'd reach that in 2-3 years, not bad I'd say.

vix86 Wrote:Is the "Kore list" based on Kanji Odyssey ordering? Thats what I had always assumed when people said Kore instead of Core.

Yes.