Learning grammar is fine, learning kanji is fine, but learning vocabulary keeps being for me the biggest obstacle.

I've been a long used for anki, and it works great at least for kanji but for vocabulary it just goes slowly and slowly. I switched to the core deck, and kept adding vocabulary from there but it just keeps going slowly and slowly.

I don't really know how I'm supposed to do this. I've tried sentences, it was a slow and painful experience and I don't recall much of the sentences either if any. I've tried just regular anki method, it works but slow. I also tried memorise which was good but the courses there are unfortunately terrible, unorganized and its filled with so many bugs.

Anyone with some suggestions or tips ?

Sounds to me like a matter of context. Try writing sentences on Lang-8 with the words you want to learn. (Using pre-made sentences didn't help me either.) That way your familiar with what you wanted to say and how it's used in context.Then get corrected, and if you used it wrong, it'll just be engraved in your mind because of that mistake. Otherwise, your still using it and therefore getting repetition. I felt the same way a little while ago, and just writing sentences has been helping me a lot already.

Did you ever tryed to use mnemonics ?That what i used to do before knowing any kanji and I could do very good with it.Even after doing kanji, sometimes I feel better making my own mnemonics for the words rather than using the Kanji for shortcuts.Tough it helps knowing the On-Youmi kunyoumi in some cases but for the kun youmi I prefer mnemonics.

Sorry to disappoint you but if you thought that you can continue learning vocabulary with a pace you got used to when you did RTK then you were wrong. Unless your memory is supper efficient, or you have constant exposure to words that you learn (either through reading or watching (and understanding those) native materials) your pace is going to be 20-30 new items a day.

There are people who can do 50/day but I don't think that's common.

Quote:Did you ever tryed to use mnemonics ?That what i used to do before knowing any kanji and I could do very good with it.Even after doing kanji, sometimes I feel better making my own mnemonics for the words rather than using the Kanji for shortcuts.Tough it helps knowing the On-Youmi kunyoumi in some cases but for the kun youmi I prefer mnemonics.

I used it for Kanji, and thats enough for me to say I don't like them. Mnemonics only works for me for a very few certain things, even when learning Kanji I hardly used mnemonics, I stilll make a new mnemonic for most card, but even for those who I don't use it with, it seems like I learn at the same rate. I'm just not good at making good mnemonics so I tend to dislike.

Quote:Sorry to disappoint you but if you thought that you can continue learning vocabulary with a pace you got used to when you did RTK then you were wrong. Unless your memory is supper efficient, or you have constant exposure to words that you learn (either through reading or watching (and understanding those) native materials) your pace is going to be 20-30 new items a day.

There are people who can do 50/day but I don't think that's common.

Ok then :/ thats a shame, cause I hear people do like 100 a day, and it would be nice to be able to at least get to half that point per day, at least especially when I finish the jouyou kanji and won't be adding as many kanji daily.

Lavasioth Wrote:

Quote:Sorry to disappoint you but if you thought that you can continue learning vocabulary with a pace you got used to when you did RTK then you were wrong. Unless your memory is supper efficient, or you have constant exposure to words that you learn (either through reading or watching (and understanding those) native materials) your pace is going to be 20-30 new items a day.

There are people who can do 50/day but I don't think that's common.

Ok then :/ thats a shame, cause I hear people do like 100 a day, and it would be nice to be able to at least get to half that point per day, at least especially when I finish the jouyou kanji and won't be adding as many kanji daily.

I think he was talking about words in general, not specifically kanji.

Lavasioth Wrote:I don't really know how I'm supposed to do this. I've tried sentences, it was a slow and painful experience and I don't recall much of the sentences either if any. I've tried just regular anki method, it works but slow. I also tried memorise which was good but the courses there are unfortunately terrible, unorganized and its filled with so many bugs.

Anyone with some suggestions or tips ?

There are a few Core decks out there. Which specific deck are you using as there are now a couple that sort via kanji in the sentences or kanji used in the vocabulary word itself. Both of those types are generally accepted as being easier to learn than the random order of the original deck.

The next question is what you do to initially learn a word then what do you do to review the word. For initial learning, I always wrote down the word, then the kana for the word, then the entire sentence example. This is probably what many do, but I'm not sure. On review, the question side is English word and sentence and a Japanese clozed sentence. I answer by writing down the correct word. Others go Kana to Kanji which is also what I used to do. I only focus the vocabulary word. Others like to test themselves on every word in the sentence. The later can have you failing a card a lot more times.

Well, I'm sure there's a lot of different ways to approach this, but for what it's worth, here's what I do.

I do think sentences is the way to go, because they provide context and usage examples, as opposed to just random words.

I use Anki, but you could use any SRS.

I don't try to remember the entire sentence, which would be really hard. I focus on one vocabulary word per sentence. So on one side of the card, I put the sentence in Japanese, with the target vocabulary in bold, and on the other side of the card, I put the same sentence in Japanese, minus the target vocabulary.

I also put the hiragana on the flip-side of the card, with spaces between each word.

Finally, I put an English-eque translation at the bottom, for my own reference, again with the target vocab in bold. I don't worry too much about the quality of the translation, and I almost never refer to it when I'm doing my reviews. But I still feel it's important to do a translation so that I'm sure I really understand what's being said.

For example, to learn the word "guilty," the card would look like this, with four fields:

彼女に*有罪*の判決が下がった。

かのじょ　に　*ゆうざい*　の　はんけつ　が　さがった。

彼女に＿＿の判決が下がった。(guilty)

To her, a *guilty* verdict was handed down.

I use a few rules when making my cards.

1. One unknown word per sentence. I don't want to overload my memory, but instead focus on just the one word. For the same reason, I try to use simple, short sentences.

2. Make the sentence personally relevant. Instead of using a generic "her," I'd try to use the name of someone received a guilty verdict (a public figure, for example). Then when I do my reviews, I imagine myself speaking this sentence, maybe relaying the news to a mutual friend. If surroundings permit, I'll say it out loud. I want to make it as memorable and full of emotion as possible.

3. Choose necessary words. I live in Japan, so most of the words I choose are either a) words I heard but didn't understand; or b) words that I wanted to say but didn't know how to. For example, I might be explaining about a court case and suddenly realize I don't know how to say "guilty." So that's obviously a word that I need.

As for how many you can learn a day, I don't worry about that too much. It depends on how much time you can devote to it. I do about 10 new cards a day, and that's plenty. If by this time next year my vocabulary has grown by 3650 words, I'll be plenty happy.

Lavasioth Wrote:There are people who can do 50/day but I don't think that's common.

Quote:Ok then :/ thats a shame, cause I hear people do like 100 a day, and it would be nice to be able to at least get to half that point per day, at least especially when I finish the jouyou kanji and won't be adding as many kanji daily.

I used to learn up to 150, with around 120 being the average of cards/day, while working through Kanji Odyssey levels 1 + 2. This took some time of getting used to, since it was the first time I tried to learn mass-amounts of vocabulary, but it worked. Since KO has many unknown words right from the get go, it involved constant look-up and adding definitions for the unknowns to the back of the card. Just let me say that I am surely NO genius, and in the number of failed cards per session was high in the beginning, around 16 to 25 out of 135. But this changed at some point.

I was typing everything in myself, not using any pre-made decks, and I think that it helped. The other key factor is to constantly search for words via google and read whatever comes up, even though the texts contain many more unknowns. But you see the words in their natural habitat, so you eventually also learn how they are used and in which context. Example sentences might also work, from edict, or some other source, i don't know.

Once you are used to the high numbers, it eventually becomes easier, as long as the number of known items vs. unknown items is higher on average. And many decks are sorted in such ways that there is no more than 1 unknown item. You just have to find the best way for yourself to learn vocabulary, and this is something only you yourself can find out.

I learned tons of vocabulary a few years ago playing around with Gyakuten Saiban on a Nintendo DS. I took me a really, really long time to get to solve the mystery. I haven't had much success using anki for vocab either. I have memorized songs i.e. I can say/sing all the words and write out at least part of the song. This takes a while, but if I really like the song, I am less bored with this than I am with anki reps. JDrama is also good for vocab. If you need to learn technical vocabulary, there are a few translators wandering around here somewhere.

One method that helped me learn vocabulary faster was to learn words that share the same kanji, together (同時 , 一時 , 時間切れ,時給, ect). How helpful this will be will depend on the deck you’re using (you could find extra words from a dictionary but then you may end up learning rare words if you’re not cautious). When a certain kanji has a different pronunciation for different words, learn a batch of words that use a certain reading and once that reading feels solidified go back and learn the others. It will be slow in the beginning but for me, it eventually made learning words far easier.

Edit:Something else to keep in mind is that if you memorize words solely through anki you’re only going to make yourself familiar with the words. You need to experience native Japanese in order to learn the nuances and usage of the various words (some like 犬 you could master with Anki however a word like 僕(ぼく) has nuances attached to it that are hard to explain).

I made the mistake of relying too much on learning from wordlists to “get ahead” in Japanese when I had first began learning years ago. Although the foundation I had built through my massive vocabulary learning spree has helped me, learning from native sources and using Anki on the side would have been far more effective (and fun). Learning from native sources may make you feel like you’re slowing down your learning progress but from my experience, picking easy to understand native materials and slowly working yourself up to harder material is more effective than trying to master various vocab and grammar points before you start trying to read/watch real Japanese material.

So in my experience, grammar books, courses and vocab lists [anki decks] are great as long as you don’t use these resources as an excuse to wait until you’re “ready” to start learning from real Japanese material. Hope at least something in this post will be helpful for you.

I think when you first start learning a language new vocabulary has almost no stickiness. You learn them, remember a few but forget a lot. And it's very hard to predict what will stick and what you seem to be forgetting. A lot of the time you'll think come to a word and be annoyed that you'd forgotten it's meaning. But the fact that you remember having known the meaning in the past means that there is a trace memory remaining and it just needs to reinforced. Vocabulary learning is a long-term thing. It takes time for you brain to get used to new information and change it's configuration in accordance with that. Think of the brain like a muscle. It grows after you study, while you rest, while you sleep. I don't think there is some ultimate drill that let's you just install items into you memory in an instant and have it fully active and instantly retrievable for a lifetime. You need to get used to seeing words in many different contexts over a long period of time before they really stick.
To that end I think it's best to literally swim in a sea of new vocabulary. Expose yourself to as many new words and their meanings as you can. Use them as tool of comprehension/communication. Don't be too concerned with 'momorizing' them right from the start. Just keep on going and you'll get used to them eventually. I think trying to 'memorize' things (via srs for instance) is a bit of a trap really. Because you'll end up focusing on what you're forgetting. You may think it's vitally important that you can remember the item the next day so you'll spend a whole bunch of time making sure you can. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, unless you're trying to learn the language in a week or something. If you are then good luck, but I think you're better off focusing on the longterm. You should ask yourself, how much do I understand this month compared to last month? How well can I communicate this month compared to last month?

Lavasioth Wrote:Anyone with some suggestions or tips ?

I can't tell exactly, but it sounds like you're just starting out with Japanese. I'm sure you're aware from personal experience, but learning a new language takes a lot of time in the beginning. When learning new words, you have nothing existing to make connections to.

For instance, when learning a new word in English, you already know thousands of words, so you generally just make a connection to a word you already know and it's pretty easy to remember. Let me try to give an example with Japanese.

I don't know the word for donkey. So I look it up and find out that it is "驢馬（ろば）". I imagine if I put this into Anki, I would probably only fail it once before I memorized it. Why? Well, it ends in "馬", which I know is "horse". From having studied Japanese, I know it's probably some type of horse, and it probably ends in "ば". Usually that's enough to jog back the meaning of the word along with the definition.

For someone new to Japanese, there's nothing to connect it to. Even if you recognized "馬", it might not help you with the reading or with the relation to "donkey".

As JapaneseRuleOf7 and Lavasioth said, don't worry about trying to cram. As long as you're doing your reviews everyday, and occasionally adding new cards, you should be fine. Go at your own pace and have fun. That's really all that matters.

For the record, I also add about 10 new cards a day. This seems to be a pretty sustainable pace.

(Also, don't forget that you don't have to use an SRS. I believe NukeMarine(?) uses a method based on reading parallel texts along with a lot of shadowing, etc. You may want to search for alternate ways to study.)

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Well, I'm sure there's a lot of different ways to approach this, but for what it's worth, here's what I do.

I do think sentences is the way to go, because they provide context and usage examples, as opposed to just random words.

I use Anki, but you could use any SRS.

I don't try to remember the entire sentence, which would be really hard. I focus on one vocabulary word per sentence. So on one side of the card, I put the sentence in Japanese, with the target vocabulary in bold, and on the other side of the card, I put the same sentence in Japanese, minus the target vocabulary.

I also put the hiragana on the flip-side of the card, with spaces between each word.

Finally, I put an English-eque translation at the bottom, for my own reference, again with the target vocab in bold. I don't worry too much about the quality of the translation, and I almost never refer to it when I'm doing my reviews. But I still feel it's important to do a translation so that I'm sure I really understand what's being said.

For example, to learn the word "guilty," the card would look like this, with four fields:

I might just try it but, I'm already sceptical about it, because japanese words can be used in so many different ways to mean so many different things I'm not sure how well its gonna work.

' Wrote:There are a few Core decks out there. Which specific deck are you using as there are now a couple that sort via kanji in the sentences or kanji used in the vocabulary word itself. Both of those types are generally accepted as being easier to learn than the random order of the original deck.

The next question is what you do to initially learn a word then what do you do to review the word. For initial learning, I always wrote down the word, then the kana for the word, then the entire sentence example. This is probably what many do, but I'm not sure. On review, the question side is English word and sentence and a Japanese clozed sentence. I answer by writing down the correct word. Others go Kana to Kanji which is also what I used to do. I only focus the vocabulary word. Others like to test themselves on every word in the sentence. The later can have you failing a card a lot more times.

I use: Cerego iKnow smart-fm Core-2000 Japanese Vocabulary Tabulatortast.

Each time I come upon a sentence, and the keyword is unknown to me I write it down, and add it to another anki deck with the english word on front, the japanese on the back.

I figured it would just be easier to learn how they are used in sentences more by exposure cause some words can have some ridiculous amount of different meanings learning how its written in one context isnt gonna help that much.

Either way thanks to everyone else for the tips, I think ill just try a bit around and see what works out. I should just limit myself to a low amount but, if I only go 10 words a day its gonna take ages to be able to read native japanese material cause there's such a ridiculous amount of unknown words, so probably around 3-4 pages in a manga in a day if I had to just pick 10 of the words I didnt know. It just sounds very little.

Ill try sentences first of all, see what its like.

If you want, you can try learning through watching Japanese tv dramas.
They have exact Japanese subtitles (I.e. the subtitles are exactly what the actors are saying).

You can get the Japanese subtitles here:
http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/subtitles.php#Japanese

just so you know your're going to have to actually read manga (lots of it) to understand it 99% or 100% or whatever since not all the words are in some premade anki deck or in a dictionary persay. And you can learn so much grammar from decks. you need to experience real japanse like in the manga to get used to it. don't hold off manga till you think you'll understand it 100%. It just seems like you're too obsessed with learning as many words as possible because that day will never come if you don't even read manga in the first place. By learning though you mean knowing the english translation/definition of a word right? but that doesn't mean you understand the word anyway which i hope you are already aware of.

since you're gung-ho on anki deck or whatever you can try it. but i would say also actually read manga or whatever other thing you're interested in reading.

couple quotes from ajattttt
I learn Japanese/Chinese by taking tests on the SRS, not for the purpose of taking SRS tests and showing off my deck stats. #justsayin #

“I’ll buy Japanese books when I know how to read them” = “I’ll buy Final Fantasy when I know how to play it” #notgonnahappen #

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:“I’ll buy Japanese books when I know how to read them” = “I’ll buy Final Fantasy when I know how to play it” #notgonnahappen #

This is a pretty crappy analogy. There are a lot of things you can do to vastly improve your reading ability before you ever jump into reading actual books. And there is a level at which jumping into books is pretty inappropriate in that it will be demotivating rather than motivating, and the time spent on reading the book would be better spent on something more structured.

Whereas, with Final Fantasy none of those things are true. How does this analogy work?

Tzadeck, that's been my experience exactly. I've clocked in over 300 hours of videogames in Japanese where I understood close to nothing and don't feel like I gained much from it. I regret not using the time on studying a grammar book or something.

I know at my level I can probably read and understand books for toddlers, but honestly, I'd rather not.

I'm on board with Stephen Krashen here -- input has to be comprehensible before you can get very much out of it.

That said, the レベル別日本語多読ライブラリ goes down to a very easy level, probably around N5. Extensive reading is great when it's at a level you can understand.

Books require a much larger more mature vocabulary than manga.
So I'd suggest starting out with manga.

There are many manga that have furigana over every single kanji.
So if you've finished RTK, reading through manga is more a matter
of getting a good grasp of grammar.

Many people recommend Yotsubato as a good first manga because
it's a slice of life story with very simple vocabulary.

When you can read through most manga without using your dictionary
often, then you can try to read books or light novels.

Also, like I already mentioned in another post, drama scripts are very good
for learning conversational japanese.

Roughly, there are 350 to 550 unique kanji in a 45-minute drama episode.
I don't know how many words that translates too.
But at least it gives an estimate for what's needed to read a drama script.

Books roughly have 1500 to 1900 unique kanji (basically you need to know all of
the joyo kanji and a some obscure ones).

It really depends though betwen manga and books.

Manga will always be infinitely easier than a book because you have visual clues to go on to help you understand stuff while a book is going to require you to be able to understand what you read and grasp the scene.

Light novels are especially easy to step up into from manga if you have about 6000 words. I have found that reading 俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない has been easy because of this. It also has an anime to go with it so you are not always totally lost on whats going on. At the same time its not simply word for word as to what the anime is. Just as movies from books often leave a lot out, same for light novel. There is a TON of internal dialogue going on and dropped scenes and context that was excluded from the anime. Some things have even flowed differently. That said, I've been amazed at the amount of non-joyo kanji that's thrown in the books. I'm on book 2 and 1/3 way through and I think I've added maybe 40-50 non-joyo kanji. All of it has furigana though, but there are also a lot of words that are never used. I've added a lot of them to my decks and native speakers have even stopped and pointed out that "We never say that." (May not say it but it gets written though so ya...)

You have to pick your light novels just like you pick your manga. Some manga will have furigana on everything and some will only have it on some stuff. Some won't have any at all. Light novels are exactly the same. I think maybe some publishers are easier to read from than others, but I'm not 100% on that, it might be an author thing. You could potentially find some manga that are harder than some light novels (ex: Ghost in the Shell).

Whenever I have a week or two when I have plenty of free time to study, I can usually learn 200-250 new words a day. Two tactics in particular have made this possible:

1. I stopped caring about getting answers correct in Anki. Instead of hesitating on cards I think I could get correct, I just fail them. I never spend more than 3 seconds on a single card. This has made my reviews dramatically more efficient, and yet I haven't seen any significant changes in my pass/fail rate for mature cards.

2. I made a "learn deck" with reduced intervals (do a search on the forums to find out more about this). I add all new words into my learn deck and review them before I go to sleep until each card has an interval over a few minutes. I then continuously review throughout the following day, and I import the words to my main vocabulary deck right before I add new words again. In my learn deck, I only learn and review 7 new cards at a time until their intervals are at a few minutes, so I don't have to struggle learning too many at once. When I wake up and review in the morning, I usually remember the readings and meanings of almost all the words. I used to do the Iverson method, but it now seems obsolete compared to my learn deck.

chamcham Wrote:Books require a much larger more mature vocabulary than manga.
So I'd suggest starting out with manga.

That really depends on the manga. Manga are on all kinds of subjects in all kinds of genres, and the vocab they contain can be almost anything. A typical manga will have far less text (and thus fewer words) than a novel, but it's not like they're drawing from a smaller, "less mature" pool of words than books are. A manga like Golgo 13 contains a lot of vocab related to politics and recent history, and virtually no furigana since it's in an adult's magazine. Something like Mugen no Junin (Blade of the Immortal) has all kinds of archaic terms; I still can't read MnJ without a dictionary and fully understand it, even with Samura's footnotes defining some of the more complicated words.

Quote:When you can read through most manga without using your dictionary
often, then you can try to read books or light novels.

Most manga? There are a huge amount of manga out there; how would you ever figure out whether you can read "most manga"?

Quote:Books roughly have 1500 to 1900 unique kanji (basically you need to know all of
the joyo kanji and a some obscure ones).

"Need to know" is misleading; you do not need to know every single kanji in a book to try reading it.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:Books roughly have 1500 to 1900 unique kanji (basically you need to know all of
the joyo kanji and a some obscure ones).

"Need to know" is misleading; you do not need to know every single kanji in a book to try reading it.

I found dozens of great reading strategies at http://www.mori7.com/beb_category.php?id=14 One of the best is to choose 5 or 6 books. When one is too hard, continue with the next, and so on. Instead of learning to read from a single book or Manga, until a point is reached that 100% of everything is understood, it is better to read different things, and return to the difficult one, after the remaining book / Manga have become easier. Or rather when one has learned more grammar, vocabulary or whatever is missing to make sense. Also when, instead of fighting through one book, one chooses 5 books, the chances are high that it becomes an accomplishement, once 2 or 3 of the others are finished. As I said, there are more wonderful tips to find there, not only for reading but also for writing. (For which I use it mainly). Go and discover, and there is so much to read, that eventually it also becomes a good source for mining vocabulary.

I did Core2K for a while, but I found it freakishly boring, bland, and contextless.

Scripts and subtitles are available for pretty much every jdrama now and a good number of anime. Aside from just watching these shows with these subtitles, there are a lot of things you can do with these scripts. You can just simply read the scripts as if it were a book on paper. You can also do the same but with LWT, so you have easy access to a personal and online dictionary. You could watch your show and pause every sentence to make sure you understand everything. Which would be slow going, but hey you get everything in context that you wouldn't get with your visual imagination if it were a plain book, and an audio source that you don't get with manga. Also with Subs2SRS combined with the morphology plugin is an insanely great way to get i+1 sentences. Sentences I find that are actually enjoyable. Each of these vary quite a bit in difficulty, Subs2SRS method being rather easy with what can be an extraordinary amount of difficult setup, but I think each have their own merit.

Anyway, just my two yen.