Hello Everyone,

Nice to meet you I apologize in advance if this is posted elsewhere, and being new I did not find it.

I wanted to the ping the community of experts here on the most efficient to learn vocabularly--because I'm not exactly sure what that might be.

For example, if I find 3 new words I want to learn, would I just enter those into my SRS and keep failing them until I eventually I get them right? Or would I do some sort of studying for 5 or 6 minutes on each one, review a few times throughout the day, then add them to my SRS and let it cycle them for me?

I truly want to learn, so any feedback is appreciated and I will do my best to learn from it

This is what I do.

1. Enter it into my SRS.
2. When it comes up for review, if I fail it, then I spend a minute working on what I failed. For example, if it's a kanji that I wrote incorrectly, I write it out a few times, paying attention to the elements that make it up and the stroke order. If it's a word whose meaning I don't remember, then I read the sentence I got it from, or read other example sentences, and try to visualize it in context. If it's a word whose reading I don't remember, I say it out loud, and out loud in the context of a sentence. I have my Anki settings set so that failed cards come up in ten minutes -- long enough to see if I've really "learned" it at least provisionally.
3. Repeat.

If you're failing the same word more than once in a day, then you need to rethink your approach. For me, context and visualization are the things that make the difference between learning and brute-force memorization.

For me:

-I add the sentence with the new word/grammar into SRS. I make sure there are only 1 or 2 new things in the sentence to learn.
-I make sure I understand the whole sentence as well as the context of the article/book/etc. it was in first before reviewing it in SRS.
-Brute force it.
-In cases where a word doesn't stick, I create an additional card with just the word and its definition.

Thank you both for the advice--I'm going to put the suggestions to use!

kainzero,

I didn't think about adding a sentence with the word into a deck for context. I was simply just adding words straight to into a vocab--I can see now how learning it in context would help. For your sentence, would you add it as a cloze deletion? Just trying to think of how I would add it in, but keep the focus on the word I'm trying to learn.

Fillanzea,

Good suggestions. I will try the visualization, writing and also check what my failed card intervals are set to...

There's nothing wrong with just adding new words and then just reviewing them like normal, even if you fail them a lot initially you'll get them right eventually. Don't be hesitant with failing cards, it's natural. I like this AJATT article on it. Just leave it to the SRS scheduling.

If there's a particular word that you think you just can't get into your head no matter how many times you review it, you could suspend that card for the time being (assuming you're using Anki, don't know about other SRSs' features) and come back to it some other time when it might sink in better. Or you could google around for a context to the word that makes it easier to remember.

By the way, what are your vocab cards like? Do you just have a lone Japanese word with the translation of it, or do you do sentences or something? I think having done full sentences helped a lot in the beginning because the context makes the word easier to learn, and I indirectly reviewed the grammar structures of the sentences too (wasn't so picky with the grammar rules). Now I feel that I have got and constantly get so much exposure that doing just lone words is faster and easier. I count on encountering the words outside SRS a lot.

Edit: You can have cloze deletion, but the context will have to make it quite obvious or there'll be multiple options you can think of. Look up "MCD" on here and on AJATT if you're into that. I just put on sentences that I didn't find too difficult to understand except for a word or two (or grammar points) that I wanted to focus on, and then translations on the back. Never bothered with cloze deletion.

TwoMoreCharacters,

Great advice as well. I'm reading the article now, and it's a shift to my current way of thinking which I think I needed...

This is easily the most supportive community I've come across online

Yeah, I definitely think it's better to have context, either by doing straight-up sentence cards where you try to understand the sentence as a whole, or by doing vocabulary cards with the sentence as context.

I'm using Learning With Texts for my vocabulary studying now, so most of my reviews are something like this:

Q: これは世間を憚かる遠慮というよりも、その方が私にとって自然だからである.

A:　はばかる　hesitate, be afraid of what others may think

And (I don't know whether this goes without saying) I don't test myself on remembering the exact English definition I wrote down; I text myself on whether I can get reasonably close to the general sense.

supermancampus Wrote:kainzero,

I didn't think about adding a sentence with the word into a deck for context. I was simply just adding words straight to into a vocab--I can see now how learning it in context would help. For your sentence, would you add it as a cloze deletion? Just trying to think of how I would add it in, but keep the focus on the word I'm trying to learn.

Well typically my card IS the sentence.

For example:

Front -
家庭で使っている電球の中に、熱くなって光を出す「白熱電球」があります。

Back -
電球 でんきゅう (n) light bulb; (P)
白熱電球 はくねつでんきゅう (n) light bulb; incandescent light bulb

My focus is on understanding the entire sentence. I only define words that I don't know, and I keep that low so that it's only 1 or 2 new words, so it makes the focus relatively easy.

I also have straight vocabulary cards and cloze delete cards, but those are more for JLPT preparation than for actual language purposes.

There's also grammar cards that usually contain the entire definition of the grammar for reference, ripped from JLPT books.

Front -
ビールであろうとワインであろうと、酒は酒だ。運転前に絶対飲んではいけない。

Back -
～であれ・・・～であれ・～であろうと・・・であろうと

意味：～でも・・・でも関係なく、同じ種類のものにはみんな同じこととか言える。
接続：「名」＋であれ
注意：関係ないばらばらの例ではなく、同じ意味のグループに入る例を並べる。

kainzero,

Thanks alot for the explanation and the example. I'm going to try creating sentences tonight when I get home for a few new words I've heard today--looking forward to a new method!

Fillanzea,

Definitely, I truly see the value in sentences which I didn't before. Your example sentence idea is a good one, so I will be combining with kainzero's tonight

Learning with texts looks interesting, how do you like it?

Again, many thanks to you both.

For pure vocab learning I've found it much more efficient to ignore sentences and keep the cards as simple as possible.

This is for grinding through huge chunks of vocab.

I wouldn't create sentences myself, I'd rather just take them from sources. Usually I'm reading an article/book or something like that.

Given the amount of sentences I get corrected on Lang-8, I don't want to take the risk that I'm learning something incorrect.

(Though surprisingly, there've been plenty of times when I've looked at a mature card and realized I made a typo somewhere and have to go and correct it.)

I've only been using Learning With Texts for a couple of days, but so far I like it a lot. I used to do sentence cards with Anki, but since I get most of my sentences from books/magazines, if I wanted to learn more than one word in a sentence I would either have to type out (or copy/paste) the sentence multiple times and do multiple cards -- which was annoying -- or I would have to do multiple unknown words on the same card, which I don't prefer to do because it makes each card too difficult. Learning with Texts is nice -- you can just input the whole text once, and then pick out the words that you want to learn.

My one complaint is that it doesn't really parse Japanese, which is mildly annoying but not impossible to work around.

This is really two questions, one of techniques for initial learning ("priming" it before you start reviewing it in your SRS) and a second of content (what material/cards should you learn vocab from).

Techniques:

supermancampus Wrote:...some sort of studying for 5 or 6 minutes on each one, review a few times throughout the day...

This can work, but it's worth noting that this is essentially a spaced repetition algorithm (albeit adhoc, loosely defined, and not based on good science) and thus you'll almost certainly find better results with the better algorithm.

I used to use Anki 1.0 with a separate "learning" deck that had micro-intervals ( initial intervals of like 20 seconds and once it gets to 1hr I unsuspend it from my normal deck and delete from learn deck ). Anki 2.0 is much nicer and implements a learning mechanism for new cards right from the start that work with fixed intervals which I would definitely recommend using if you don't mind that it's still in beta.

Content:
As others have mentioned, sentences for context helps a lot, but it's worth pointing out that some sentences are drastically more interesting and thus memorable than others.

I learn almost all my vocab now through sentences from anime/dramas generated by subs2srs and sorted in my personalized optimal learning order according to MorphMan. It's a nearly automatic process and results in a very nice corpa of sentences which are of a very high base quality. Since there's so many and it automatically resorts itself in optimal learning order, you can also be very liberal in suspending cards that you don't find immediately entertaining.

I really can't emphasize how much easier I found learning vocab from sentences generated via subs2srs of shows I really enjoyed watching compared to core6k.

Actually, I'm having the same question as supermancampus; while Heisig 1 went relatively well for me (around 90% retention) my retention dropped like a well-oiled brick when starting vocab. So I, too, am wondering how to effectively learn vocabulary.

The sentence-based method definitely seems interesting. I think it may make learning in the sense of not failing the cards easier, but would seem to have as risk that the word is harder to recognize outside the sentence, and may cost more time due to all the 'extraneous' context to read, especially for a beginner like me who can not read Japanese very quickly yet.

And forgetting words again and again - in my experience (and as far as I understand memory research) retention increases with the vividness/importance of the item, and decreases with the complexity of it. For example, I find words like "雨" (あめ) easy to learn, both since it has few letters and I get soaked often since I live in a very rainy country. However, I have significantly more trouble with 引き続き, which is quite a long word and a bit more abstract. I think this means that for a beginner like myself, focusing on short, simple words at first may be advisable; it may be easier to learn words like 面白い if you have first learned 白い, which is actually easy to remember if you know that Japanese sometimes avoid the number four because it is associated with death (し) and white is the colour of mourning. But I digress. Anyway, I think Overture's point in liberally suspending hard cards makes lots of sense.

The four different methods I'm testing so far for retention are as follows:

1) learn by 'usage'. I try to use the new word while talking to myself a few times as 'substitute' in an English sentence. For example 'Asatte I will take a walk in the forest' 'Asatte evening, I'll return home'. I do this three times, sometimes on my bike, and occasionally a day or a few days later again. So far, retention seems to be reasonably well with this method.

2) learn from texts; though in my case I use the lyrics of songs I find on youtube and put the individual words in Anki; the song is just to sing in my free time and make a sort of meaningful rehearsal. Example: I'm now learning the vocab from

, singing to myself in empty moments like in the supermarket or while traveling "見せて 上げよう 輝く世界..." Disadvantage: it can take some time to get to the right video and you often need to convert verbs back to their 'native form'. Overall, though, an enjoyable form of learning, and words seem to stick relatively well.

3) 'raw kanji visualization'. For example, if I see 格好いい, I use Heisig and miscellanous associations based on the raw form to turn the 'raw visuals' into something memorable. For example, 格 ('status' in Heisig), I recognize as one of my status-conscious family members, which in Dutch is fortunately called 'kak'. Based on that, remembering the 'ko' is quite doable (right side of 好 is child, which has 'ko' as one of the kun-yomi). With elementary hirigana reading I now have kakkoshii (かっこいい) Remembering the meaning, 'cool'/attractive, is then a relatively small burden. I'm also experimenting with this method, but much depends on how successful my associations are, method [1] seems more robust at the moment.

4) pronounciation->meaning->kanji. It may also be possible to start with the hirigana and learn the meaning as a first step; when that has been done, you could probably easily learn to recognize the correct kanji if you know Heisig. So this would be more like breaking the learning into two steps; first pronounciation/meaning, after succes on that, work on to kanji->pronounciation->meaning.

Anyway, these four strategies, the 'words from sentences' method, and the 'raw SRS labor' make six methods; starting with short/easy words is a kind of additional strategy. Does anyone have methods to add that they have tried and worked well and less well, and how is the learning time compared to retention? I still have a few thousand words to go, so I'd love to test different strategies to see which work best for me.

EWLameijer Wrote:The sentence-based method definitely seems interesting. I think it may make learning in the sense of not failing the cards easier, but would seem to have as risk that the word is harder to recognize outside the sentence, and may cost more time due to all the 'extraneous' context to read, especially for a beginner like me who can not read Japanese very quickly yet.

"Learning in context only" - definitely a concern. However, if I feel like I should know something when I read it "in the wild," and I don't, it goes in the SRS too. Two example sentences are better than one.

"Cost more time" - I think that reading speed improves if you keep reading the same sentences over and over, plus I think it trains comprehension. There've been a couple a sentences that I haven't really understood but after throwing it in the SRS I end up getting a clearer understanding of it (and perhaps even the article that I pulled it from).

EWLameijer Wrote:The sentence-based method definitely seems interesting. I think it may make learning in the sense of not failing the cards easier, but would seem to have as risk that the word is harder to recognize outside the sentence, and may cost more time due to all the 'extraneous' context to read, especially for a beginner like me who can not read Japanese very quickly yet.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature! You get good at reading quickly by reading a lot of material, and especially by reading a lot of easy material, which most of the stuff in your SRS should be. Anyway, it depends whether your sentence method involves understanding every word in the sentence or just using the sentence as context for a specific vocabulary term. So, I have sentences like

甘やかした子がだめになるのは世の常、気の利いたご近所なら親をやんわり 諭す のが道だろう。

(where 諭す is the term I'm trying to remember). I don't need to read that entire sentence. 親をやんわり諭す is enough context, and the rest is there if I need it.

I think of it this way: unless you are a translator, your task in speaking a language is almost never "come up with the English translation of this term," or "come up with a dictionary definition of this term." It's usually "understand this term in the context of a sentence." So it makes sense to model that when studying, I think, and I agree with kainzero -- there's no harm in adding extra sentences for a word if that's what you need. It may be that the word is abstract enough that you just need some extra input to triangulate the meaning.

EWLameijer Wrote:The sentence-based method definitely seems interesting. I think it may make learning in the sense of not failing the cards easier, but would seem to have as risk that the word is harder to recognize outside the sentence, and may cost more time due to all the 'extraneous' context to read, especially for a beginner like me who can not read Japanese very quickly yet.

I did this when I was learning Hindi. I can now read at a pace 10x faster than I sued to be able to. Today, I compared my reading rate with my brother's (he hasn't been using the sentence method) and was shocked. I really helps.


Also, consider doing i+1 sentences where you get a sentence where everything is something you already know, except for 1 item, which is new.

Fillanzea Wrote:there's no harm in adding extra sentences for a word if that's what you need. It may be that the word is abstract enough that you just need some extra input to triangulate the meaning.

You're going to have to add multiple sentences for the same word anyway. Japanese, just like English, has a lot of homonyms. You might be able to collapse your understanding of some of these other meanings by coming up with strong abstract representations of the word's meaning, but it won't cover everything. But this is seriously why the sentence method is important/required. If you were Japanese and studying English and you had a card that looked like this:

(Front) Run
(Back) 走る

You would eventually find that that card is suboptimal. Which 'run' do you mean?

"He went for a run."
"The politician ran for public office."
"He ran from the police."
"The car is running fine."
"The trains run every hour."
(More advanced level)
"Her mascara ran."
"Her stockings ran."
"He ran guns for the mafia."

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, run has 28 different meanings as an Intransitive verb, 31 as a Transitive, and 30 as a noun. This is quite a bit and I generally haven't seen anything as bad in Japanese (かける comes close) but you get the idea. You NEED context.

overture2112 Wrote:This is really two questions, one of techniques for initial learning ("priming" it before you start reviewing it in your SRS) and a second of content (what material/cards should you learn vocab from).

You're absolutely right, that's what I was asking without really knowing how to ask I'm definitely going to try Anki 2.0 (had no idea there was a beta version) and focus on the good science aspect--I definitely want to learn things the most efficient and proper way.

I just did a search on subs2srs and MorphMan and they both seem extremely powerful and would help me out immensely. MorphMan in particular looks amazing, but a little intimidating because I'm still so new, so I'm going to read about it slowly until I understand it.

I can't thank you enough for the advice, and taking the time to respond.

And also my thanks for your comments! I will definitely give the 'learning from sentences'-method more consideration, also since you're right that there is no such thing as a 'translation' for a word; words may have a sort of general nebulous 'idea' associated with them next to a number of fixed expressions. On the other hand, that is advanced language use, and a beginner may need some crutches such as 走る -> "run". In my view, it's a bit like science; quite some scientists try to explain every detail of their research, even to a class of elementary school children - that is usually ineffective; people generally need an 'oversimplified' base knowledge that they can build upon and refine later, like a tree can't start by building leaves in the air and add the trunk and branches as an afterthought.

That being said, I'm still curious about other/better ways to learn vocabulary (just heard some tip about physical language learning, acting out verbs). Are there any other methods you'd recommend next to sentence learning (which I will try out as well)

Also, it could be that a beginner would benefit more from one way of learning and less from another way of learning, while this may be different for an intermediate/advanced learner. Since I'm much of a vocab beginner (I guess my Anki has now about 200 words), are there specific strategies that you find/found helpful at this stage?

vix86 Wrote:According to the American Heritage Dictionary, run has 28 different meanings as an Intransitive verb, 31 as a Transitive, and 30 as a noun. This is quite a bit and I generally haven't seen anything as bad in Japanese (かける comes close) but you get the idea. You NEED context.

Truly excellent observation sir. I'm going to follow this advice as well Thanks for your time.

supermancampus Wrote:MorphMan in particular looks amazing, but a little intimidating...

I'm hoping Morph Man 3 + Anki 2 will be a bit more streamlined. One of my close friends is about at the point where he can learn through subs2srs so I'm hoping to get a lot of feedback from him on usability improvements.

supermancampus Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:According to the American Heritage Dictionary, run has 28 different meanings as an Intransitive verb, 31 as a Transitive, and 30 as a noun. This is quite a bit and I generally haven't seen anything as bad in Japanese (かける comes close) but you get the idea. You NEED context.

Truly excellent observation sir. I'm going to follow this advice as well Thanks for your time.

I think this is a good and important point, but there are some things that people would be able to argue against it:

1) Every language has words like "run", but a majority of words has a rather restricted set of meanings; for example 星 has only one or two main meanings. That some words have lots of meanings and would (perhaps!) require context for understanding, does not mean that putting words in context would be the best study methods for all words, [it even does not mean that it would be a good study method at all!] especially for the simpler words it may be overkill and possibly even deleterious as providing context for simple words gives spurious cues (for example, writing "オバマは[白瓜]食べます" may lead you to see "Obama" and immediately skip to the right answer, cucumber, without even consciously processing the kanji; it would be hard to recognize cucumbers then when not eaten by Obama)

2) Not all meanings of a word are equally frequent. Just as it is not worthwhile to learn 100% of existing Kanji or 100% of words in a language, it is probably not necessary to learn 100% of meanings of every word; knowing only the most frequent meanings of words and knowing about 98% of words in the rest of the text would generally seem enough. Knowing all meanings of a word would therefore seem irrelevant for most learners.

3) My main question was about learning when you are a beginner. If you ask an English-speaking child what "run" means, it is unlikely to answer "That is something that depends on the context. In its intransitive form, for example, it has over 30 meanings, including, but, due to linguistic and metaphoric freedom, not restricted to...". The child would more likely answer that to run is "to walk very fast", but would still understand at least some of the other meanings due to knowledge of the other words in the material (the context) and the real-world knowledge it possesses.

I'm not certain if above arguments are right, but the more I think about the question, the more I get the feeling that at the point that you would truly need the context to decipher a word's meaning you would be so much advanced that putting sentences in an SRS would be a waste of time, after all, how many English children have to laboriously repeat again and again what it means if a politician "runs" for office?

I'll try to be open for corrections and constructive criticism though

Its true that Japanese may not have very many words like "run" and that most words may only have 1-3 extra meanings which may not be used all that often. This becomes even more the case with nouns.

The thing I would caution any beginner against though, if they are doing E->J or single word decks, is that you'll eventually have to (should) break out of it. And once you have started something it becomes very difficult to break or difficult to decide "Well, I've learned enough, now time to switch to full on sentences!"

As to the point of "at the point you would need context" and the benefit of putting stuff to context. There is core6k, most of the work is done for you. But I think you're also missing a point about context with words, which is that its not always a case about having context so you know which definition of a word to use. Its also about knowing when a word is suppose to be used. Some words only find themselves being used in certain context. I like to use "important" as an example of this. 重要、大切、肝心、大事、重大、大した. All of these could be translated as "important" in English but not all of them can be used interchangeably. Which one's do you decide to use? Context tells you. How important is this? The N2 and N1 JLPT test your ability to decide which word to use in a sentence when given 2 seemingly similar words. I find that this particular issue is really the reason why I like context more than knowing which "run" to use.

Don't get me wrong. I think there can be merit in single word or E->J cards (or whatever we're talking about here) for beginners, but the point I'm trying to hammer home is that you will eventually want to switch to J->E sentence cards. Deciding when to do this is difficult, but if you can already read 200-300 words and know basic grammar, I'd argue that point may have already arrived. I suggest Core6k (again?) strongly. I realize some may not like it but the deck is setup (when using Nukemarines n+1 sorting) to take you from "I know nothing!!" to "Wow...I can almost read a light novel..." in incremental steps.

EWLameijer Wrote:1) Every language has words like "run", but a majority of words has a rather restricted set of meanings; for example 星 has only one or two main meanings. That some words have lots of meanings and would (perhaps!) require context for understanding, does not mean that putting words in context would be the best study methods for all words, [it even does not mean that it would be a good study method at all!] especially for the simpler words it may be overkill and possibly even deleterious as providing context for simple words gives spurious cues (for example, writing "オバマは[白瓜]食べます" may lead you to see "Obama" and immediately skip to the right answer, cucumber, without even consciously processing the kanji; it would be hard to recognize cucumbers then when not eaten by Obama)

This is one of the reasons why the "right answer" for the vocabulary card is never just the English meaning. It's understanding the vocabulary word AND remembering the reading for it. It's hard to skip over processing the kanji if you're reading it out loud, and just thinking しろうり at least creates a little link to 白い in your head.

This is also a good reason to take your sentences from authentic materials that you read in larger chunks. I don't have sentences with spurious contexts. My sentences about yellowfin tuna and skipjack tuna are about overfishing, the decrease in tuna catches in Japan, and how this will affect people in developing countries where canned tuna is an important cheap source of protein. So, I haven't linked "tuna" with some random context that has nothing to do with tuna: I've linked "tuna" with things that have everything to do with tuna and are likely to come up again in tuna-related contexts. This makes it easier, not harder, to recognize those words the next time I see them in a different context.

I think that it is super hard to learn a large number of vocabulary words in isolation. If you're just linking a word to its dictionary definition, that's a single very weak link. If you're linking "tuna" not just with the dictionary definition, but "important food source in Japan," "It comes in cans," "It comes on fishing boats," that's a much more solid knowledge of the word. And that's so much more true when it comes to more abstract words that are harder to nail down to a precise dictionary definition.

The thing about learning a language is, it's just about the only field of human endeavor where you have to learn thousands and thousands of discrete facts. If you're a surgeon and you have to memorize every part of the human hand or something, that comes close, but medical school is super hard and learning a language is something every human being does. So how do we do it? It's because words are tied together in a web of contexts. I think you're losing out on a lot if you don't have that.