I have a deck with 8482 cards. It grows to ~11000 when I'm stimulated (reading stuff that contains vocabulary from my deleted core2k deck, and other vocabulary I know but don't SRS).

Sunspot Wrote:I have a small but very hard deck.

Your kanji avatar is very relevant here...

My main (vocab) one is 10,175, but it's been underused lately and is going to need working rigorously to appease. After I do that, I'm going to use a special tool to increase its size by about 6%. I also have a smaller but more functional grammar deck that I use to supplement the work of my main one.

Really motivating thread here, you guys made me realize how small my deck is (), and motivated me to make it bigger!

Stian Wrote:

Sunspot Wrote:I have a small but very hard deck.

Your kanji avatar is very relevant here...

I had to search up what his avatar meant, awesome kanji.

Just curious, as to learn how many cards I want to look forward to. For the people who have very large decks, like 10,000+ vocab/sentence etc and whatnot. How close to 'your own' definition of fluent would you guys consider yourselves to be? Obviously fluent has a little different connotation to everyone, but to where you would like to be? Could you watch anime w/ or w/o subs and understand it enough to enjoy it? Etc. The whole AJATT thing says 10,000 sentences is a good place to be, but I'm curious on peoples actual experiences.

you could do as little as 1,000 sentences plus rtk and listening and get to the point where you understand anime enough to enjoy it.

I have two very healthy decks, of sentences/production 4,000 and vocab recognition 7,000 cards. I have to work very hard to keep them oiled up and flowing smoothly, especially since they are growing bigger every day. Some days I really get bent out of shape trying to keep up such intimate contact with my own decks, really chewing on them for hours, but the experience is totally bearing fruit.

I love my two giant beautiful decks... everyday their impact reaches into the nexus of my existence...

Joshade Wrote:Just curious, as to learn how many cards I want to look forward to. For the people who have very large decks, like 10,000+ vocab/sentence etc and whatnot. How close to 'your own' definition of fluent would you guys consider yourselves to be? Obviously fluent has a little different connotation to everyone, but to where you would like to be? Could you watch anime w/ or w/o subs and understand it enough to enjoy it? Etc. The whole AJATT thing says 10,000 sentences is a good place to be, but I'm curious on peoples actual experiences.

I remember mezbup posted that he found going from 2.5K to 12.5K within a year to have greatly increased his comprehension abilities (as you'd expect), and he also quoted something like 17K where he felt quite comfortable. My vocab decks total around that at the moment and reading general (non-specialised) material from various sources like blogs, newspapers, 2ch and so on I find to be doable but Rikaichan is still required. I'm working my way through 「ノルウェイの森」 and the language used is not very difficult so you can get by with maybe one or two unknown words per page.

That said even with 30,000 words SRS'd, if you delve into any particular field that you haven't previously exposed yourself to you'll immediately start encountering a lot of unknown words, but that's to be expected. I find things like the reading of place names and people's names to one of the most difficult things to learn because there doesn't seem to be a systematic way (or a comprehensive deck as of yet) to do this easily and it has to be learned simply through gradual exposure and osmosis.

Vocab/sentence deck size can be a good motivator, because we rarely get tangible feedback on our language learning progress and it's nice to open up Anki and see 11,783 cards or whatever. So there's that RPG leveling-up like element to it which is fun and motivating. Ultimately though the key is to force as much exposure through reading and listening a wide -- and I mean wide -- variety of material. SRS should always be secondary to that, I think.

Joshade Wrote:Just curious, as to learn how many cards I want to look forward to. For the people who have very large decks, like 10,000+ vocab/sentence etc and whatnot. How close to 'your own' definition of fluent would you guys consider yourselves to be? Obviously fluent has a little different connotation to everyone, but to where you would like to be? Could you watch anime w/ or w/o subs and understand it enough to enjoy it? Etc. The whole AJATT thing says 10,000 sentences is a good place to be, but I'm curious on peoples actual experiences.

Fluency varies between people but I'll share my SRS story for the large decks I used to have. I used to have 20,000 sentence cards and roughly the same amount for my vocabulary deck. I ended up deleting them both because I felt it wasn't feeling genuine (meaning I wasn't really adding to learn new things but to increase my number of cards). The reviews were getting out of hand, so I decided to start fresh.

It was a turn for the best, I soon found a good pace for myself now and keep at it daily (30 for my vocabulary deck and 5-10 written kanji cards(monolingual) and 10 monolingual sentences/dictionary look-ups). So I average 45-50 a day(not a bad pace for me as they are split between two decks). My vocabulary deck is usual done within 20mins and the same with my sentence deck (what I like to do is add a lot of cards and just work through them for the week). It saves me a lot of time.

Now does "10,000 sentence/vocabulary deck equal fluency?" In my opinion fluency is only really achieved when you can read,speak and write to an advanced level. That's how I see it. When my deck increased over time, my listening and recognition skills went through the roof. So I kept adding and reading and immersing. One thing was lacking and that was my production skills. They are still lacking to this date but it's improving and I'm confident that when another year goes by, my speaking will jump through the roof too.
(There is common things you can do by yourself to improve but if you really went to get speaking up and going, speak on skype to Japanese people daily and try doing language exchange a few days a week). I'm only recommending this because I'm not living in Japan just yet, so I'm doing what I can here and not giving the excuse "I'll learn it once I get to Japan"

Everyone is different, so bear in mind I learned pretty intensively for 2 years. I'm modest about my progress then when I started. Overall, "fluency" is subjective, so just make sure you accomplish what you set out to do.

Guoguodi Wrote:I remember mezbup posted that he found going from 2.5K to 12.5K within a year to have greatly increased his comprehension abilities (as you'd expect), and he also quoted something like 17K where he felt quite comfortable. My vocab decks total around that at the moment and reading general (non-specialised) material from various sources like blogs, newspapers, 2ch and so on I find to be doable but Rikaichan is still required. I'm working my way through 「ノルウェイの森」 and the language used is not very difficult so you can get by with maybe one or two unknown words per page.

Isn't that a bit too much? I mean at higher levels, there will mostly be enough understood context to figure out the unknown words and by encountering them several times we memorize them, I don't see why someone would continue adding cards to his/her deck after reaching that level. Do natives have SRS decks? No.

[Zgarbas]

Natives have their whole life worth of exposure+constant ongoing exposure to compensate for their lack of SRS decks.

I think once you get to that level of "fluency" you probably don't need the SRS anymore per say but, maintaining it and adding at a slower pace wouldn't hurt anyone. It basically comes down to this: just maintain and keep learning, even if your fluent or native-level.

undead_saif Wrote:

Guoguodi Wrote:I remember mezbup posted that he found going from 2.5K to 12.5K within a year to have greatly increased his comprehension abilities (as you'd expect), and he also quoted something like 17K where he felt quite comfortable. My vocab decks total around that at the moment and reading general (non-specialised) material from various sources like blogs, newspapers, 2ch and so on I find to be doable but Rikaichan is still required. I'm working my way through 「ノルウェイの森」 and the language used is not very difficult so you can get by with maybe one or two unknown words per page.

Isn't that a bit too much? I mean at higher levels, there will mostly be enough understood context to figure out the unknown words and by encountering them several times we memorize them, I don't see why someone would continue adding cards to his/her deck after reaching that level. Do natives have SRS decks? No.

SRS is not a requirement by any means, but it's a nice supplement if you can handle the review workload. I find that since I've developed a habit of using it, that it's become an indispensable routine that feels rewarding when you see how many words you've "learned". I also find the initial learning of words to be easier when you have the help of the SRS to further solidify that knowledge after initially looking the definition/usage up. That said, I agree that overall the most important factor is sheer exposure to the language, and the SRS is just a tool to help maintain that knowledge.

Incidentally I found the original post by mezbup regarding vocab size. Granted he doesn't quote exactly 17k words but the gist of it is that one needs to have a measurable vocab of at least in the high thousands to be (barely) functionally literate. I still enjoy adding vocab to Anki, so I continue to use it.

mezbup Wrote:50 a day is too fast, 35 is just right, 20 is ok, 10 is slow, 5 is way... too... slow. I know you're happy with the pace but will you be happy with the results? I mean... fair enough if you've got all the time in the world but Japanese doesn't really start coming alive as a language until you have about 10k vocab and even then it's still very patchy. I guess what I'm trying to say is that... certainly for me 10k was roughly the start of Japanese. Aiming for 10k over 5 years I think is aiming too low.

My retention rate is sitting on about 82% which is ok. Not perfect, not great but good. I find that every 3000 words I learn my listening and speaking makes a noticeable improvement. Accuracy isn't so important with vocab - as long as you can recognize the word when it comes up again, that's all you need. Even then, there are plenty of words that you might be able to recognise it when reading but if it came up in a dorama you would miss it. It's something I don't think you can avoid. I find that sometimes I'll come across a word that I know that I know and won't be able to remember it... just look it up again and reset it in Anki and boom that usually solves the problem. The sheer amount of vocab (30k ~ 40k) needed to truly function on par with a Japanese native is why everyone says 5 a day is too slow. I say you could drop the number down to 20k and still live a decent life but not to the full extent as your mother tongue. Minimum 15k if you just wanna have fun and never do anything serious with the language.

For me the magic is in understanding and engaging in Japanese. Even though I loved studying Japanese and had lots of fun... the first year and a half sucked in that special way that only not understanding Japanese fully can suck. Tonnes of vocab changed all that. My experience of going from 2.5k in Jan 2010 to 12.5k Jan 2011 taught me that it's all about vocab. It's not just a numbers game. I know we all talk about it a lot but that's because there is real weight behind these words.

I know a lot of people in real life who are learning Japanese. All different ages, abilities, length of time studying - all different combinations of those things. Time and time again, the ones that are the best have massive vocabularies and the ones that can hardly hold a conversation to save their life have small vocabularies.

I've rambled on way too much but I can't stress the point enough. I guess my advice to anyone would be... even if you're content with going slow... spend 1 year going fast and THEN take it slow. You're Japanese will love you for it.

(http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid137778)

I'd be interested in some kanji statistics from some of the larger decks.

For reference, my current vocab deck has about 6000 seen cards containing about 1450 unique kanji.

I'd like to know how many kanji are actually being used in Japanese. From what I've seen so far, there are quite a few Heisig kanji that are never used in actual Japanese.

Maybe someone with a larger deck (maybe 10k or 15k+) can tell us how many unique kanji they've encountered.

Largely made of vocabulary from marimite series.

apirx Wrote:I'd be interested in some kanji statistics from some of the larger decks.

I'm missing 74 from JLPT1. I've been meaning to add words for them, but some of them would be pretty useless. All those 100%s look nice though...

apirx Wrote:I'd like to know how many kanji are actually being used in Japanese. From what I've seen so far, there are quite a few Heisig kanji that are never used in actual Japanese.

And conversely some in use are not in Heisig (eyelid, luxury, spinach, spider...), so I'm not sure what you mean by actual Japanese (camelia, tanuki (both in RTK) are "actual Japanese", right?). I guess that would depend on what you read. I can't seem to find the old threads where this was discussed (Katsuo probably can), but the numbers were like RTK1 covers 90% of the kanji (ordered by frequency), and RTK1+3 was 95%.

EDIT: fixed (my first impulse before I submitted).

EDIT @warakawa: of course, if you had a link, you would have provided it. Still morning for me.

EratiK Wrote:

apirx Wrote:I'd like to know how many kanji are actually being used in Japanese. From what I've seen so far, there are quite a few Heisig kanji that are never used in actual Japanese.

Not sure what you mean by actual Japanese (thinking spiders, spinachs, bats and camelias here), so that would depend on what you read. I can't seem to find the old threads where this was discussed (Katsuo probably can), but the numbers were like RTK1 covers 80% of the kanji (ordered by frequency), and RTK1+3 was 90%.

I remembered the number was more like rtk1 covers 99.23% RTK 1+3 was 99.96%

EratiK Wrote:

warakawa Wrote:I remembered the number was more like rtk1 covers 99.23% RTK 1+3 was 99.96%

Link?

right back at you.

mezbup Wrote:50 a day is too fast, 35 is just right, 20 is ok, 10 is slow, 5 is way... too... slow. I know you're happy with the pace but will you be happy with the results? I mean... fair enough if you've got all the time in the world but Japanese doesn't really start coming alive as a language until you have about 10k vocab and even then it's still very patchy. I guess what I'm trying to say is that... certainly for me 10k was roughly the start of Japanese. Aiming for 10k over 5 years I think is aiming too low.

My retention rate is sitting on about 82% which is ok. Not perfect, not great but good. I find that every 3000 words I learn my listening and speaking makes a noticeable improvement. Accuracy isn't so important with vocab - as long as you can recognize the word when it comes up again, that's all you need. Even then, there are plenty of words that you might be able to recognise it when reading but if it came up in a dorama you would miss it. It's something I don't think you can avoid. I find that sometimes I'll come across a word that I know that I know and won't be able to remember it... just look it up again and reset it in Anki and boom that usually solves the problem. The sheer amount of vocab (30k ~ 40k) needed to truly function on par with a Japanese native is why everyone says 5 a day is too slow. I say you could drop the number down to 20k and still live a decent life but not to the full extent as your mother tongue. Minimum 15k if you just wanna have fun and never do anything serious with the language.

For me the magic is in understanding and engaging in Japanese. Even though I loved studying Japanese and had lots of fun... the first year and a half sucked in that special way that only not understanding Japanese fully can suck. Tonnes of vocab changed all that. My experience of going from 2.5k in Jan 2010 to 12.5k Jan 2011 taught me that it's all about vocab. It's not just a numbers game. I know we all talk about it a lot but that's because there is real weight behind these words.

I know a lot of people in real life who are learning Japanese. All different ages, abilities, length of time studying - all different combinations of those things. Time and time again, the ones that are the best have massive vocabularies and the ones that can hardly hold a conversation to save their life have small vocabularies.

I've rambled on way too much but I can't stress the point enough. I guess my advice to anyone would be... even if you're content with going slow... spend 1 year going fast and THEN take it slow. You're Japanese will love you for it.

Very very true. Not necessarily the exact numbers but the gist of it. I'd also add (as I always do) that you should always focus on the learning new vocabulary rather than remembering the old and allow media/life to act as an srs.

Here is mine. Nothing extreme but this is my new vocabulary deck built over 1 year of learning.



I usual do this deck in less than 20mins, everyday. So it's natural for me to maintain this deck.

what version of Anki are you guys using?

warakawa Wrote:what version of Anki are you guys using?

Recent version (not 2.0), it's version 1.28.

warakawa Wrote:what version of Anki are you guys using?

Anki 2.0. Love it. Well, except for the keystroke shortcut problems, which suck.

Won't post my kanji stats as my deck is still small (under 3,000) and I'm still building it out through vocab mining and selective imports from my New subs2srs deck. Last I checked it stood at between 1500 and 1600 unique kanji.

I am also using Anki 2, no wonder their statistics look so different from mine.