seaweedhead wrote:

My method in memrise.. learn the reading.. write it out once.. pick a mnemonic or create one.. write it out once.. move on.. review of course.

What kind of mnemonics?

This is a Japanese word: 検索.

What's an example of a mnemonic that associates that with its reading: けんさく ?

Use mnemonics when everything else fails instead. I remember using it for 両親 to remember the reading. Thinking of some shitty parents that where "råskinn" (though that sounds more like ろうしん) (~rascal, often associated with reckless drivers.)

But I don't need mnemonics for most kanji any more; I have forgotten most of them long ago, and I finished RtK in september.

I prefer learning sentences for the following reasons:

-You get more practice with vocabulary that is somewhere between "totally unknown" and "perfectly known" -- for example, in my current Chinese deck, I added a bunch of sentences from a Magic Tree House book that have an owl in them. So I don't just have one sentence for the Chinese word for owl, I have five or six of them.

-You get more practice with grammar usage and collocations.

-When you do sentence cards the way I do -- taking them from native materials, usually novels/manga/chapter books -- then every sentence is embedded in a context and a narrative that helps me remember each element. (Visualization is incredibly powerful as a memory aid. If you are reading a book and you're visualizing the story in your mind as you read, then that can help you a lot in recalling the vocabulary.)

-Some words have many, many different usages. I remember seeing an essay that said that for Murakami Haruki, a certain number of sales was "katai." I knew perfectly well the meaning of "katai" as in "hard" -- but I didn't know the meaning that translated to "firm, reliable." If I had added that as a single vocabulary item, then after a couple months I would have gone "Sure, sure, it means 'hard,'" so I needed something else -- like the context of the whole sentence -- to cue me to the other meaning.

Almost every new card I create is a sentence card (and all self-selected... I didn't quite... okay, I didn't -remotely- follow the 'standard path', but say, post Core-3k, everything is self selected and you're in the ballpark of my learning experience. And yeah, a lot of my early vocab was single words marked as JLPT blah or Grade blah.) 

I do this for a -lot- of reasons - first, for what vix86 just said, context is everything.  From the other side, basically...  '状態・condition' is ... almost meaningless. J->E, E->J, furigana, whatever. I can look at that card a hundred times and it won't help.

Take a sentence from the dictionary...
彼女はとても通学できるような状態ではない
She is in no condition to go to school.

and suddenly, ohh, -now- I know why 'condition' 状態 and 'condition' 条件 aren't synonyms.

(条件, if you don't know, is 'condition' like 'terms'. Conditions that must be met to release the hostages, etc., almost totally unrelated to 状態. The pronunciation similarity in Japanese an unfortunate trap that nastily lines up with the same word multiple meanings of the English, but note the Kanji difference.)

Of course the two can be differentiated by longer definitions, but good luck finding a J->E dictionary that gives long definitions rather than a list of word-equivalents. (Kenkyuusha is your best bet, but even then... ) Maybe you have a mind that can look at a list of cross-language equivalents and understand why the condition in "condition, terms" is different from the condition in "condition, state" and never mix them up... logically, it makes sense, (especially after contrasting 状態 and 条件 directly) but in terms of imprinting meaning in my mind, such a flashcard is essentially useless. Especially in the absence of direct contrasts.

Beyond that, sentence cards give examples of varying grammars, show the most common words and all the particles as surrounding context and so give you more depth on how they are used, and even provide you with common fixed phrases that can be repeated verbatim.

About the only time I create straight vocabulary cards anymore is when I'm creating a card for a 四字熟語 or other long compound that has a clearly fixed meaning, and even then I'll prefer a context if I can get one.

Personally, I like dictionary sentences because they are -not- exactly the context that I first read the word in (ie, the novel/manga/anime/drama that I'm looking the word up for) so now I have at least 2 contexts for the word (original and dictionary), and because dictionary contexts tend to use common words and phrases to a fault -- and if I'm going to read something dozens of times, it had better be something -common-, and because J->E dictionaries obviously have English translations. If dictionaries fail me, I grab sentences from ALC or Tatoeba, and if I have to, I simply take an untranslated sentence from the original work I'm looking up the word for. (Ideally only after fully understanding the line/sentence the word in question appears in.)

If that all sounds very painful and pedantic... yeah, well, that's why at times I just enjoy material and let unknown vocab slide past me and hope to catch it later. Sometimes I add every word, sometimes only words that catch my eye, and sometimes I just let it all go and just enjoy the moment, confusing parts and all.

Inny Jan wrote:

Having sentences in SRS for the purpose of proving context is not particularly useful. A gloss of a word and understanding of grammar is all what you need to know when you move on to reading the native material. It’s kind of obvious that that material will provide you with more than enough context to allow you to resolve meaning of similar English meanings, like those 状態 and 条件.

From that point of view then, sentences in SRS are redundant. Where having them may come useful, is when you start collecting vocabulary from various sources (songs, articles, books, newspapers, etc.) and the sentences will help you remember what was the source of your vocab. Note however, that you start collecting sentences after you start reading native sources.

Half the posters in this thread, and a bunch in other recent threads (including myself), have given specific reasons as to why SRS-ing sentences IS useful.

Never addressing why that reasoning is wrong, and just stating that sentences are useless, is not particularly useful advice.

Btw, an argument I haven't seen in this thread yet is that SRS-ing simple sentences is EASIER than SRS-ing words, because the unknown word has a context. So what is redundant is making the extra effort it takes to memorize words out of context, by doing vocab.

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 March 15, 6:24 am)

Stansfield123 wrote:

Never addressing why that reasoning is wrong, and just stating that sentences are useless, is not particularly useful advice.

what do you mean? he was addressing why the reasoning is wrong. The context from the sentence is not necessary in the SRS because there is always at least some context present when the words are encountered in reality. Also there are a lot words such as simple nouns that are entirely unambiguous without context (bird, refrigerator, tree...).

Stansfield123 wrote:

Btw, an argument I haven't seen in this thread yet is that SRS-ing simple sentences is EASIER than SRS-ing words, because the unknown word has a context. So what is redundant is making the extra effort it takes to memorize words out of context, by doing vocab.

if that were true, and I don't think it is, you still need to balance that against the extra time spent making the card and the time spent reading it during your review. That's the argument for word cards, they are faster to produce and review and the context necessary to really learn words is present in native sources. The SRS is just a way of getting some trace of the gist of a word into your brain.

I approve of simple sentences to remember words.

If you ever create production cards, sentences are necessary. For recognition, I find that reading one fully comprehensible sentence is enough to learn a word.

Imo, focusing on the definition is really boring.
I prefer using sentences to "define" words.

Then again, I only ever look at the word, and pass reviews far into the future.

dtcamero wrote:

um, am I the only one that sees a compromise here?

That's not a compromise since you still don't know what definition to use. Are you going to sit there and ponder all of those it could be? If you include the audio on the front, then that might solve some of the problem, but that'd be a listening recognition card. The reading comprehension would still need the sentence.

Regarding the point that reading an example sentence takes too long: so don't read it (although, of course, reading a sentence you know should not take any time, it should be a glance). The question is about the word, not the example sentence. If you can read/produce the word without so much as looking at the sentence, great.

Regarding making the cards: it takes me less than two minutes, and those two minutes aren't busywork: I'm reading example sentences, looking at new Kanji, locating and manipulating words and readings to highlight and replace the Kanji with the reading in the sentence, etc. That time is spent at least as productively as anything else I do in Japanese. I guarantee you that it would take longer than that to make up a mnemonic or try to brute force an out of context word, and you'll have a lot less to show for your efforts.

dtcamero wrote:

um, am I the only one that sees a compromise here?

front
Word

back
Word with reading
Ex. Sentence
Definition

You can actually set up rikaisama to make these types of cards automatically for you by just pushing one key when you find a word you like in firefox.

...As for me personally, I prefer to also have an audio example in my cards because pronunciation can be tricky as we all know. hence after finishing core10k I'm moving into subs2srs decks again.

Why not put that example sentence in the front, with the word?  Why put it in the answer, where it doesn't help you? (rikaisama doesn't care where your various fields go)

I also switch the word with its reading, in the front, so that I have to produce the actual kanji, a little bit like in the AJATT MCDs. So my cards look like this:
Front:
[ぜんそくりょく]で走った
Back:
全速力
(n) full speed; (P)
Audio

Audio is auto generated (I auto input the sentences, generate the audio for all sentences I put in that day, then modify the Front part by replacing the word and adding the brackets for each). If the sentence is ambiguous in any way, I take the time to add a translation for it. All this takes me 30 minutes, for about 20 cards. Note that most of that time is spent looking at example sentences, and deciding which one I like. It's not pointless editing time, it's time spent "in Japanese" so to speak. The actual editing takes a few seconds. It's literally just pressing a couple of hotkeys as I select a word with the mouse and click the destination for it. Took me longer to write a couple of posts on this site just now, than it would take to edit hundreds of cards.

When answering, I produce the word. In this case I probably wouldn't (because all three Kanji are very common, but I usually take the time to physically write the answer. As I'm writing out the word, I also shadow the audio that just played. This word is actually from a song, so I even have a little melody to go along with it.

These cards work ridiculously well in helping me learn both the writing and pronunciation of words, without any focused effort on trying to memorize anything. In fact, all the stuff I have to do, both while making the cards and while answering them, helps me avoid trying to force memorization (which doesn't work, and is the number one enemy of learning).

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 March 16, 1:31 pm)

dtcamero wrote:

Vix86 wrote:

That's not a compromise since you still don't know what definition to use. Are you going to sit there and ponder all of those it could be?

I don't understand this question. Yes I would look through and choose the right definition. I have 4 kokugo dictionaries loaded into rikaisama, usually with several definitions for each word. From sentence context and a J-E dic lookup I'll get the relevant meaning in this case, then choose the most appropriate kokugo definition. Is this really hard to do?

The problem is, suppose you have two cards, with example sentences on the back:

暴動を治める
suppress [put down] a riot

国を［家を］治める
「rule a country [manage a household]


If the front of both cards just says '治める', you have to recall both definitions to be sure to pass the card. And おさめる is nice enough to separate its definitions with different kanji spellings, unlike some other words where you might have 5 distinct meanings.

I know people have solutions to these problems... notes on which definition or kanji a card -isn't-, or some sort of hint, or even simply accepting that the most correct answer is to list all of the definitions and list them all on the back. But it's not a problem at all for me since I put my example sentences on the front.

Trying to quiz vocabulary -without- kanji would be kind of a nightmare... かける immediately springs to mind; and I make a kana card for every new vocabulary word (in order to get used to going from reading to recalling the kanji, to get used to reading the word in its kana form - which also helps with listening comprehension when you're less dependent on kanji.)

I don't put sound clips on my sentences for a lot of reasons, although one of those was that it was too much trouble under Anki-1. I may make a separate sub-deck with sound-clip words later.

Also - I'm not interested in compromises. It's great for those of you with good memorization abilities that you can whip through tens of thousands of cards with minimal information on both sides and have that actually result in working ability to use the word. If it works for you, then I wouldn't expect you to waste time adding sentences. But for those of us with poor memorization abilities... we have to do what we can.

dtcamero wrote:

I guess the reason I think this is valuable is that I think the ability to deal with large numbers of vocab more quickly beats the depth of better context. This is because in my view Anki really won't give you a solid understanding of that word... it's more like a foundation... you learn the word's subtleties through reading/listening later.

Only if it works. I usually won't even recognize a word I study with such a card when I find it in context. If I do recognize it, perhaps after a minute or so of staring if I have the feeling I ought to know it, then I might recall the meaning or the reading but rarely both. Almost always I'll need to look it up in the dictionary anyway.  And while the cards may be quick, I'll fail them much more often and so need to review them much more often.

There's simply something completely different (for me) between reading a word, even in a banal dictionary sentence, and recognizing an isolated word. The one doesn't help much with the other (in both directions!). 

I have no idea how much that generalizes into sentence cards helping everyone; certainly I'm not a typical learner, but I also doubt that my brain is -that- different from everyone else's. I think people that use sentence cards are internalizing quite a bit of useful cues and patterns, and practicing 'reading' rather than 'recognition'.

In any case, I certainly think that people who think "flash cards don't work" or something after using simple gloss cards should definitely try sentence cards, they may have a similar learning pattern to mine.

I just have a vocab deck and then read a couple pages of a book every day. It's hard enough going through 400+ cards daily when it's just vocab, much less if they were sentences.