Vocabulary "sticks" at different levels. Usually it takes people years to have a sense of vocabulary they can use as I am using these words right now.

That said, there are many different approaches to exposing yourself to language, and even more methods to train your comprehension of those words.

If you don't mind a personal question: what do you do with your preferred language with derives a sense of pleasure; something you return to over and over again?

Mystery wrote:

uisukii wrote:

If you don't mind a personal question: what do you do with your preferred language with derives a sense of pleasure; something you return to over and over again?

I'm not sure if I understand the question, but I'll try to answer it as best as I can.

I suppose by "preferred language" you're talking about the language I use the most for my daily activities and especially in my free time.

I play video games, watch movies, read a lot of books, listen to audiobooks, podcasts and music etc.
That's what I'm trying to accomplish with Japanese as well. I'm working on my immersion environment, switching to Japanese content whenever feasible.

For some things it's easy, like music. I listen to japanese podcasts almost all day, even though I don't understand anything yet. I figure the more exposition to the language I get, the better.

But I can't do it everywhere, yet. For example: I love reading books and role playing games, but with barely any vocabulary, I can't put my collection of japanese RPGs to use. I don't mind not understanding everything perfectly, in fact I believe consuming material that's just slightly out of my comfort zone will yield the best results.


But in order for all that to work, I need at least some basic vocabulary, but building that is a little bit frustrating at the moment.

I believe that once I start understanding more it'll all go faster, because more exposition to the language will lead to a better understanding and more natural way of using the language.

This is pretty much how I learned english, but after acquiring the basics, I didn't put any effort into actually learning english. I just gradually switched everything I did to english and I became more and more proficient in it. But that took about a decade, because I didn't study a single second. The whole process happened totally by accident, I just realized one day that my english had improved significantly without even trying.

I want to apply this to Japanese as well, but with the added benefit of actually studying in addition to being immersed in the language, because I don't want to spend another decade on this.




Ugh, this has become way too long.
TLDR: I want to speed up the learning process by incorporating Japanese into my daily life, but I can't do that yet, because I can't seem to remember the vocabulary.

I'm just wondering if it's normal for vocabulary to take such a long time to actually stick, especially in the beginning.

Edit: Should I just stay the course and keep at it until I reach a point where it gets easier? Or does that point not exist?

The following is highly IMO:
If you don't understand what you are listening/reading then it's not worth the time and effort.
So many gets tricked thinking that consuming Japanese you can't understand will benefit you.

Also, why would you write down the example sentence? It's the word you want to memorize not the sentence. Read the example sentence but don't bother writing it, will save you a ton of time also.

I think you are doing the right things.  It is a bit tough in the beginning.  People get lulled into a false sense of security after doing RTK and get a bit shocked when they first learn the words and have to deal with the various compounds with their kunyomi and onyomi, etc..  This is why I usually tell people to skip over RTK 3 and get a head start on vocabulary studying since RTK 3 doesn't add much value.  But since you did it already, it doesn't matter.  Just keep at it.  Writing down the word is good practice when going through the cards.

Mystery wrote:

He or I'm just spoiled by the incredible effectiveness of RTK.

That's part of it. As you already have admitted, learning a language is not so easily systematically plannable like the kanji writings is in RTK. You might want to try some shadowing http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowing with Assimil, and/or Pimsleur's and/or Michel Thomas and there's even a book called Shadowing that's really just okay.
The book Japanese Step by Step was written for American IBM employees spending time working in Japan. It's organized as much as possible in a way that those mathematically minded people would be able to understand and quickly establish a foundation in how the language works. It's all romaji, so that might piss you off but it won't hurt you if you're still doing your Anki reviews (and why not read Yotsubato! to make up the difference, you will notice how little yotsuba's speech bubbles have the words in hiragana and the adults have the words in kanji!*). I think it helps to read more than just Tae Kim because you're really reading different authors' attempts at explaining the language system, which is basically impossible; at least it's impossible to do to the extent that it will lead to aural and reading recognition let alone oral and written production.
Are you able to hang out with any Japanese people or other Japanese learners? Some people encourage a 'silent period' of input only as per Stephen Krashen, but it has been disproven that making mistakes in a language will ingrain bad habits--mistakes are learning opportunities! My thinking here is just that different contexts will give you varied meaningful exposure, even if you just try out one or two sentences with some real folks or discuss what you're learning with another learner or even not (though they'll get tired of hearing about Japanese, as has been discussed on this forum).

You have to see the forest for the trees to some extent. This means that in addition to immersion input and all that, you want to engage up-close and personal with some bite-size chunks of the language and make them feel familiar to you.
Once you've done some of these things (all the while carrying on with Anki RTK and Core) you might want to take some of that immersion (if it's a dorama or anime) and put it into Subs2SRS. I've just recently been noticing how words that I learned from Subs2SRS and then talked about to Japanese persons and then encountered in new contexts are starting to solidify and become available for production even if I'm just talking to myself. Actually, talking to myself in Japanese is a new thing, I just couldn't force it before, so that's fun. Enjoy your journey!

*is this common in manga

uisukii wrote:

[rant]

[/rant]

PotbellyPig:
That sounds promising, I guess I'll just keep going then.
I didn't do all of RTK3, I just did a few hundred sorted by frequency and ditched the rest.

Stansfield123:
You mention that immersion is working very well for you. Did that also affect the beginning stages? Or did you have to overcome a certain hurdle until immersion really made an impact?

tashippy:
Thanks for the detailed information. I've heard of shadowing, but haven't read about it in detail. I try to read all sentences aloud, mimicing the native speaker as good as I can until I can read the sentence alongside the core6k audio sample.

I don't have the opportunity to talk to Japanese people right now, but I've absolutely got it on my radar. I totally agree that the input should be as varied as possible and I intend to incorporate that into my learning routine, already having prepared quite a lot of material (novels, manga, games, tv series etc.).
However, without a certain basic vocabulary many of these are just out of reach and building these basics is what I'm struggling with at the moment.

But it seems as if that's quite normal. I haven't actively learned a language for over a decade now, and I barely remember struggling with english vocabulary.


howtwosavealif3:
If you had bothered to read past the first sentence of my posting, you would've realized that I did in fact read through nuke's beginner guide and took advice from it.

I didn't say the manga or that character only use hiragana or that it's easy for beginners who just finished RTK because of the lack of kanji.
I'll amend my originally just tangential statement: there are some frames in the manga where the younger characters use hiragana and the older characters use kanji for the same word and I just think it's interesting.
I didn't know that's an observation that gets "thrown around" because I've never seen or heard anyone else say that. Maybe you've had enough uisukii.

In my opinion you should scrap writing and speaking aloud. Both are exercises in muscle memory, and wont really help your vocab. Just focus on getting the main elements of the card: kanji keywords, meaning, reading. If you're doing production, consider switching to recognition because it is easier. If you're already doing recognition, at least make sure that you can recall the kanji keywords in the vocab word because that helps you and is often easy to gloss over by just looking at the general 'shape' of the kanji.
Another thing, having 10 failures in a row indicates to me that you aren't learning the vocab adequately before you press 'again'. When you have failed to recognize a card, don't just read the back and move on-- consider testing yourself again. Put your hand over the answer and make sure you can recall it. It's something you should do if the whole 'relearning' process for a vocab item takes you more than a few seconds. I do it for my more difficult cards in anki.
Another reason you could be failing is that you're not visualizing the meaning of a word well enough. A lot of the time, you're given something generic for the definition of a word, like 'establish', and its dull as can be. The brain turns off at this point. Try to make it more vivid by looking up examples. Ask yourself "What are we 'establishing'?" It's a good exercise to do, and if you find anything interesting you can add it to the definition field so that you don't forget.
If you're still having trouble, use mneumonics. Think up any ole stupid thing that the phonetics of the word remind you of, and then string that together with its meaning through a pseudo-RTK story (don't write it down or anything). I do this with more difficult vocab items. No matter how bad of a pun you make, its usually more memorable than a simple string of sounds.

When I first started vocabulary, I had the same problem. I agree with the others that have said that it just takes some getting used to.

With the Core decks, I suggest using the sentences to learn all the unknowns at the same time. Of course, you should focus on the main word the most, but this way you'll have seen a few more instances of the words before you actually get to their individual cards. If you do this, don't worry too much about how many cards you do each day, since you'll be learning multiple words at a time.
Don't worry about using the sentence as a crutch; it really won't matter after a while and I've always found it easier to remember old vocabulary after I've moved on to knew cards.
I still do this to an extent, but not as much now that I have a few thousand cards under my belt and pick up vocabulary more quickly.

Anyway, try what you want and adjust it to your liking.

Correct me If I'm making a poor assumption, but wouldn't 「つもり-心算」 be:

つもり-積もり
しんさん- 心算

I would recommend not writing the full sentence down, just say it aloud once and focus on the new word. Say the new word aloud as many times as you wish. You learn best when you learn one thing at once. I started off doing the same thing, writing down the entire sentence etc but it took way too long and I couldn't remember anything.

Now that I just focus on the word, and make sure to write down the kanji for that word each time, I'm speeding through it a lot better and it's actually sticking. The sentences are mainly there for context, you don't need to learn them at this point.

uisukii wrote:

Correct me If I'm making a poor assumption, but wouldn't 「つもり-心算」 be:

つもり-積もり
しんさん- 心算

http://www.geocities.jp/bunakobo/kan/ateji.htm

Before asking next time, just type the word and look in the IME　list please.

Last edited by arnaldosfjunior (2013 July 22, 12:34 pm)