grulul
New member
Registered: 2008-02-04
Posts: 9
Hi everyone.
A couple of weeks ago I started adding sentences to Anki, I think i have reached about a hundred. To tell the truth, they are German sentences, not Japanese (will start soon...currently on frame 2025 of RTK1) though it doesn't matter.
Anyway, my problem is that I don't seem to be learning most of the words at all.
When I read the question field, for the majority of the cards, rather than remembering the words themselves I am merely recognizing the structure of the sentence or a single familiar term, and from that, I remember the English translation that I had put in the answer field. It's as though I am looking the words up in a dictionary every time and re-learning them from scratch.
If I were to be shown a word from a sentence I reviewed a minute ago, I would swear I have never heard that before, nor do I know what language it is in. I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.
Now, never having used this method before, I don't know whether I am doing something wrong or it's supposed to be like this, which is why I am asking you in this thread that I am creating. Well, that sounded a bit redundant...reminded me of that Mojo Jojo guy. I just am not very good at English, sorry.
Nukemarine
Member
From: 神奈川
Registered: 2007-07-15
Posts: 2347
The reason is you're only doing Recognition. That's equivalent of doing RevTK from Kanji to Keyword only. Production (equiv. to Keyword to Kanji) are much more effective for languages.
Here is where I'm gonna say Trinity will be lacking. With Chinese and Japanese, there are pronunciation (using kana or pinyin or romaji, etc.) that are not the actual answer. They just simulate the pronunciation. So you can go both ways without getting English involved. Trinity does that just fine.
With Romance and German languages, we don't get that non-verbal benefit. If we want production cards, we must use English and therefore pollute our language studies with a third language.
Now, recently on AJATT (and Rosetta Stone to give them a little credit), Katsumoto posted that perhaps we should go from audio to WRITING the sentence down. For that, you'd have to convert your German sentences to German audio. Well, just use German Text To Speech software there. So, you'll HEAR the german sentence and must WRITE out the sentence. In addition, an opposite card will show the sentence and you must SPEAK it out loud. You'd use your english part of the cards only to determine did you know what the sentence or individual words meant.
This is what I've done for a Japanese friend. As she's so barely into the sentences (only 60), I cannot determine a benefit yet. However, I'm noticing it. It recalls the brief enjoyment I got from Rosetta stone.
Anyway, hope this helps. To accomplish this in Trinity, you may need to have it link to an audio file online. In addition, it could show an audio file name that you'll play on your iPod or computer as that's where it'll be stored.
phauna
Member
From: Tokyo
Registered: 2007-12-25
Posts: 500
Website
Your problem is that you need more. More sentences, more review time, and more time to think about the stuff learned. You want to be swamped with understandable sentences. If you want to learn a new word, you need to see it used in many different sentences, in many different ways. Your passive recall is always going to be much greater than your active recall. So if you know a thousand words, maybe you will only use a hundred. It's the same for native speakers.
More.
Ah, also, you may need to associate the words more strongly to English words in your brain, at least at the beginning. You could use pictures or what have you, however one technique is the recite and translate method. An example, this sentence comes up in your SRS,
昨日泳ぐために海へ行きました。
So you read it aloud in Japanese:
きのうおよぐためにうみへいきました。
Then you read each word individually and then say it in English like this:
昨日 yesterday 泳ぐ swimming ために in order to うみ sea へ to 行きました went
Then you try to make a translated sentence in English but try to keep it as logically Japanese as possible:
Yesterday in order to go swimming I went to the sea.
(not, I went to the sea yesterday in order to go swimming, it wrecks the Japanese order a bit too much although it sounds much better in English.)
And that's the method. Once you have enough vocabulary and grammar and feel for the language you can dispense with the English, but at the beginning it's much easier to tie it into your own language.
Last edited by phauna (2008 June 21, 11:13 pm)
grulul
New member
Registered: 2008-02-04
Posts: 9
Thanks everyone, you were definitely helpful. I checked out the demo for the German voices on the at&t website but I don't find them to be very impressive, though they do get far better when slowed down a bit. I have been listening to some dubbed Smallville episodes to get used to the language, so I think I will just rip the audio from that and make cards out of it. For a couple of months, in the meanwhile, I'll keep adding sentences and rely more on the English, see where it takes me.
Now I'm off to add the last handful of kanji, can't believe I'm finally starting with the sentences.
Sorry phauna. I did not meant any harm. Also I do not disagre completely. I totaly agree with the first paragraph of your post.
I just cant agree with recite and translate.
Antimoon advices of paying attention to every word and trying to imagine changes in the sentences do a great job, at least for me.
Even if this is so much harder to do in japanese, wich is so different from the few languages I already know, it is worth a try. Even Alexander gave up of Japanese and Chinese.
Alexander somewhat agrees with antimoon. I remember a post from him on http://how-to-learn-any-language.com forums where he states the stages he values more:
1) thinking in the language
2) reading
3) reflecting on the language
I believe he does better use of translation technique because he knows many many languages and studied them all at the same time. For one that is focusing on only one language, monolingual is the way.
For last, I'm not a poliglot yet. But I'm still young. Btw, I already grasp a few languages besides English (wich you probably noticed it is not my first one).
Last edited by mentat_kgs (2008 June 22, 8:12 pm)
roderik
Member
From: The Netherlands
Registered: 2008-04-04
Posts: 98
I will start off with a warning: do not ever think that, just because someone knows more about a certain subject than you, that he or she is always right. Keep thinking critically is one of the most important things you will ever get to learn at a university studies.
Apart from that, the technique as written down on the Antimoon.com website is one that I have used myself for around 3 years, from age 14-17. During that time my knowledge of the English language skyrocketed and my proficiency level went from proficient to native-like. Therefore I personally do recommend reading in the way as described on the Antimoon.com website. However, this technique does work best when you are able to put the sentences you analyze into context, so perhaps it would be wise to exclude (at least some) SRS sentences.
