The perfectionist in me wants my Mnemosyne deck to be perfectly synchronized with my actual Japanese vocabulary. Lately, that ideal has become impossible.
Eventually when you learn enough Japanese, you experience a wonderful phenomenon: you have enough of a grasp on the language, that when you look up a new word, you have a high chance of learning it then and there even if you don't put it in your deck!
Of course, it's the same way with English. If I see a new English word in a dictionary or in a sufficiently good English sentence, I have NO CHOICE but to instantly learn it. I'm just delighted to be experiencing the same thing now with Japanese. 
Knowing the kanji is definitely a big part of achieving this.
Hard to say how many words since I do sentences. This is my category breakdown:
Chrono Trigger sentences: 239 cards
Experimental cards (Q side is romaji with no spaces, A side is sentence, goal is to write it): 68 cards
FF6 sentences: 280 cards
Harvest Moon sentences: 27 cards
Heisig: 1654 cards
Katakana: 45 cards
Generic: 6417 cards (mostly sentences/clauses from Yahoo辞書, Tae Kim, Space ALC, Kenkyusha Demo Page, WWWJDIC, but also around 1000 very old word-word cards from before I found the sentence method)
I still have a lot to learn Let's learn together... I have six more sections before I finish Tae Kim (which is very slow because "finishing" means putting all his example sentences in Mnemosyne, *plus* other example sentences for whatever new vocabulary he introduces). Then maybe I'll join the Kanji Oddysey Project
TGWeaver
Member
From: 大阪
Registered: 2007-06-08
Posts: 99
meolox wrote:
Can I ask how many words you have in your deck, I keep hearing numbers of 5000 words before you feel you can "just learn" a new word, I'm at rougly 3000 words right now.
it doesn't matter how many cards you have in your deck. don't focus on that. it's a study tool, not a measure of your language command. numbers like 5,000 and 10,000 are exactly that: numbers. whether you have 10 or 10,000, it just doesn't matter.
it's sorta like the kids that come to japan and buy every textbook they see. it doesn't matter how many you have unless you've actually used them, learned from them, and plan to use that knowledge in the future.
don't focus on creating the worlds biggest set of flashcards. just study, enjoy japanese media, and if you do this long enough, it'll start happening.
i think the point where you can "just learn" a new word only happens when you stop the "study first, then enjoy media" plan and switch to the "enjoy media, and learn from it" option.
for me it happened when i started using a J-J dictionary. for a while i just stared blankly at the definitions, but eventually they started making more and more sense. the definition of 意識 (いしき - conciousness) brought me to 失う (うしなう - the verb "to lose," in this case "to lose conciousness."). i'd never seen or used the word before, but it had to be the meaning. it was the same with words like 黄金切符 （おうごんきっぷ - the golden ticket, of charlie and the chocolate fame: チョコレート工場の秘密）. you can only have that "natural learning" when you're doing natural things, like reading books and watching movies.
the only way you learn stuff like グチャグチャ (used for describing things like a stir-fry, or a messy area... think cluttered papers and things) is from T.V., books, and people.
i know lots of people using this website are very high on tossing every grammar book they can find in an SRS, but this really isn't different from the ol' flashcard method.
alyks
Member
From: Arizona
Registered: 2008-05-31
Posts: 914
Website
phauna wrote:
There is fun and then there is efficiency.
Why does language have to be all sunshine and puppies?
I prefer sunshine and candies. Because if it's not fun, it's very hard. Going through KO is boring. Going through tons of manga, anime, games, etc., is fun.
It would be like a foreigner learning English going through tons of spelling lists with contextual usage against going through and reading Spiderman, batman, pulp fiction, novels, whatever. The point of ajatt is 10,000 sentences and All Japanese all the time. Who cares if you're "haphazard"?
Why are you even doing sentences? At least part the reasoning behind sentences is because the alternative, namely textbooks, suck! For a good reason! Even if it does have examples, do you really care about "the horse that runs in front"? KO, I believe, expands on the meanings of the characters and provides readings, right? Manga does the same thing, is much more fun, and also gives far more diverse sentences.
You get more knowledge from the fun stuff than a dumb old kanji book. Just use it as a reference, I say.
meolox
Member
Registered: 2007-08-31
Posts: 386
alyks wrote:
Is there even a set number of words in katakana? Try number of katakana words instead of percentage.
I meant % of the words in a vocabulary list that are katakana, If a vocab list has 1000 words I'd like to know what % of those 1000 are katakana.
AJATT is far from sunshine and candies for me and given the effectiveness of manga and anime as a medium for learning Japanese...I seriously doubt it, movies and TV maybe but I would not trust me learning Japanese via manga or a foreigner learning English via comics.
"Holy hogwash batman learning English sure is a hoot and a holler."
Last edited by meolox (2008 July 10, 4:18 am)
ファブリス
Administrator
From: Belgium
Registered: 2006-06-14
Posts: 4021
Website
phauna wrote:
Using an SRS is just a method of revision (...)
Exactly my feeling. SRS'es are overrated by some users.
The SuperMemo author, according to his interview on Wired, keeps using his program everyday, and for far more knowledge than he needs to remember. He is doing extensive testing over a long time period (was it 20+ years?), with one goal being to improve his program. He also develops his ideas of incremental learning and such. He uses a SRS religiously, but with a practical purpose.
But I get the feeling that some users treat a SRS like an end into itself. They get so caught up into the adding material into it, that they may loose the big picture. I hope I don't offend anyone here but in my opinion a SRS, however good the algorithm may be, is only an approximate representation of your knowledge in whatever subject you decide to feed into it. Having a rough estimation of your knowledge is a nice side effect of the program, the real purpose of the reviews should be to stimulate learning new information and solidify it into longer term memory. And the end goal of using such programs is to use the information in real life.
For these reasons, personally, I don't worry abour reviewing religiously everyday, and I don't worry too much sometimes of saying "Yes" instead of "No" if an item was on the "tip of the tongue". I also removed a bunch of words I added into the Trinity SRS for learning new readings, because I didn't use these words and they increased the number of reviews needlessly, as well as take time away from learning more useful words. Words for which I added corresponding sentences were remembered far better and I can more readily use them, for example when I imagine a dialog in Japanese.
mystes
Member
From: USA
Registered: 2008-04-08
Posts: 99
snispilbor wrote:
The perfectionist in me wants my Mnemosyne deck to be perfectly synchronized with my actual Japanese vocabulary. Lately, that ideal has become impossible.
Eventually when you learn enough Japanese, you experience a wonderful phenomenon: you have enough of a grasp on the language, that when you look up a new word, you have a high chance of learning it then and there even if you don't put it in your deck!
Of course, it's the same way with English. If I see a new English word in a dictionary or in a sufficiently good English sentence, I have NO CHOICE but to instantly learn it. I'm just delighted to be experiencing the same thing now with Japanese.
Knowing the kanji is definitely a big part of achieving this.
I'm a native English speaker and I can't automatically memorize every English word I see in a sentence! I encounter "hyaline" two days ago, but I couldn't remember it just now, I had to use wordnet to look up synonyms for "clear". If you can permanently memorize a Japanese word just be seeing it once, your memory must be 100x better than mine and I doubt you even need and SRS.
Considering my bad memory, I find that an SRS is most useful if I get a word in my short-term memory after seeing it. In this case I won't have to struggle to remember it the first time but can just pass it immediately. If I didn't put it in an SRS I would forget it in a couple days since pretty much all the Japanese words I am memorizing now are too low frequency for me to be likely to hit them again soon enough. However, if I put a word I have temporarily memorized in an SRS I may be able to get it up to a long period without much effort.
As for having your SRS match your knowledge, I also think this is silly. In fact, there are sentences where once I have memorized them sufficiently I have just deleted them. This is because I had learned the vocabulary so thoroughly that I would naturally produce this sentence, and so it seemed strange to continue to artificially memorize it specifically. Personally, I prefer this outcome to the alternative of keeping information in an SRS forever.
tuuli
Member
From: new york
Registered: 2007-11-10
Posts: 44
I think one difference in opinion here comes from the environments people are talking about when they say AJATT...if you're in an physical immersion environment, living in Japan with Japanese friends, etc., pretty much anything you add to your SRS is going to pop in the near future in real life and give you context, and things are naturally cohesive.
If you're NOT in Japan, and presumably spend about 8 hours a day at least working in a different language environment, you might try to use the remaining time more effectively by learning groups of words that are organized in some way, hence the preference of some people for text book sentences. Of course, sentences from other sources are also grouped in a different sense, and it's good to mix things up with different kinds of media. This is where I think it's a matter of personal learning styles that makes the difference in effectiveness...
(I think this is what phauna is saying too)
Last edited by tuuli (2008 July 10, 8:26 am)
