tuuli wrote:

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.

I am not in Japan, so take this with a grain of salt, but I find this very difficult to believe. There are no words you want to learn that have too low a frequency to learn without actively memorizing them?

The whole debate here of where to mine sentences from is interesting. I've mined both from reference books, like All About Particles, from TV dramas, songs, manga and even conversations, and I have to say the least useful of all of these are textbooks/reference books. The only benefit is they may give you an odd piece of grammar with an example, but the sentences are stilted and you will never really want to talk that way.
I take my own Japanese students as an example here - the ones who have the most natural grasp of English, who are the most fluent in conversation, are those who hate studying. But they love watching movies, listening to music, etc., and they religiously COPY what they here. They will replay episodes of Friends, for example, a dozen times until they repeat the sentences word for word, just the way the character Rachel does. If you want to sound like a natural Japanese speaker, this is the way to go. If you want to sound like a foreign professor who has trouble ordering in a restaurant, then mine too many textbooks.

I have around 30,000 cards in my Anki deck, but only around 15000 actual data items.  Mostly that is from words I've studied over the years, my kanji study from the past year (finally made it through all the joyo kanji, yeah!), and words I've heard people say.  I wonder if I will ever get through all the cards....  I'm just trying to use it as a way to keep my Japanese fresh.  At some point I knew every word in there, at least for a few minutes.  At this point, it is at least as effective to just read books, but then again, I don't want to forget everything I spent such a lot of time learning, so I try to spend a few minutes each day with Anki. 

I get depressed because every day there is a new word that I've never heard... like today I just heard for the first time じょくそう (褥瘡) = bed sores and also がっち（合致） = be in accordance (once I saw the kanji, I understood, but until then, I was just guessing).

I love/hate Japanese.  I'll probably forget じょくそう by the morning.  Apparently my brain hates to be told it has no choice.

alyks wrote:

Agreed. It's very much like flashcards when you put in sentences for the game you want to play.
Gold:
"Stop the 'study first, then enjoy media' and switch to the 'enjoy media, and learn from it'"

It kills me when people talk about using kanji odyssey or whatever to plug into anki. That honestly sounds like the most boring thing in the world and very much like traditional methods (which I hate). I'd rather put in a bunch of sentences from Ghost in the shell or Hellsing than a study book.

I'm sorry, but for the life of me, I can not understand how in the world this is supposed to work. Let's say I go watch Ghost in the shell to mine sentences from it. I hear a stream of sounds come from a characters mouth. Now how do I know how to separate those sounds out into words? How do I know that I'm hearing the sounds that I *think* I hear? How do I know what kanji to use? How do I know what the sentence even means?
It seems to me, that all I have managed to pick up is a sequence of sounds which I know nothing else about. How is this supposed to help me learn? I would have a very high probability of learning *incorrectly* from this. My goal is to learn Japanese, not to end up making my own language that's a bit similar to Japanese.

It's also much easier and quicker to mine from textbooks. With the spreadsheet projects for books like Kanji odyssey, I can add as many sentences I want into my anki deck in literally no time at all... compared to sitting down and watching some program, listening for interesting sentences, spending time trying to work out whats going on in the sentence, etc.

I also don't see how sentences from media are supposed to be any more fun and interesting than a sentence from a textbook. I personally think the sentences from textbooks are quite interesting, because they are often relevant and contain things that I will find useful in actual life, such as how to understand directions, or how to ask someone where they would like to go eat. Seems that it would be far more useful than learning how to say "His power level is over 9000!!!"

alyks wrote:

Ghost in the shell is a manga.

The point applies to written media too; even if you are able to parse a sentence syntactically, what are you supposed to do with it if you don't understand it completely? I would like to know what people who follow the AJATT method strictly do about this.

mystes wrote:

alyks wrote:

Ghost in the shell is a manga.

The point applies to written media too; even if you are able to parse a sentence syntactically, what are you supposed to do with it if you don't understand it completely? I would like to know what people who follow the AJATT method strictly do about this.

I try for awhile to understand it because I am stubborn, but eventually I decide to give up and move on. I'm trying to read Catch-22 in Japanese ATM. If I use my dictionary, I am able to defeat most sentences in the book, but sometimes there are some where it's like I understand all the words and get the meaning, but don't feel like I understand the sentence well. Then there are the others where I understand all the words (or, their definitions) but when I read the sentence it is just like "Huh"?

Try to look at the structure of the sentence, guess what is going and to get a feel for it. But sometimes it is just really like "what?" If so, just skip over it. There are a million sentences out there you can understand and learn new words/structure from. Don't make too much time for the ones you don't get.

Imo, "skipping" itself is a good skill to practice. We do it in our native language all the time. There will be sentences with words we don't know, but through context we can understand the meaning. We don't freeze what we're doing to stop and look up the word. Developing this skill in Japanese is probably a good idea also.

My opinion on the matter is getting the basic areas of a language out of the way so that you can move on to areas that are of interest to you.

UBJG provides that nice little "+1" concept that allows incremental sentences that give a grasp of the language. You get vocabulary, grammar, and context.

KO2001 provides a coordinated approach to learning On and Kun of the top 1100 kanji in context.

What makes the above two "fun" for me is each sentence is giving me new things to learn which apply to other fun stuff I have (dramas, manga, TV, walking around, music, etc).

What one should NOT do is take those 4300 sentences, dump it into an SRS and think they're down. That's as useless as going to RevTK and dumping all 3001 kanji into your Blue Stack. Each sentence in an SRS should be something you've learned. By learn, it's a story you've made up, honed and reviewed for a kanji you know how to write. For a sentence it's one you can pronounce and know the meanings of the individual words and the entire sentence as a whole. By the time it becomes "useless", it should be at a year review schedule or longer (which is the big selling point for an SRS for me). So yeah, I don't see a need to remove cards from an SRS if the thing is doing its job. It removes itself technically.

Yeah, I've been changing up how I'm doing things as I go along. A lot is based on advice from this forum, some from AJATT, some just from my own experimentation. For example, now I'm creating the dreaded "vocabulary list" for Trinity. However, EVERY word in that list is represented in at least one sentence in my AJATT deck. It's obviously something Fabrice thought about (hence Trinity), but I didn't see it's advantage till reading other posts concerning Japanese keywords and a bit on RTK. Still, my original deck remains the same and Trinity has a lot of "junk" which I know will space itself out on its own.

It's the SRS spacing itself out that's got me worried for using RevTK for a long period of time. The max space out (for now) is 8 months. I've been on here long enough to where those card will soon come up. So now a card that should be scheduled 16 months away will instead stay at 8 becoming a hindrance (overscheduling) instead of a helpful review. 3000 cards spaced out over 8 months is still 15 cards a day. Yes, there's the Anki option, but I do like RevTK. Plus it's still not an issue yet (stack 9 cards only started popping up for me a couple of months ago).

Sorry for the rant. Point is for some of us, the basics are fun as it's still new and translates to access to other new stuff. I consider mining anime and TV dramas for sentences tedious (for now), maybe in a year it'll be fun. And by then, the "boring" stuff from early fun stuff is spaced out as to be irrelevant.

cracky wrote:

meolox wrote:

Heh I was joking

Figured, on that note though I hope they don't learn about English speaking culture from those old comics either.

No, as stated above by timcampbell, they watch friends. And they're not the only one's; Chinese fansubbers watch Friends too:

When I first started watching ?Friends,? I found the show was full of information about American history and showed how America had rapidly developed. It?s more interesting than textbooks or other ways of learning.

It's like how Americans get lots of accurate knowledge of Japan by watching anime.

mystes wrote:

It's like how Americans get lots of accurate knowledge of Japan by watching anime.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I hope you're not. You can gain a lot of knowledge about the history and culture of either nation by viewing their television programs, as long as you keep in mind that it's only one <i>aspect</i> of the culture, and use some salt. I've of course seen the people who like to make outrageous claims about Japan after seeing a few episodes of some anime, but that's a reflection of their stupidity more than it is anything else. (I've been guilty of this in the past, admittedly!)

About sentence mining in general... I don't think anyone has said that it's necessary to avoid a textbook wholesale, but rather to exempt them from SRS. I think you said (I find you a little difficult to understand), Mystes, that you don't understand how someone who doesn't understand the grammar yet can be expected to effectively mine sentences from a textbook, and of course you're right; someone can't. But I, for example, read articles online and read through about one and a half textbooks to have all of the basic grammar constructs explained, and then hopped into more enjoyable reading via manga, which I don't have any particular problem reading now. The textbooks were invaluable in letting me encounter grammatical structures beforehand so that I could recognize them in real Japanese, but I'd never consider plugging any of those sentences into an SRS. The reason for this is that they're not the kind of Japanese I ever want to speak, so they're not the kind of sentences I want floating around in my head, which is what I see the sentence mining method as being for. Other people have different takes on this.

'strict' AJATT have never been about avoiding textbooks altogether, though. He espouses picking up a few books on Japanese grammar rather consistently, and if memory serves links to a few on the main page.

But.. I do still have to wonder about what seems to me to be taking the 'lay the basics then do what you enjoy' concept too far. Like I said, I didn't have to enter 4300 sentences into an SRS before I could read manga I enjoy. I'm reading them now, though my level is in my opinion quite low, and I haven't actually started really SRSing sentences yet (I think sentence reviews on top of kanji reviews would kill me, at the moment). But I'm big on the different strokes things. If whatever's working for you is, in fact, working for you, then... what's really to talk about?

Lastly, Zarxrax, if you find mining from an anime or drama too stressful or difficult, you just don't do it. Use books for mining instead. But the exposure does a lot for you on it's own. As for somehow making up a fake Japanese, that's just a silly concern; you know when you've heard a sentence right, at least in my experience. Anyway, if you need lower-key listening material to bulk up a little before trying anime and drama, there are always podcasts like japanesepod101.com to get your ear used to things.

Last edited by QuackingShoe (2008 July 10, 7:02 pm)

QuackingShoe wrote:

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I hope you're not.

I was being half serious, I guess.

QuackingShoe wrote:

About sentence mining in general... I don't think anyone has said that it's necessary to avoid a textbook wholesale, but rather to exempt them from SRS. I think you said (I find you a little difficult to understand), Mystes, that you don't understand how someone who doesn't understand the grammar yet can be expected to effectively mine sentences from a textbook, and of course you're right; someone can't.

Ah, no I didn't mean textbooks or other materials with English translation. I meant other materials without corresponding direct English translations.

QuackingShoe wrote:

The textbooks were invaluable in letting me encounter grammatical structures beforehand so that I could recognize them in real Japanese, but I'd never consider plugging any of those sentences into an SRS. The reason for this is that they're <i>not the kind of Japanese I ever want to speak</i>, so they're not the kind of sentences I want floating around in my head, which is what I see the sentence mining method as being for. Other people have different takes on this.

'strict' AJATT have never been about avoiding textbooks altogether, though. He espouses picking up a few books on Japanese grammar rather consistently, and if memory serves links to a few on the main page.

That's why I was curious; if you avoid textbooks and don't have direct English translations, isn't it hard to use an SRS in the beginning? I think someone posted here or in another forum that he [Edit: Khatzumoto] personally used Mangajin which I believe had direct English translations and notes, but he didn't even post that information on his site, so I was wondering what other people following AJATT have done.

Last edited by mystes (2008 July 10, 6:11 pm)

QuackingShoe wrote:

My assumption is that I have to understand the sentence to put it in, so I'm going to know it the second time around as well; if I don't, then I can just figure it out again the same way I did the first time. So my answer side either just has Japanese definitions for words I want to remember, or nothing at all, just depending on how I feel at the time - but no translation.

I definitely agree with the top part and even if I temporarily am unable to produce a given card I can pretty much always mentally carry along extra information that isn't actually on the card. As for the next part, it seems you're only doing recognition and not production if you have cards where half is blank?

Basically I have two questions for people doing AJATT from the beginning:
1) If you're doing production, what do you put on your cards? Surely at a low level, a Japanese definition would be too difficult?
2) How do you confirm your understanding before entering the card if there's no translation? Or, unlike QuackingShoe and me, do you expect to gain understanding after entering the card?

RE:  How to add sentences with no English translations.

One trick I've discovered is, instead of adding an English translation, you can just add a contextual note.  So instead of putting "There are too many slimes, we need more manpower!" on the answer side, you could just put "(Dragon Warrior hero when all the slimes attack)".  I do this for my video game mining, and combine it with invisible text.  In some sense it's BETTER, since a direct translation often LACKS key contextual information.

Why English translations? Define the sentence components.

Q:
私の名前がアレクスです
A:
わたし [Me]　の [Possessive part.]　な-まえ [Name + Now = Name] アレクスです
or
わたしの [My. Defines the following in as mine, as per の] な-まえが [Name + Front of = Name. が used as *description*] Edit: Corrected. Staying up sixteen hours will make you think not good.

This isn't exact. But the point I'm trying to convey, is you're trying to understand the sentences, not translate them to English. You want to get out of English thinking and into Japanese thinking. You have to understand what the sentences is trying to tell you, and know how each part of the sentences functions. I believe this is possible without trying to constantly translate to English. (It's just a clutch, really.)

*Not saying you should never ever use them.*

Last edited by alyks (2008 July 11, 1:09 am)