Having thought about this for a while, I am beginning to think the same way.  Chunks are probably a better division than words.  That makes for much quicker sentence construction.  Is learning through sentences the best way to learn the chunks?  Also, will the chunks you are learning as you read a book like Kanji Odyssey be helpful when it comes to speaking?  I have a feeling that the chunks used in speaking are much different than those used in formal writing.  Like, I have never seen anything like 「いいかな」って思ちゃう感じ in writing, but this seems to be a pretty natural sounding spoken chunk.

Is there benefit in organizing lists of useful chunks?  I would love to have a set of "speaking" chunks that I could practice from time to time, or have handy as I am chatting on Skype.

yukamina, sorry I could not understand what you meant with that.

Yo daniel, you solve that by having "casual" sentences in your deck.

Sentence mining is a great way of learning a language. It is fun to mine sentences from doramas, anime and songs. Songs are specially fun because they are very heavy on grammar (weird, but correct constructions).

[rant]
About phonics, my son Nicholas was having terrible trouble reading because they @#&%! tried to teach him to read just by showing him words and @#&%! expecting him to remember them. (Sorry for the bad language.) Maybe some kids can learn that way, but he wound up being unable to read a thing after twelve months of school.

So my wife bought a phonics reading program. We've ignored all the rubbish he gets home from school and concentrated on learning to read the old fashioned way, and thank goodness he's picking it up now.

The justification they give is that (a) most common words have irregular pronunciation and (b) adults read by sight. The flaw in that argument is that when you come across an unfamiliar word, what do you do? Sound it out! You only read it by sight once you've read it enough times to commit it to memory. Therefore the correct way to teach kids to read IMNSHO is phonetically. Just encourage them to memorize words they encounter repeatedly, and to teach irregular pronunciations as exceptions along the way. At least irregular words do provide a good hint as to how to say them.
[/rant]

Anyway, the question I was going to ask is that I've been using the SRS for a few months now, putting in Japanese phrases and sentences and checking my understanding. It's good, but have a problem with it.

What it does well is that my ability to read is improving, since after all that's what I'm exercising out. However, my ability to create sentences is lagging behind. In other words, it's putting heaps of words into my passive vocabulary, but not improving my active vocabulary much.

If it's a word that I revised the day or two before, say, I can use it in conversation. But if it's been weeks since the word last popped up, sure, I'll understand it if I read it somewhere, but I won't recall it in conversation.

Anyone else had this problem?

zazen666 wrote:

Yeah-you should make sure you test your self from English to Japanese.

Forget that. Thinking English is a bit limiting. Instead it should be something like JP question > JP or Audio > JP. Tanuki corpus is very good in this aspect.

Ji_suss wrote:

Yukamina and Raichu
Don't get me wrong.  I'm not down on phonics.  Just the PENDULUM of fashion that says, "Now we shall teach all reading through phonics!" OR "Now we shall teach all reading through whole language study!"   To my mind, we need both.

Oh, I'm not against the whole language method; I don't really know much about it. I was just commenting that my sister complains about it. Using it for a second language might be a lot different than using it for your native one.

As for active recall...I wonder, could you put the question in Japanese with the answer also in Japanese? Not translating or transcribing the same sentence, but say...

Q どんな食べ物が好きですか。

A 私はピザがとても大好きです。Or whatever your answer might be.

Yo, I'm barely starting monolingual, but I already feel it is "the way". I feel like whatever I've done bilingual, I'll have to practice monolingual to have it working well.

nest0r wrote:

Raichu, are you doing production cards, or recognition?

Well, that's the thing. I'm focusing on Japanese recognition in the SRS.
(I'm using Khatzumemo, but I'm in the process of writing my own.)

That trains my ability to *read*, but not to listen or to speak.

I was wondering what sort of things you can do to train your ability to speak. I don't think SRS is the answer (whether E2J or J2J).

danieldesu wrote:

Raichu wrote:

I was wondering what sort of things you can do to train your ability to speak. I don't think SRS is the answer (whether E2J or J2J).

I agree, no matter how much one can read in a language, they will not become fluent listeners and speakers without some other sort of practice.  The reading may HELP, but it will not get you all the way there...  It would be great if there was a systematic way (like SRS) to learn how to formulate your thoughts in the target language.

I've found myself dragging the time slider at parts of videos over and over. This helps a lot.

I was even thinking of ripping one apart, piece by piece, to train my ear that way.

danieldesu wrote:

Like, I have never seen anything like 「いいかな」って思ちゃう感じ in writing, but this seems to be a pretty natural sounding spoken chunk.

Reminds me of some Soseki stuff I've seen. @_@

Head ache