I do mostly production cards. I have never done English to Japanese production, and I usually do not do vocab cards alone. My cards are mostly set up as so:

Along with the occassional picture, kana sentence OR audio (never both) → Sentence with proper kanji in place and Japanese explanations to glance at if needed

However, recognition cards are in place for when stylistic choice needs noting, such as video game text (different characters have their text rendered different ways) or works of literature. In this case, it is:

Occassional picture along with original sentence with notes on context → Reading along with explanations in Japanese if needed and along with notes about what might be special about this sentence if not too obvious.

I disagree. While production won't help with conversational skill, it WILL improve learning speed and retention of vocabulary far better than recognition alone will. If I only could have one set of cards, I'd only have production. But that's silly. I have both production and recognition, because they're discreet skills that reinforce each other.

And I don't know about you, but I still have to write a lot in longhand. Being able to write is a basic function of literacy that is one of my language goals, so I have production in my deck.

Note that I didn't say it was faster to do production cards. It isn't. (At least not at first.) But after a few months, I got into a groove and figured out how to do them at a decent speed.

For production, my quick and dirty approach to it is:
Sentence in Kana -> Sentence in Kanji + whatever notes I deem appropriate.

I do it this way because I do about half of my reviewing by cell phone, so I don't have mp3 audio available in Anki. It took a while to get used to reading sentences full of just kana, but it's not *that* bad. Read the whole sentence before you start writing it out if you have trouble with it.

The major downside is that if you plan on writing out the entire sentence, you're going to need a LOT of time to do it. I would recommend doing it for a short period of time, just to get used to writing. (During which time I wouldn't add too many sentences, because you'll get overwhelmed.)

But once you get more comfortable writing, stop writing it out, and use the "finger in the air" or "visualize it" method. That's where you simply write out only the kanji you need to reproduce with your finger in the air, or you draw them in your brain. This speeds things up considerably.

The other way to do it would be to consider penmanship a separate skill, approach it separately, and just go straight to doing it in your head or with your finger in the air (or on the table. whatever.)

The important thing is to force your brain to go from reading -> producing kanji.

rich_f wrote:

And I don't know about you, but I still have to write a lot in longhand. Being able to write is a basic function of literacy that is one of my language goals, so I have production in my deck.

Personally, I never have to write anything in longhand in Japanese, not even when I lived in Japan. I can't even think of a situation where it would be needed.

That aside, it's not like you don't learn how to write just because you don't practice production. You're not going to sit around and wonder which kanji are used in 勉強 after having studied Japanese for a few months, enough exposure fixes that just fine.

What I mean in my first post was that if you're in Japanese class and NEED to produce kanji in writing on a test in the near future, production will be needed because the exposure might not be enough. Eventually however, exposure will be enough so if you don't have a certain time-limit and especially if you don't use longhand regularly, I don't see the point. I mean, wasn't it discussed on these forums before that overexposure might be detrimental? Having both a production and a recognition card would certainly count as overexposure, no?

Tobberoth wrote:

Personally, I never have to write anything in longhand in Japanese, not even when I lived in Japan. I can't even think of a situation where it would be needed.

Heck, I can think of plenty of examples.

o Illustrating a point on the whiteboard with colleagues.

o Ordering a home newspaper delivery.

o Filling out an in-store credit application.

o Taking notes in sales calls.

o Some restaurants, where a sheet of paper
   goes around the table and everyone writes his order on it.

onafarm wrote:

Tobberoth wrote:

Personally, I never have to write anything in longhand in Japanese, not even when I lived in Japan. I can't even think of a situation where it would be needed.

Heck, I can think of plenty of examples.

o Illustrating a point on the whiteboard with colleagues.

o Ordering a home newspaper delivery.

o Filling out an in-store credit application.

o Taking notes in sales calls.

o Some restaurants, where a sheet of paper
   goes around the table and everyone writes his order on it.

1. Only if you work and at the point you get a job in a japanese company and are expected to write Japanese on a whiteboard, you shouldn't have any problem picking the right kanji.
2. Internet.
3. Usually doesn't require much kanji skills. You don't have to practice production in an SRS to be able to write your adress and stuff like that.
4. I've never seen such a restaurant ever, in any country.

Tobberoth wrote:

That's the whole point why RtK is awesome. If one feels they have to produce each kanji they learn for each word, they may just as well skip RtK.

I don't really understand your point here.

I write kanji from memory when I'm writing handwritten letters to my fiancée.  Of course there are times when I'm unsure which characters to use and I look them up, but it would be a drag if I had to do that for each one.

Aside from that, passing a high level of the kanji kentei can be some good street cred ;-)

The question is not whether one wants to write or not. But what's the most efficient path to getting there.

At first getting to a point where you understand Japanese is much more important than practicing how to write every single word you study. There is a lot of vocabulary to be learned to get there and that should be done in the most efficient way possible.

If you systematically add a production card for each item in your SRS instead of doing recognition only, you're multiplying your workload by at least a factor of 3 (a production card takes at least twice the time it takes to review a recognition card).

Also does it make sense to add a production card at the same time you add the recognition card? Production practice should at least be delayed until you've learned to recognize the new item so that  you won't waste time attempting production on something you don't know well enough. (An anki option to do that automatically could be nice I guess)

Once a sufficient level has been reached it could be a good time to focus a bit more on writing. No need to SRS everything though. Practicing writing real texts, playing kanji games on the nintendo ds and reading a lot should really help a lot more than brute force drills a this point.

rich_f wrote:

JimmySeal wrote:

Tobberoth wrote:

That's the whole point why RtK is awesome. If one feels they have to produce each kanji they learn for each word, they may just as well skip RtK.

I don't really understand your point here.

I don't either. Doing RTK makes writing out kanji compounds from memory MUCH easier than it was before I did RTK. And using production cards makes those sorts of activities even easier, because you don't sit there trying to squeeze the words out of your brain.

If you don't want to write, that's fine with you. But the rest of us want to be literate.

That was my point. RtK makes writing kanji from memory extremely easy and that's why production cards are excessive. You already know how to write the kanji from memory, why waste tons of time training it?

I don't want to write? Sure I do. I just like to prioritize. I will be able to write just fine eventually by just doing recognition. If I waste my time on production I might be able to write a few compounds a month sooner but I'd rather learn to recognize even more in that time.

It's not about becoming literate or not, it's about becoming literate fast or not. I'd rather get to a really high level of comprehension with longhand writing lagging slightly behind than being stuck on medium Japanese with exemplary longhand.

Thanks for all the replies guys. I've also been convinced now that starting out with recognition (JAPANESE -> YOMIKATA and possibly ENGLISH) is the best way to go in learning the copioius vocabulary necessary for JLPT2 in the most efficient manner.

Production can be added in later using Anki, and as you say there are other ways of doing "Production"- SRS isn't necessary for everything, and I do enjoy playing my Otona No Renshuu game on the DS.

Now to just finish the damn RtK so I can get onto the next stage of study!

Nukemarine wrote:

I don't think any of us are doing production. We're really doing dictation, right? Hear the word or phase to find out how well we know it. Speed depends on what kind of dictation you're doing:

1. Mental dictation - thinking it in your head
2. Partial dictation - writing out only a portion of the sentence, such as a key phase, grammar point, or vocabulary word.
3. Translation production - now this is production, but you're going from L1 to L2. When I did this, it was very controlled to remove chance of ambiguous translations.
4. Full dictation - writing out the entire sentence.

Yeah I'm doing number 3.  I start out with recognition (smart.fm) and after I finish the lesson in about 3-4 weeks I put it into Anki as a production card.  I go from the English sentence and have to write out he Japanese one.  If I use different vocab I give my self slack, it's mostly for writing practice and to be able to effectively produce the words in conversation more quickly.

I also do it because I have tons of free time and loads of Japanese around me so I can do whatever I want a learn at a pretty fast pace thanks to having to use it all day long.

Sorry for the necropost, but didn't seem necessary to make a new thread.

Here's a chart from Anki showing my cards and how the intervals are. Only thing I can gleem from it is that although Recognition has 10% more cards being 6 months or longer in interval, they're still pretty close to the dictation cards. Had Recognition been very high up there, it may show that it's wasting time in that I'd get results with just Dictation.



Personally, there are cards that I don't remember pronunciation, but can write. While other cards are the opposite issue of knowing how to pronounce it, but cannot write it. I'm glad I have both types of cards in that I catch these few anomalies.

Recently, I added Tanuki cards. Those are reading (recognition) only due to having no audio and I'm not going to go kana to kanji without that. However, I made a choice to write out the vocabulary word as they come up in review for those.

I do audio and kana on the question side. Seems reasonable, and is there to make sure I know which word in the sentence I'm supposed to be writing out.

Out of interest, are you using Anki's ability to give the same spacing to cards that are of the same fact or starting from 0 spacing?