I'm increasing my vocabulary using nukemarine's Core 6000 + image + audio. However, I'm having trouble memorizing them.

By default, the question card shows the English translation, an image, and clozed sentences. The answer card shows the Kanji and sentence translation and audio. I can see going from English to Kanji as being effective for Heisig, but it doesn't seem like it would work for the Core.

I changed the Question card to a Kanji in big font, nothing else, no readings, no translations, no sentences, no audio, nothing. I believe that seeing the sentence, even untranslated as cheating, giving me hints of what the Kanji is, when I should be memorizing Kanji by itself, with no help from context.

The Answer card, contains everything else: readings, translation, sentence plus translation, image and audio.

I'm still having trouble memorizing though. Katakana words are no problem, hiragana words are mainly no problem, verbs even multi-Kanji ones are reasonable. My only problem seems to be Kanji words consisting of two Kanji or more.

Any advice?

At the moment, I have close to 1000 reviews that need to be done because I flew through the first 1000 or so.

qwertyytrewq wrote:

I'm still having trouble memorizing though.

Are you sure your memorizing goal isn't too strict? Do you need to be able to produce a close English equivalent from the kanji?

I believe that seeing the sentence, even untranslated as cheating, giving me hints of what the Kanji is, when I should be memorizing Kanji by itself, with no help from context.

Perhaps this is misguided. I used to have the same problem with reading sentences, where I was convinced that "the sentence gives the meaning of the word away". But now that I'm reading more native material, I'm finding that it wasn't as bad as I thought. I really do pick up on those words, even if occasionally with a little extra push from a dictionary. If you were able to understand the word from the sentence, then it's not really cheating as much as it was your own brain extrapolating the meaning. While it might be easier, it's still a mental exercise focused on that word, which certainly does help you when you see it again elsewhere (as I've since discovered).

Good job on the first 1000! The difficulty picks up after 1950

Hey netsplitter, I missed your post.

netsplitter wrote:

Are you sure your memorizing goal isn't too strict? Do you need to be able to produce a close English equivalent from the kanji?

Since my last post, things have changed a bit. I have now completed 2000 of the 6000 Core cards using the Kanji (front) and everything else (back) method. This is my 25th day so about 80 new cards a day. My memorization goal is quite strict: I need to memorize both the reading and the English meaning (this includes English translations of Katakana words where the Japanese meaning of the English Katakana is different from the English meaning, such as "mansion"). My reviews at the moment vary from 500 to 1000 cards (which I'm unable to cut down), but that's the cost of focusing on new cards, which is my priority. Having said that, I am pretty happy with my progress so far and I memorize most things.

This wasn't the case under Nukemarine's default card layout: English to Kanji/Readings. That's what I had trouble with.

I still do English to Kanji though: Heisig's 2200 (80% mature, between 50-100 reviews a day) + physical writing. Again, strict: If I miss even 1 stroke, the card goes straight to the "Soon" pile. That doesn't happen often but I do forget a bit of the older ones.

Perhaps this is misguided. I used to have the same problem with reading sentences, where I was convinced that "the sentence gives the meaning of the word away". But now that I'm reading more native material, I'm finding that it wasn't as bad as I thought. I really do pick up on those words, even if occasionally with a little extra push from a dictionary. If you were able to understand the word from the sentence, then it's not really cheating as much as it was your own brain extrapolating the meaning. While it might be easier, it's still a mental exercise focused on that word, which certainly does help you when you see it again elsewhere (as I've since discovered).

I'll see how I go so far, but if what you say is true (it gets hard after 2000), I'll add the Japanese example sentences as a training wheel.

So far, the only trouble I've had is the management/politics/business-related vocabulary.

Good job on the first 1000! The difficulty picks up after 1950

I will ganbaru as much as I can. Stats so far: Seen: 2030, Unseen: 3969

Last edited by qwertyytrewq (2012 September 30, 8:30 am)

netsplitter wrote:

That's very good progress. Perhaps for your own sanity you should consider yielding some of that anki time for something more entertaining. (Not to sound like that jealous guy who dreams of being Anki World Champion 2012). I'm quick to drop or put on hold anki decks once I've fixated on a favourite (that would be the Core6K deck).

Thanks. I prefer to build up my vocabulary beforehand though. More work done now means less looking up the dictionary later when I read native material.

netsplitter wrote:

I've been trying to do 33 new cards a day to get that nice and well-rounded 1000 per month, but I find myself doing no anki reviews on the weekend at all, instead opting to read some manga. I might have to step up my game now since you're making me feel sucky.

Haha, maybe we can have a race! (though you had a head start) I did more today: Unseen: 3814 Seen: 2184

Having said that, you're probably using Anki as it was intended: having a consistent manageable number of new cards a day, and I assume, keeping up on your reviews and spreading the future reviews out. I'm impatient though which is why I'm rushing through the new cards and have a high amount of reviews (1000-1200 at the moment). I think they're still both valid strategies but time will tell whether my lack of reviews will hurt my long term memory.

netsplitter wrote:

I did E->J up until around 2000, so it's likely my perceived difficulty was only due to the synonyms that started showing up. The difficulty eases off fairly quickly. They get easier as you learn more since there'll be fewer surprises and a lot of the readings in compounds won't be new to you.

So you're using nukemarine's Core deck and change it to J->E right? Personally, E->J isn't too useful to me which is why I changed it to J->E because I'll be doing more reading than anything else in Japanese. I guess that E->J is more useful for people who want to quickly form and produce sentences to communicate with Japanese people and maybe for those who want to write paragraphs in Japanese.

netsplitter wrote:

Good luck! I have 1946 left. You'll be done before me if you can keep up your pace!

With about 4000 left, If I do 50 or 100 a day, then I'll be finished in 40 to 80 days. I'll see you there!

Last edited by qwertyytrewq (2012 October 01, 11:28 am)

nilfisq wrote:

This forum, and this thread specifically, contains a lot of useful information. Sometimes though, newbies may bump into terms, names etc. that are not completely clear at first sight. Could anyone help me out and explain what is meant by
"Kanzen Master Two - 100 sentences (km thread link)"?

"Kanzen Master" (完全マスター) is a set of study books for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (日本語能力試験). There's a s/s of the sentences culled from the books floating around, but it's not publicly available b/c it's copyrighted material. Hence the lack of an actual link.

qwertyytrewq wrote:

Haha, maybe we can have a race!

Sure, although my head start is a little unfair. (*cough* it doesn't count until your reviews reach 0)

qwertyytrewq wrote:

I'm impatient though which is why I'm rushing through the new cards and have a high amount of reviews (1000-1200 at the moment). I think they're still both valid strategies but time will tell whether my lack of reviews will hurt my long term memory.

Ah, I see what you're doing now. That's an interesting approach. Hopefully it works out for you. This is where I would recommend using the sentences because then you get to practice words you're still learning as they appear in the sentences of other cards. In fact, what I do now when a new card appears that contains additional unknown vocab in its sentence is I mark the card and move on. When I get home, I find marked cards, then unsuspend cards that contain that additional unknown word (or the kanji that make up that word if it's difficult). So I'm actually reviewing a lot of vocab out of order just to take advantage of having a sentence or two that uses a new word while I'm still learning it as the keyword in another card. It's a synergistic effect.

I've also found a good way to make my weekends more productive. Thanks to the brilliance of Anki 2, I created a sub-deck that contains all the katakana words. I can now avoid doing those on weekdays and save them for the weekend. I figured since a lot of them are nearly English equivalents, I can still make easy progress without the stress of actually thinking.

Progress ahoy!

Last edited by netsplitter (2012 October 02, 8:20 am)

I do all my reviews on AnkiDroid. There are betas for AnkiDroid 2 which are compatible with Anki 2.

I love the new learning mode more than anything else. The way it re-schedules failed cards seems to be a big improvement if my stats are anything to go by. Sub-decks are handy. It's also much faster than previous versions (especially for mobile devices). There are many downsides though. I think it's much too complex now and the desktop client's UI is a disaster, which I'm sure will drive many people away. Reading the manual will help you a lot, but I'm sure most people will give up before they even try. Oh well.

undead_saif wrote:

I've been avoiding Anki 2 and Ankidroid 2 until now, but your post encouraged me to try it, thanks!

Hope you enjoy it. Sub-decks and learning sets are very cool new features.

undead_saif wrote:

How do you make use of the sentence? For example, do you check it if you couldn't guess the Kanji meaning? Or you see the Kanji then the sentence then attempt to answer? Thanks in advance!

Well, before even reading sentences, I assume you have studied at least basic grammar so you know what Japanese sentences are like.

You might be different but my way of thinking is that if you want to really be good at reading Japanese, you have to understand Kanji vocabulary and other vocabulary by itself, and not just within a sentence. If you read manga or watch anime, characters don't always use fully fleshed out sentences. Sometimes they have very short and abrupt speech, so you don't get the benefit of sentences there.

Firstly, if you're looking at a new vocabulary,  look at the vocabulary, the meaning, the reading and the translated English sentence. The sentence is helpful for seeing what the vocabulary looks like when used in a sentence and where. Press "Soon/Again".

The second time it pops up, what I do is look at the vocabulary. Do I know the meaning? And do I know the reading? If yes, good.

If I fail to do both, I'll scroll down to the Japanese sentence. Try to read the untranslated sentence. Does the sentence give any hints to what the meaning is? What about the reading? Here's a very simple hypothetical example.

Let's say the word you don't understand is: 真っ黒

Let's say you know what 真っ is because you've seen it several times. Since you've seen it several times, you know the reading: まっ. Since you know 真っ, it means that the second kanji is a color. But you don't know which color. It could be blue, red, black or white.

So you check the example sentence:空は真っ黒になったら、夕飯を食べました。

The first thing you see is: 空は真っ黒になったら、

You know that 空 is sky. There are blue skies, red skies, and black skies, but I've never heard of white ones (usually). The sky might be covered white with clouds, but it's the clouds that are white, not the sky. Anyway, your multiple choice question goes from 4 to 3.

Then you see 夕飯を食べました。

You know that 夕飯 means dinner. I don't know about you, but I usually eat dinner at night. What color is the sky at night? Your multiple choice question now goes from 3 to 1: black.

That is what I mean when I say that the sentence gives you hints on what the vocabulary you are stuck on, is. Of course, this is the hypothetical best case scenario I made up for the purpose of explaining what I mean. I'm sure my sentence is grammatically incorrect somehow.

So basically, the example sentence is a double-edged sword. It helps you to understand the Kanji when used in context, but if you need the sentence to understand the meaning of the Kanji, then you haven't really memorized it, in my opinion.

Last edited by qwertyytrewq (2012 October 04, 11:00 am)

undead_saif wrote:

Then what? If the sentence gives away the meaning or reading you failed to recall, what would you mark the card with? Hard (assuming later after first review)?

That's up to you decide because you decide on your own strictness on whether you got the Kanji or not and also the options you set up in your Anki, for example, the amount of Fail/Soon cards. Also Anki2 has some changes so things might be different there too.

If you completely fail a card the second time you see it, then study the Answer card in detail, press Soon/Fail, and try again the next time it pops up (the same day or the next day).

qwertyytrewq wrote:

I somewhat agree with that, that's why I'm interested in understanding the layout you're using!

Well, I'm pretty strict so the question side only has the vocabulary (big font) with the untranslated example sentence without furigana (small font) as backup/immersion purposes.

The answer card basically has everything complete and translated with readings including audio.

As I said in a previous post in this thread, if anyone has better ideas for card layouts, I'm all ears.

Last edited by qwertyytrewq (2012 October 04, 11:55 am)

I'm wondering if anyone has the original Core2K6K decks that they can send to me? I only have the first 2000 or so, from beginner to lower intermediate. I don't have any of the remaining upper intermediate decks.

I believe these were the original decks that were available when you clicked on Download in the Anki window and searched for "Core2K6K" and they were divided into titles such as "Beginner," "Basic," "Lower Intermediate 1," "Lower Intermediate 2," and so on. But they were recently removed from GoogleDocs. I hope someone knows which ones I am referring to.

The ones that are currently there are not the same ones. I downloaded these ones and tried to import them into my main Core deck but the formating is completely different and it will change the template.

It would be great if someone could help me, or inform me as to how to correctly import different models without altering the original template.

Thank you

Last edited by anonymosse (2012 October 10, 2:04 pm)

I have the ones you're talking about but I'm not home yet I'll send them later. Pm an email address and pm me again tomorrow if I forget to send them tonight. I'm pretty busy today. Err I have a compiled version of them already so I don't know if that conflicts but I'll give you what I can.

Thanks for this post Nukemarine. The deck for the grammar guide is so damn useful. Those numbers/days at the start of optimized core are damn annoying though when you just finished RTK, so I just suspended them, I can learn the other words fine for some reason.. will cram the suspended ones separately..