Update on my progress if anyone cares.

After exactly 50 days since I started (as shown on the Anki stats), I have reached 3000 of the Core 6000. That's 60 a day on average. Not bad, but my impatient self says that it can be better.

The most important change I made was that I decided to forgo the "emphasis on new cards" strategy (IE. do as many new cards as possible everyday, without caring about reviews). I have since decided that I should be using Anki properly and use it for what it is meant to be used for, and that means doing the reviews consistently.

At one point, I had 1500 reviews needed. That took me just over a week to clear and for that duration, new vocabulary had to be put on hold. Now that my reviews are under control, I feel that my own internal vocabulary has increased by a decent amount.

I gave myself strict rules on Anki/Heisig, but it was necessary to be a little less strict when it came to Core 6000 on Anki. Otherwise, I'll have 500+ reviews a day and not much time for new vocabulary.

My new rules are as thus:

1) Do I know the English meaning and the reading of the Kanji? If yes, then choose "Good."
2) Do I know the English meaning but not the reading? Choose "Hard."
3) Do I need the example sentence to guess the English meaning? Choose "Hard."
4) Do I not know the English meaning, example sentence or not, knowing the reading or not? Choose "Fail."

The above rules also apply to hiragana only items. For katakana, instead of "Good" it becomes "Easy" (because katakana for the most part is easy).

So far, the political terms wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. What is annoying however, are the business terms. You know the words I'm talking about: management, organization, system, industry, business, etc...

There's many unmemorizable words but the two biggest I can think of are:

経営 keiei: The pronunciation is annoying if you're using nukemarine's decks+sound, and the woman with the glasses for this vocabulary also looks annoying. The word is "management" which is the third annoying thing.
I think it's 事情 but I'm probably confusing it with a similar term. I think the word is "circumstance" or a similar word, and the image of it is one annoying looking guy (not two).

Anyway, 3000 done. It's downhill from here. It's a similar feeling to reaching 1000 in Heisig, except not as exhilarating because I did it already (with Heisig). Any tips for what to expect vocabulary-wise?

Last edited by qwertyytrewq (2012 October 25, 6:36 am)

qwertyytrewq wrote:

経営 keiei: The pronunciation is annoying if you're using nukemarine's decks+sound, and the woman with the glasses for this vocabulary also looks annoying. The word is "management" which is the third annoying thing.
I think it's 事情 but I'm probably confusing it with a similar term. I think the word is "circumstance" or a similar word, and the image of it is one annoying looking guy (not two).

Anyway, 3000 done. It's downhill from here. It's a similar feeling to reaching 1000 in Heisig, except not as exhilarating because I did it already (with Heisig). Any tips for what to expect vocabulary-wise?

If it's that annoying you'll remember it better! There were a few that annoyed me too. There are always going to be difficult words. A fun exercise is to sort your cards by lapses and see how much the difficult cards are draining your progress. I think the worst 20 cards probably add up to several days' worth of reviews alone. These days, I suspend cards that I know will be troublesome. You eventually get a feel for which words those are going to be. There's no need for them to slow me down now, I have another two thousand words in the deck. Those last 50 can wait until the end.

You can expect the rest to be easier from here on out. There's really nothing special about the rest, it's just another bunch of words like before.

I have 1247 left. It feels like it's taking forever. I can't wait to be down to 999.

henryw: I switched because it's substantially easier. I decided that covering as much vocab as quickly as I could was more important (to me) so I can start reading more stuff sooner (and it's worked nicely).

I also got very frustrated with synonyms. Here's the problem I found: some cards ended up with 2, 3 or 4 "not x, y, z". Okay, fine, but I know x, y, and z very well, and since I'm looking at them, they're brought to the foremost of my recollection facilities for that particular meaning, clouding my ability to find yet another meaning for something similar. I don't want to play a synonym finding game. I would have understood that word if I actually saw it. Having to mark the cards with hints was also unpleasant work (because you have to then go back and find all the other cards and add the hint on those as well), and I certainly didn't look forward to doing any more of it with another 4k cards to go. I don't regret doing it for the first 2K though. It's probably not a bad idea, and you get some good writing practice along the way.

henryw wrote:

The sooner I can start reading/listening, the more I can gain without dependency on SRS, and production should come more easily at that point.

That was my intent. Admittedly, my listening skills are as good as non-existent, and I'm certain my abilities suffer because of it.

henryw wrote:

However....I'm not finished with RTK (err...I've only got around 350....*embarassed* ). I had a very long break when things got hairy with work and school. So I'm not so sure its a good idea to jump right into core yet. Should I try and burn through RTK, and casually work my way through core6k? Or wait until RTK is DONE. For some reason, RTK scares me, even though I haven't found it extremely difficult. Its just daunting more than anything....

Yeah, don't worry, I took a 3 year break . I blamed university but I look back now in horror at the precious time I wasted.

You will get a hundred different opinions about what to do and when. You will have to read around the forum to see what others think and come to your own conclusions. Personally, I would say that if you aren't going to zerg rush RTK, you should start learning other things as well. Learning 2000 characters in isolation barely does anything to your Japanese comprehension.

Tae Kim's grammar guide is a good free resource to get you started. Don't worry about understanding it perfectly the first time you read it. Some parts are hard. I would recommend going through that before Core6k because you will need to be able to somehow make sense of the sentences in Core6k so they can be more useful to you.

If you can understand most of what you've read so far then you'll likely be fine. The grammar doesn't get any more complex, save for the occasional sentence.

Thanks for that link! I haven't seen it before. Looks like part 3 has some stuff I don't know, so I might just give that a quick read tonight. It looks very concise, which I like very much.

Did Anki 1 even sync media? I thought there was a DropBox feature that doesn't work anymore since DropBox made changes that they don't want to fix. Anki 2 does sync media with the ankiweb server, but I don't use that either. I turn off media syncing and just move files around manually over USB. I don't want to upload/download ~400MB of tiny media files to and from a server just to move them to devices 30cm away from each other. And the media search took forever on AnkiDroid that it looked like it had frozen while trying.

Also, the filesystem on my phone's SD card has a limit on the number of files in one directory (it maxes out around 17K), and since Anki2 wants every media file in one directory (!), I can't have media from other decks since the Core6k ones use it all up.

10 hours sounds unusual.

And yeah, that's one of the things that really annoyed me about Anki 2. Since I'm disabling the media syncing anyway, it shouldn't be a problem to create sub-directories and put my media for specific decks in there. So my template would have something like

 <img src="core6k/{{SentenceImage}}.jpg">

Which was a big no-no.

Thx for the post netsplitter, i was going mad trying to figure out why all my media files won't appear in anki. Made 2 separate folders for Core and KO now(i had over 25k files before in one folder, and had an error about not enough space on the device)

Last edited by meeatcookies (2012 October 28, 5:26 am)

So if I just copy over the deck.media folder, it will use that instead of syncing (if syncing is off?) - is that the solution? I'm not on Anki 2 yet, but I suppose sooner or later I'll have to upgrade...

If it accepts sub directories then I guess there is no problem lol?? Unless I'm missing something..

Quick core2k6k question. If I can produce/pronounce/translate specifically the word or phrase tested on a card, though I don't necessarily know either the meaning/reading/both of another word in the sentence, should I fail the card? If I did wouldnt it be counter intuitive to the way srs works (just one idea per card), or would I be helping myself out by forcing myself to learn more at once? What did/do you guys do?

Today I've noticed that Clozed delete Tae Kim's deck actually comes with audio files but they never play while reviewing cards, so I checked the model and the fields but couldn't find one for audio, any solution out there? (maybe a spread sheet with audio column?)
Thanks!

Last edited by undead_saif (2012 November 02, 7:27 am)

They should be pre-ordered in the browser under the "due" column.... Just go through the deck. I'm actually not 100% sure what the purpose of having the rest of the cards suspended is for if only to measure short term goals in terms of Nukemarine's guided steps?