Vosmiura:

I agree that textbooks are often too polite or contrived, but at least they deal with real words that make up a common base of Japanese vocab that every Japanese person would and should know. 

Comic books, manga, anime, and other mass media uses a lot of slang and sometimes outright gibberish.  Most people would rather err on the side of appearing overly formal rather than incredibly weird/rude. 

Furthermore, I don't see how Khatzu's suggestion of mining from a dictionary is any better.  Aren't dictionaries usually just as formal and stuffy?

Personally, I think your best bet at the sentence method is either mining from a textbook, or making your own sentences based around an efficient word base such as the JLPT words.  If you want to, you could try to "informalize" the sentences before you put them in your SRS. 

As far as learning in Japan, I know that not everybody you meet is going to be an enthusiastic teacher.  However, I'm pretty sure that the average mcdonalds employee will help make a foreigner  understand that they are asking "you want fries with that"? even if they have to point at a picture.  This is what I mean by context-driven structure that adapts to your level.

Dragg wrote:

Yes, Khatzu does imply that one should start with the basics in regards to the sentence method.  However, at least as far as I have seen, he isn't very clear about what the basics are and how you should go about discerning them.  This is a lot like telling somebody without construction experience to build a house. Language professionals make a living just by clearly defining what the basics are for us.

Well he gives some pointers such as starting with a good particle book and working your way through every example.  There are lots of sources that you can use as guides for what is beginner, intermediate & advanced.

The professionals each have their own ways, that don't always agree.  For example one source may teach you "ga = but" in an early chapter, and another might keep it for a much later chapter.  Which one is right?

That way, we don't have to go through the trial-and-error pain of figuring out ourselves!

Instead you labor through all the exercises in the textbook for weeks and months, all the while thinking you are making progress, but in reality it's moving quite slowly and won't get you very far in the real world.

For example, if I'm browsing through the dictionary, as Khatzu recommends, and I come across a sentence making use of the Japanese word for dinosaur, "kyouryuu", I might think :  "hmmm, this word seems basic enough for someone of my skill level, plus I am interested in dinos cuz they are kewl." So I add this particular sentence, and lo-and-behold, I don't hear or see the word for months on end except for in my SRS.

I didn't think Khatzu recommends browsing the dictionary, fishing for things you 'might' be interested in.  He recommends you learn things that you see and need.  For example if you are reading a book and you see a word that you want to read, then you go and check the definition in a dictionary and add an example sentence in your SRS to help remember that word.

Sure, it is being reenforced a little, but not in a real-world way.  In fact, I get so used to the same sentence that I wouldn't even recognize the word for dinosaur if it wasn't part of that sentence.  And even if I did, it would be on shaky ground at best and I would always be second-guessing myself.  If someone starts telling me about their "kyori", hometown, I might have dinosaurs on the brain instead.  Learning obscure words first often causes one to actively "look" for them in places they don't even exist.  The homonym-heavy nature of Japanese makes this problem even worse.

I used to be skeptical about practicing sentences in an SRS too.  I suggest you stop assuming how it might be in theory, and start doing in practice.

In normal life we normally get a lot more input than we output.  We're naturally good to learn language just from input.  There are lots of words we pick up that we never speak.  People who are speaking impaired are able to learn spoken language without ever speaking a word.  One of Stephen Kranshen's publications highlights one person who was born with most of his body paralyzed so he could not talk or write, but he was able to learn English from listening and reading, and later when given a special typing device, was able to write perfect and elaborate English.

So instead of subjecting yourself to making decisions about these things, why not pick up a good highly rated textbook that matches your skill level in which a professional has already determined what you should learn.  Just skip over the classroom words if you want.  You can use sentences from the textbook for your SRS, or better yet, you can make your own based on what you are learning from it.

I was sutdying JFE (great textbook) before I started doing sentence mining ala AJATT.  After I started mining, I decided to mine JFE for all grammar points that I didn't know.

It took only a few days to mine all of them.  And then through reviewing it didn't take long to learn all of them.  Far less than if I had worked my way through the 27 lessons (JFE is quite a dense material).   After, I could read all dialogues in JFE except where I didn't know the vocab, so I decided I need to start bulking up on common vocab.  And that's where Kanji Odyssey came in.

PS. I wouldn't recommend making up your own sentences to put in your SRS.  You might learn something wrong or unnatural, uless you have a native to check them for you.

Last edited by vosmiura (2008 April 07, 8:25 pm)

You know, there is a reason I will be giving this AJATT method a try, and it's not because it seems like it's the quickest route.

No; it seems like this path legitimately works for many people. Not only that, but here's my story with learning Japanese:

I've always been really into it. I tried teaching myself a bunch of times but never put as much effort into it as I could. Then, when I got to college, I realized "Hey, I can finally learn Japanese in a class! Hell, I can major in it!" So, that's what I did.

Now, Japanese classes at my college are all taught by very competent, older native Japanese women. There are three different levels that each span two semesters, plus self study one-on-one at the 4th year level.

Since I began to study here I've put all my time and effort into it. I pretty much do nothing but study Japanese. It's really the only thing that is fun for me, plus I can pass my "GenEd" classes by just breathing. When I started, I blew through Heisig's book on the Kana, and started the kanji book. I'm finally back to about 500, but that's a whole other story.

Anyway, classes went very well. I practiced all the time, got good grades, and enjoyed going to my teacher's office hours and just talking in Japanese (or attempting it). However, now that I look back, I discover that talking Japanese didn't help as much as it should. And making up my own sentences definitely hurt me a bit. Let me explain.

I've recently reviewed all my homework from the first and second year (I'm finishing up the second year (202) now). I've noticed that if I wrote something wrong on a homework once, I continued to get it wrong. It showed on the test, and on other homeworks. This was ONLY when I was translating from English to Japanese, or just plain old writing a paragraph in Japanese. The teacher correct it, and I rewrote it myself, but it didn't help. It implemented itself.

Now, we've gone through both Genki books, and I've done some self study on the side (no sentences yet), but can I read anything well? Nope. I can not. I can't read children's books; I can read children's magazines; I can't read manga; I can't read anything. Want to know what I CAN read? I can read the stories they put in the "kanji" section that are tailored to use our vocabulary and exactly our understanding of current grammar.

So, what does that tell you?

*New story

Sorry to make this post so long, but another story just popped into my head that backs the AJATT site.

So, I was hanging out with some friends, one of which was cooking a delicious home cooked meal, and one of my friend's roommates comes out. She's Chinese, and has been here since the 8th grade and is now 24. We were talking about all different things, and suddenly it comes up about how she learned English.

Basically, to break it down, she didn't do any kind of English classes; she also didn't study English very much. However, she did say, using an interesting term that caught my ear, that for about three years (until her senior year of high school) she was basically silent. Then, she said, she started talking and making herself understood in English. (A cute side note, she said how she was so proud the first time she understood what someone was asking her to do and she said, "Ok!" and held up the little hand sign that goes along with it).

This immediately reminded me of that theory that there should be a silent period during language "acquisition" (as we'll call it) that has one doing all input and no output. It seems to have worked quite well for her! 

That's my spiel.

I'm nearing the end of RTK1 and am intending to start down the AJATT route once I finish up, going through a dictionary of basic japanese grammar mining sentences. I am uneasy however about only reviewing from Kanji to readings and meaning.

So my question then, to anyone who has been doing sentence mining+SRS, do you find after a few reviews you able to produce (with effort, I don't expect them to just slip out) the sentences when you need to, or at least to form sentences using the same grammar structures from them?

I'm aware AJATT isn't just about the sentences method and immersion is all part of it, I live in a small rural village in Hokkaido where few people speak English so I have plenty opportunity to practice and am fairly immersed as it is.

Last edited by tomusan (2008 April 21, 9:50 am)

tomusan wrote:

So my question then, to anyone who has been doing sentence mining+SRS, do you find after a few reviews you able to produce (with effort, I don't expect them to just slip out) the sentences when you need to, or at least to form sentences using the same grammar structures from them?

I'll often start to use stuff after they get to around a month for review time; but I definitely don't use everything I put in. ymmv.

Your Mileage May Vary.

nest0r: A few people from this forum are using a book/CD called Kanji Odyssey. It has example sentences for lots of kanji readings. The CD version has sound but suffers from *ugh* pictures of text which means you still can't copy it into an SRS.

Last edited by zdude255 (2008 April 25, 8:57 pm)

I have a somewhat similar approach, but for me, about half of this is review/refresher stuff. (I had 6 semesters, then walked away for 2-3 years.)

1. RTK- done with all 2042. Reviewing on this site daily. I'll tackle RTKIII some other time.
2. K.O. -- doing it in Anki, both ways. Sentence full o'kanji-> Recognition/Reading, Reading in kana->Write out sentence, kanji and all. Takes longer, but it's more effective for me. At about 45 kanji in that so far, but that's a deceptive number. There's LOTS of vocab to learn there, so things can bog down. I'm plowing through it, because I want to finish it up as fast as I can. For some of the tricker compounds, I wish I could find smaller, easier sentences so I can focus on them separately. Duh. I may just get them off of excite.co.jp's Kenkyusha dicts.
3. UBJG-- already finished parts I and II. Scanner pen helps tons here. I'm scanning straight into Anki. Going both ways isn't as effective here. Not as much kanji. It's a handy book, but really dull, vocab-wise. Lots of sentences, though, and the verb section has lots of repetitive sentences. Useful.
4. All About Particles-- Checked it out of the Uni library, and I'm scanning it into an excel sheet now, to add a little later. Probably after I finish scanning in UBJG. Not really sure how to incorporate it all, though. It's a bit dense, and the idea of just learning all the は particle stuff, then all the が particle stuff seems weird. (But breaking it all down by function sounds tedious.)
5. Kitchen Sink full of Kodansha Books. I'll probably add some stuff from the adjective/adverb book eventually, as well as some of the sentence patterns, if I feel like it. I'll probably also plunder some stuff from other books as well. I'm a sucker for Kodansha books.

I haven't really figured out how to approach the Basic Dictionary of Japanese Grammar yet. I don't really want to go through it in alphabetical order... that just sounds silly. I suppose I'll try to find a list of all the grammar on the version of the JLPT I'm aiming for. (Probably 2... although I don't know if I can pass that this year.)

The tricky bit is figuring out what to add and when. Too much kanji and not enough grammar makes Jack a dull boy who can't make a complex sentence. Too much grammar and not enough kanji and you're stuck talking about eating and going to school. (Which is fine, if that's all you ever do.)

The other tricky bit is figuring out how many sentences are enough. Not enough, and you don't learn a concept efficiently. Too many, and your brain just sort of checks out and ignores it. (At least mine does.)

So yeah, after RTK, it's easy. (Lie.)

EDIT: For audio, I just listen to a lot of JP stuff. I listen to the Intermediate JPod101 podcasts while I work out. Since they're about 80% Japanese, it's pretty good. I also download/watch JP TV shows. One thing I noticed is that I need to work on my accents. Mine are kind of all over the place.

Last edited by rich_f (2008 April 26, 1:36 am)

Well, if you need sound sources that go with the sentence sources, there's always JFE. Someone on the board has already converted it into an excel sheet, and you can find the audio from it if you look around on the web a little bit. (I still can't remember where I found it.) I've been pondering if I'll use that as well... but again, I don't want to wind up repeating stuff too much.

And yeah, now that I know how to make the scanner pen work, I find it's pretty quick. I went through the first 8 pages of part II in about an  hour or two. That's about 40 facts/80 cards.

Here's a link to the Japanese for Everyone discussion. The link in the very first post will lead you to the site hosting the Excel spreadsheet with all the sentences in it. He even went so far as to convert the kana to kanji, saving you a huge amount of work.

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=221

You *really* need to have the book to make the most use of it, though. And also, from a copyright fairness issue, you should also have it. I found it used locally for $10-20, so it shouldn't be too hard to find.

Genki is also a good textbook series... but textbooks are, for the most part, textbooks. I do think that Genki's approach to teaching verb conjugations is a little better than most, because it uses the Japanese kana rather than spelling out conjugations in romaaji. I find it's easier to remember them that way, but that's a personal preference issue.

Not to criticize anyone's methods, but I think, at least according to the AJATT guy, you're doing a little too much work that could be counter productive.

I think his message is to read things that interest you (the beginner's and intermediate's grammar dictionary is fine) and to take sentences that you can connect with and strike home with you. So I don't think it's productive to copy every single sentences from the grammar dictionaries, but maybe one or two that you find amusing/interesting/etc.

I could be misinterpreting though; and, if it works for you, then go for whatever.

I thought I was adding a lot of cards a day, from JFE, KO and UBJG, but it sounds like you two guys are hooning along.  How many do you review, and how many do you add a day?  Because I'm not really typing sentences in much anymore it's getting quite fast to add more, I review 80 to 100 a day and add maybe fifty more.  I couldn't imagine doing front to back and back to front at this pace.