nadiatims wrote:

I never bothered with sentence cards, but if you do, I'd say keep them short. Short cards = quick creation and quick reviews. That's why I stick with vocab only. I can see the benefit of very short sentences. Because they can demonstrate whether a verb is transitive or not and reinforce particle usage. However how long do you need to keep reminding yourself that direct object takes を etc?
Is this really necessary?

学校に歩いて行く。
I walk to school.

instead of just

歩いて行く
walk (somewhere)

It's not necessary, but it's definitely more useful if you're at that level. Obviously someone with 5,000 sentences wouldn't really benefit from adding something like that, but if you're still a little uneasy about basic grammar then why not solidify things at no extra cost?

This isn't the best example anyway. The main purpose of sentences is to learn words with multiple potential meanings (of which there are many) in context. "I walk to school" is just about as unambiguous as a sentence gets.

Personally I'd always recommend having a grammar deck and a vocab deck (or at least trying both), although of course neither is absolutely necessary.

harhol wrote:

It's not necessary, but it's definitely more useful if you're at that level. Obviously someone with 5,000 sentences wouldn't really benefit from adding something like that, but if you're still a little uneasy about basic grammar then why not solidify things at no extra cost?

There is extra cost though. In the time it takes to make 1 sentence card, I could have reviewed 20 vocab cards. I don't know how most people are making their sentence cards, but I'm guessing it involves typing out the sentence and reading and meaning either straight into anki or into a spreadsheet or text file. Compare this to the time it takes me to produce a vocab card: 2 seconds to type the word here and hit 's' to have rikaichan output the kanji, reading and English definition to a text file. I use anki's sentence add-on to automatically display a bunch of sample sentences (taken from an online database) on the answer side only. So sentences are there to clear up the meaning if I need it but I rarely do.

@Anna B
I'm using a premade deck that included all the vocab for JLPT1-4. It was about 8000 cards. I've been deleting a lot of the cards because I already know most of the JLPT vocab and I've deleted cards I think are incorrect. But I've also been adding my own cards so the deck has swollen to over 15000 cards. I collect vocab by writing words I don't know on paper throughout the day. Then when I get home, I type the words  here, use rikaichans save to file feature (press 's') and then import the text file into anki.

harhol wrote:

Reviewing and adding are separate issues, and you should only ever add when you've finished your reviews, so the point here is moot. The difference between adding「学校に歩いて行く」and「歩いて行く」is a matter of seconds.

My point is, by saving time on card creation, I can increase the number of reviews per day and therefore increase the number of new cards added per day. The difference isn't really a matter of seconds either, because I don't have to manually type the reading or the definition. I need only type the expression field, and the other fields are generated automatically thanks to rikaichan. If I'm reading online articles at home, I can create new cards just by pressing 's'. Less than a second for a new card isn't bad I'd say. And the longer the sentence, the bigger this creation time difference is going to be.
In rare cases where there isn't a rikaichan entry, I can just create the card manually.

harhol wrote:

Sentence cards have a totally different purpose to vocab cards. Neither type of card is necessary but I think shunning sentence cards simply because they take longer to add is missing the point, particularly if the Tanaka Corpus is your only source for example sentences. How/when do you learn grammar?

The simple answer is that I learn grammar by reading and listening. If there's a certain point that is bugging me though, I can just go ask someone about it or check online, or I'll just temporarily ignore it until it falls into place naturally.
Ask yourself this though. In the above example, what exactly is the grammar point you're testing? If you wanted to test particle usage, you're probably better off making cards like this:
front: 学校＿歩いていく what particle? why?
back: に indicating target of a movement verb.

or

front:AにBをCがくれる
back: C gives B to A.

But even grammar cards like this are likely to just be memorized without necessarily being understood. So after creating the card, you're not even necessarily getting anything of benefit on subsequent reviews. Grammar is learned by applying the rules you learn/discover to comprehend or create unknown sentences, not by memorizing Japanese X = English Y pairs.
This can be done by simply reading/listening/conversing. Grammar rules can be explained by a good grammar guide with a lot of different example sentences to test your comprehension on or drilled with a skilled language teacher or through translation/writing exercises. After you've seen a sentence card's answer once, that card is useless for learning grammar because getting the answer is no longer dependent on understanding the grammar point. You already know the answer. It would be like learning math by memorizing questions and answers. You learn math by applying what you know to new problems.

It sounds like mezbup has a pretty good system and it's what I might do if I was still learning grammar.

This forum used to be in a phase where people spent a ton of time generating study material (sentence mining etc) and little time actually studying. It's good to see that some people are realizing how unproductive it is compared to what I'll term the mass-vocab method.

I add 100-200 words to my deck per day on average (lately mostly terms for obsolete historical stuff, normally kana words in kanji, and science jargon) and have ~1000 expired cards to review per day, and it only takes about 2-3 hours with ~85% pass rate (would be higher but I fail for the slightest doubt) including making the new cards. Much of that is done on the 30min train to/from work and the rest is done at work. I don't study at home or on weekends anymore.

That method won't work so great for an absolute beginner, but I think vocab should still be focused on more than grammar in the beginning. One thing to watch out for /w rikaichan is that edict is still full of mistakes, so don't trust it blindly.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2010 October 22, 9:25 am)

nadiatims wrote:

But even grammar cards like this are likely to just be memorized without necessarily being understood. So after creating the card, you're not even necessarily getting anything of benefit on subsequent reviews [...] After you've seen a sentence card's answer once, that card is useless for learning grammar because getting the answer is no longer dependent on understanding the grammar point. You already know the answer.

The point of SRSing snippets in addition to single words it to memorize particular grammar functions, sentence patterns & idioms, which are the basis of language. Then once you've learned them you can apply them yourself. You say you can learn grammar via "drill[s] with a skilled language teacher or through translation/writing exercises"... well 'mining' is just another way of drilling grammar rules & patterns. You can either expose yourself to those rules & patterns naturally and refer to a reference guide each time or you can be more proactive. Both methods have their pros & cons but I don't think that systematically learning the various meanings, uses & nuances of something like「と」is ever going to be a bad thing. The "What's this word..." thread is full of people trying to "dive in" AJATT-style, reading material way above their level and getting stuck on simple grammar points which they expected to just pick up intuitively but which have to be explained to them.

I should clarify that I'm a strong believer in mass learning of vocab and I myself tried the vanilla 10,000 sentence method, got bored out of my mind extremely quickly and then focused on the Core 6000 before even properly learning how to conjugate to the polite form, so in no way am I saying that vocab grinding should play second fiddle: words are words and they need to be learned. However, I think SRSing various bits of grammar and particular turns of phrase is extremely useful and I don't see any obvious down side to it, so long as you don't get carried away and start mining places like 2chan. SRS is just a tool to help you remember, after all, and you can't learn a language without remembering grammar rules.

Last edited by harhol (2010 October 22, 11:07 am)

Jarvik7 wrote:

I add 100-200 words to my deck per day on average (lately mostly terms for obsolete historical stuff, normally kana words in kanji, and science jargon) and have ~1000 expired cards to review per day, and it only takes about 2-3 hours with ~85% pass rate (would be higher but I fail for the slightest doubt) including making the new cards. Much of that is done on the 30min train to/from work and the rest is done at work. I don't study at home or on weekends anymore.

That method won't work so great for an absolute beginner, but I think vocab should still be focused on more than grammar in the beginning. One thing to watch out for /w rikaichan is that edict is still full of mistakes, so don't trust it blindly.

How do you import new vocab words to Anki? If I'm not mistaken, your studies have gone entirely monolingual, yes? Rikaichan's ctrl-s function is available to those who do bilingual studying. Since that's not your situation, would you mind explaining how you go about efficiently adding monolingual cards?

Jarvik7 wrote:

My vocab cards are bilingual since it takes too much time to make monolingual definitions. I just consider the shaky edict definitions almost like keywords. I get all the vocab from reading real materials instead of texts/vocab lists, so I just learn the usage from that.

Also, when I add the card using rikaichan's s feature, it's from a Japanese monolingual dict that I've looked the word up on.

Thanks for the quick reply. Rikaichan's ctrl-s feature definitely wins when it comes to efficiency. It makes me wonder if there's any monolingual projects that are comparable to WWWJDIC. If so, then the time is nigh for a monolingual Rikaichan clone.

Anyway, if you don't mind answering, could you share the name of the monolingual dictionary that you use?

nadiatims wrote:

after you've seen a sentence card's answer once, getting the answer is no longer dependent on understanding the grammar point(s).

This isn't true though, unless you're misusing the method (not adhering to i+1) or have the ability to permanently memorize new information after seeing it once, in which case you shouldn't need to use Anki to remember vocab either. There are hundreds of different fiddly grammar constructions, many of which may only crop up every few weeks, months or even years. It isn't simply case of looking something up in a grammar guide, understanding it and then never needing to study it again. You could easily forget the meaning of the 「ところで」construction in a matter of hours, for instance, or how to conjugate it. And each time you forgot, you'd have to look it up again. Creating a grammar card such as this is an easy, efficient way of alleviating that potential problem:

Front:
食べたところで

Back:
even if ate...
[Vinf past ~ところで; even if X...]
lit. 'even if one supposes an action or a state in the clause has already taken place.'
► Vte も

If I successfully remember it, the intervals will turn to months very quickly. If I don't, there will be spaced reminders until I do. It's win/win. You previously said "I can see the benefit of very short sentences" so I'm not sure if we're really even disagreeing with each other here.

nadiatims wrote:

For this reason monolingual definitions aren't necessarily any better imo because while the meaning may be more accurate, they may slow down reviews.

Good argument. One objection worth noting is that monolingual cards allow you to build a more interconnected vocabulary than bilingual cards. When you look up a word in a monolingual dictionary, it refers you to synonyms, and sometimes, antonyms. In addition, usually the word in question is explained with simpler words. Learning these things make your vocabulary more interconnected because they help you understand the relations between words. Sure, you can understand the relations between words using bilingual cards, but the process is more straightforward with monolingual cards. Of course, this would be most useful for someone who has reached a level in which they're more or less just as comfortable with monolingual cards as they are with bilingual ones.

For nouns like 林檎, I've been using a picture for the definition - No english needed!

That's true - It's not time efficient, but I enjoy giving my deck a personal touch so it's worth it to me (and doesn't take too much time really). It kind of makes reviewing more fun for me too.

I do like your idea of an image search button. Maybe someone out there with the skills will read this, and get inspired......

Im doing core 2000 without using Anki or any other SRS,and im doing pretty good(432 words),im taking a japanese course in college where we only focus on grammar so i don't need to mine sentences.my question is,is it really necessary to use an SRS along with Core 2000(it has its own little SRS)?and is vocab or sentences more useful?