This is what I do.

1. Enter it into my SRS.
2. When it comes up for review, if I fail it, then I spend a minute working on what I failed. For example, if it's a kanji that I wrote incorrectly, I write it out a few times, paying attention to the elements that make it up and the stroke order. If it's a word whose meaning I don't remember, then I read the sentence I got it from, or read other example sentences, and try to visualize it in context. If it's a word whose reading I don't remember, I say it out loud, and out loud in the context of a sentence. I have my Anki settings set so that failed cards come up in ten minutes -- long enough to see if I've really "learned" it at least provisionally.
3. Repeat.

If you're failing the same word more than once in a day, then you need to rethink your approach. For me, context and visualization are the things that make the difference between learning and brute-force memorization.

Thank you both for the advice--I'm going to put the suggestions to use!

kainzero,

I didn't think about adding a sentence with the word into a deck for context. I was simply just adding words straight to into a vocab--I can see now how learning it in context would help. For your sentence, would you add it as a cloze deletion? Just trying to think of how I would add it in, but keep the focus on the word I'm trying to learn.

Fillanzea,

Good suggestions. I will try the visualization, writing and also check what my failed card intervals are set to...

Last edited by supermancampus (2012 June 14, 1:30 pm)

TwoMoreCharacters,

Great advice as well. I'm reading the article now, and it's a shift to my current way of thinking which I think I needed...

This is easily the most supportive community I've come across online

supermancampus wrote:

kainzero,

I didn't think about adding a sentence with the word into a deck for context. I was simply just adding words straight to into a vocab--I can see now how learning it in context would help. For your sentence, would you add it as a cloze deletion? Just trying to think of how I would add it in, but keep the focus on the word I'm trying to learn.

Well typically my card IS the sentence.

For example:

Front -
家庭で使っている電球の中に、熱くなって光を出す「白熱電球」があります。

Back -
電球    でんきゅう    (n) light bulb; (P)
白熱電球    はくねつでんきゅう    (n) light bulb; incandescent light bulb

My focus is on understanding the entire sentence. I only define words that I don't know, and I keep that low so that it's only 1 or 2 new words, so it makes the focus relatively easy.

I also have straight vocabulary cards and cloze delete cards, but those are more for JLPT preparation than for actual language purposes.

There's also grammar cards that usually contain the entire definition of the grammar for reference, ripped from JLPT books.

Front -
ビールであろうとワインであろうと、酒は酒だ。運転前に絶対飲んではいけない。

Back -
～であれ・・・～であれ・～であろうと・・・であろうと

意味：～でも・・・でも関係なく、同じ種類のものにはみんな同じこととか言える。
接続：「名」＋であれ
注意：関係ないばらばらの例ではなく、同じ意味のグループに入る例を並べる。

Last edited by kainzero (2012 June 14, 2:02 pm)

For pure vocab learning I've found it much more efficient to ignore sentences and keep the cards as simple as possible.

This is for grinding through huge chunks of vocab.

I've only been using Learning With Texts for a couple of days, but so far I like it a lot. I used to do sentence cards with Anki, but since I get most of my sentences from books/magazines, if I wanted to learn more than one word in a sentence I would either have to type out (or copy/paste) the sentence multiple times and do multiple cards -- which was annoying -- or I would have to do multiple unknown words on the same card, which I don't prefer to do because it makes each card too difficult. Learning with Texts is nice -- you can just input the whole text once, and then pick out the words that you want to learn.

My one complaint is that it doesn't really parse Japanese, which is mildly annoying but not impossible to work around.

Actually, I'm having the same question as supermancampus; while Heisig 1 went relatively well for me (around 90% retention) my retention dropped like a well-oiled brick when starting vocab. So I, too, am wondering how to effectively learn vocabulary.

The sentence-based method definitely seems interesting. I think it may make learning in the sense of not failing the cards easier, but would seem to have as risk that the word is harder to recognize outside the sentence, and may cost more time due to all the 'extraneous' context to read, especially for a beginner like me who can not read Japanese very quickly yet.

And forgetting words again and again - in my experience (and as far as I understand memory research) retention increases with the vividness/importance of the item, and decreases with the complexity of it. For example, I find words like "雨" (あめ) easy to learn, both since it has few letters and I get soaked often since I live in a very rainy country. However, I have significantly more trouble with 引き続き, which is quite a long word and a bit more abstract. I think this means that for a beginner like myself, focusing on short, simple words at first may be advisable; it may be easier to learn words like 面白い if you have first learned 白い, which is actually easy to remember if you know that Japanese sometimes avoid the number four because it is associated with death (し) and white is the colour of mourning. But I digress. Anyway, I think Overture's point in liberally suspending hard cards makes lots of sense.

The four different methods I'm testing so far for retention are as follows:

1) learn by 'usage'. I try to use the new word while talking to myself a few times as 'substitute' in an English sentence. For example 'Asatte I will take a walk in the forest' 'Asatte evening, I'll return home'. I do this three times, sometimes on my bike, and occasionally a day or a few days later again. So far, retention seems to be reasonably well with this method.

2) learn from texts; though in my case I use the lyrics of songs I find on youtube and put the individual words in Anki; the song is just to sing in my free time and make a sort of meaningful rehearsal. Example: I'm now learning the vocab from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq85-ZT9 … e=related, singing to myself in empty moments like in the supermarket or while traveling "見せて 上げよう 輝く世界..." Disadvantage: it can take some time to get to the right video and you often need to convert verbs back to their 'native form'. Overall, though, an enjoyable form of learning, and words seem to stick relatively well.

3) 'raw kanji visualization'. For example, if I see 格好いい, I use Heisig and miscellanous associations based on the raw form to turn the 'raw visuals' into something memorable. For example, 格 ('status' in Heisig), I recognize as one of my status-conscious family members, which in Dutch is fortunately called 'kak'. Based on that, remembering the 'ko' is quite doable (right side of 好 is child, which has 'ko' as one of the kun-yomi). With elementary hirigana reading I now have kakkoshii (かっこいい) Remembering the meaning, 'cool'/attractive, is then a relatively small burden. I'm also experimenting with this method, but much depends on how successful my associations are, method [1] seems more robust at the moment.

4) pronounciation->meaning->kanji. It may also be possible to start with the hirigana and learn the meaning as a first step; when that has been done, you could probably easily learn to recognize the correct kanji if you know Heisig. So this would be more like breaking the learning into two steps; first pronounciation/meaning, after succes on that, work on to kanji->pronounciation->meaning.

Anyway, these four strategies, the 'words from sentences' method, and the 'raw SRS labor' make six methods; starting with short/easy words is a kind of additional strategy. Does anyone have methods to add that they have tried and worked well and less well, and how is the learning time compared to retention? I still have a few thousand words to go, so I'd love to test different strategies to see which work best for me.

Last edited by EWLameijer (2012 June 15, 4:54 pm)

EWLameijer wrote:

The sentence-based method definitely seems interesting. I think it may make learning in the sense of not failing the cards easier, but would seem to have as risk that the word is harder to recognize outside the sentence, and may cost more time due to all the 'extraneous' context to read, especially for a beginner like me who can not read Japanese very quickly yet.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature! You get good at reading quickly by reading a lot of material, and especially by reading a lot of easy material, which most of the stuff in your SRS should be. Anyway, it depends whether your sentence method involves understanding every word in the sentence or just using the sentence as context for a specific vocabulary term. So, I have sentences like

甘やかした子がだめになるのは世の常、気の利いたご近所なら親をやんわり 諭す のが道だろう。

(where 諭す is the term I'm trying to remember). I don't need to read that entire sentence. 親をやんわり諭す is enough context, and the rest is there if I need it.

I think of it this way: unless you are a translator, your task in speaking a language is almost never "come up with the English translation of this term," or "come up with a dictionary definition of this term." It's usually "understand this term in the context of a sentence." So it makes sense to model that when studying, I think, and I agree with kainzero -- there's no harm in adding extra sentences for a word if that's what you need. It may be that the word is abstract enough that you just need some extra input to triangulate the meaning.

Fillanzea wrote:

there's no harm in adding extra sentences for a word if that's what you need. It may be that the word is abstract enough that you just need some extra input to triangulate the meaning.

You're going to have to add multiple sentences for the same word anyway. Japanese, just like English, has a lot of homonyms. You might be able to collapse your understanding of some of these other meanings by coming up with strong abstract representations of the word's meaning, but it won't cover everything. But this is seriously why the sentence method is important/required. If you were Japanese and studying English and you had a card that looked like this:

(Front)  Run
(Back)   走る

You would eventually find that that card is suboptimal. Which 'run' do you mean?

"He went for a run."
"The politician ran for public office."
"He ran from the police."
"The car is running fine."
"The trains run every hour."
(More advanced level)
"Her mascara ran."
"Her stockings ran."
"He ran guns for the mafia."

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, run has 28 different meanings as an Intransitive verb, 31 as a Transitive, and 30 as a noun. This is quite a bit and I generally haven't seen anything as bad in Japanese (かける comes close) but you get the idea. You NEED context.

And also my thanks for your comments! I will definitely give the 'learning from sentences'-method more consideration, also since you're right that there is no such thing as a 'translation' for a word; words may have a sort of general nebulous 'idea' associated with them next to a number of fixed expressions. On the other hand, that is advanced language use, and a beginner may need some crutches such as 走る -> "run". In my view, it's a bit like science; quite some scientists try to explain every detail of their research, even to a class of elementary school children - that is usually ineffective; people generally need an 'oversimplified' base knowledge that they can build upon and refine later, like a tree can't start by building leaves in the air and add the trunk and branches as an afterthought.

That being said, I'm still curious about other/better ways to learn vocabulary (just heard some tip about physical language learning, acting out verbs). Are there any other methods you'd recommend next to sentence learning (which I will try out as well)

Also, it could be that a beginner would benefit more from one way of learning and less from another way of learning, while this may be different for an intermediate/advanced learner. Since I'm much of a vocab beginner (I guess my Anki has now about 200 words), are there specific strategies that you find/found helpful at this stage?

supermancampus wrote:

MorphMan in particular looks amazing, but a little intimidating...

I'm hoping Morph Man 3 + Anki 2 will be a bit more streamlined. One of my close friends is about at the point where he can learn through subs2srs so I'm hoping to get a lot of feedback from him on usability improvements.

Its true that Japanese may not have very many words like "run" and that most words may only have 1-3 extra meanings which may not be used all that often. This becomes even more the case with nouns.

The thing I would caution any beginner against though, if they are doing E->J or single word decks, is that you'll eventually have to (should) break out of it. And once you have started something it becomes very difficult to break or difficult to decide "Well, I've learned enough, now time to switch to full on sentences!"

As to the point of "at the point you would need context" and the benefit of putting stuff to context. There is core6k, most of the work is done for you. But I think you're also missing a point about context with words, which is that its not always a case about having context so you know which definition of a word to use. Its also about knowing when a word is suppose to be used. Some words only find themselves being used in certain context. I like to use "important" as an example of this. 重要、大切、肝心、大事、重大、大した. All of these could be translated as "important" in English but not all of them can be used interchangeably. Which one's do you decide to use? Context tells you. How important is this? The N2 and N1 JLPT test your ability to decide which word to use in a sentence when given 2 seemingly similar words. I find that this particular issue is really the reason why I like context more than knowing which "run" to use.

Don't get me wrong. I think there can be merit in single word or E->J cards (or whatever we're talking about here) for beginners, but the point I'm trying to hammer home is that you will eventually want to switch to J->E sentence cards. Deciding when to do this is difficult, but if you can already read 200-300 words and know basic grammar, I'd argue that point may have already arrived. I suggest Core6k (again?) strongly. I realize some may not like it but the deck is setup (when using Nukemarines n+1 sorting) to take you from "I know nothing!!" to "Wow...I can almost read a light novel..." in incremental steps.