EasyJapanezy wrote:
So at what pace were you going with the core 2k and the core 6k to finish that fast? Like how many new words/cards a day?
I ask because I have about 3-4 months of vacation until I start school again and if I go at it 5-6 hours a day just adding new words and repeating like crazy you think I'll finish 2k and get through a decent amount of 6k?
The Core2k I was doing about 200-300 words a day, I was passing stuff with 4's a lot. The speed at which you clear the decks will depend on your current level. I had been studying Japanese through Uni for 3-4 years when I started core2k so I had a lot of prior vocab already in my head. If you can read katakana and sound out the words correctly, every katakana word in the deck should be a freebie; save for maybe 5-6. The core2k is FILLED with katakana words. I did iKnow's older order on the 2k and then decided to reorder my cards for the upper 4k using Nukemarine's n+1 spreadsheet.
For the Core6k I averaged 40-70 a day, but I slacked a bit here and there and missed days where I added cards. I kept on top of my reviews though, I always ended the day with only like 0-20 cards in queue. The days I did add new cards, 40 became my minimum. I started at 20 a day but found I could do more easily. I tended to do more cards if a lot of the core6k cards I was seeing were ones I knew OR katakana words. I wanted to be doing 40-ish words a day of new stuff.
If you are new to Japanese though, ignore how fast I did it and just pick a realistic number for yourself. 20 isn't bad. If you find the learning easy then up it a bit, but pay close attention to how many young cards you start to pile up. With about 1000 young cards, I would have about 100-200 reviews a day and that can take 1-2 hours a day to do. You may have a lot of time over break, but resist the urge to do huge swaths of card if a lot of the words are new to you; you'll be failing them a lot later on. Then, after your break is over, you may have more cards then you can deal with for your daily schedule. Also huge chunks of new cards = huge chunks of reviews for first month or two.
Increasing your vocabulary is a slow process. You can blow through the RTK and generally be ok with the exposure that gives you, but blowing through words will leave you with stuff not really sticking. You didn't grow your English vocab overnight or even in months, it tooks years. So have realistic expectations about Japanese as well.
At 20 words a day you'd finish 6000 cards in 10 months, which isn't bad. Don't spend more than 2-3 hours a day on learning/studying vocab. I don't care how "in love w/ Japanese you are;" you'll burn out, not to mention the productivity of putting more hours in probably starts to drop after that first hour. Pace. Your. Self.
And another thing, did you do any grammar or something like genki. I am starting to get certain words and expressions when I watch anime but a lot of the meaning of the sentence is beyond me. By light novels you mean you can fully read and understand the text and subtext and follow the plot as if though it were in English right? (With a few obvious exceptions for new vocab and stuff)
I haven't done any focused grammar study really since university. So its been years since I've actually studied grammar from a book.
It depends on the novel really, but I'm really into 俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない right now and after the first 100 pages in the first book (over half way through on 2nd book now), the number of unknown words I ran into on each page fell back to about 3-7, of which I might add 1-2 to the deck. The first 30-50 pages had about 100-200 words I didn't know and I added those to my deck. I feel like I understand a lot of whats going on in the book and only occasionally feel lost about certain sections. I've seen the anime a few times too so that helps put scenes into perspective, but there are pages of internal monologue that just don't show up in the anime and scenes/lines get pruned left and right from the book to the anime. The biggest issue will be the kanji I think. There are surprisingly large amounts non-joyou kanji used by this author, but the words have furigana; still I'm left looking up words here and there. I also never did the RTK and don't know if I ever will, but having kanji knowledge + Core6k under your belt will allow you to make educated guesses on word meanings and allow you to skip having to look up stuff.
And as for the Export:
I got to the deck
File>Export
Um, what? Export for what? What are you trying to do?
