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Anki
Feb 3, 2015 16:19:57 GMT
Post by Jembru on Feb 3, 2015 16:19:57 GMT
No no.. they're the words that I CAN remember. Very easily in fact. They get stuck in my head, meaning and all! Maybe the word I used 'stick' made it confusing, because it sounds like 'stuck'?
I think it's the way they sound that gets them stuck in my head.
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Anki
Feb 3, 2015 17:53:18 GMT
Post by chocopie on Feb 3, 2015 17:53:18 GMT
No no.. they're the words that I CAN remember. Very easily in fact. It's not you, it's me! I definitely didn't read your post properly, in fact I'll quote my last post! I proved myself right didn't I...
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Anki
Feb 3, 2015 18:16:02 GMT
via mobile
Post by Jembru on Feb 3, 2015 18:16:02 GMT
Haha! I love it when things like that happen. To be honest, I'm glad people read my posts at all, even if they just skim them (they're always soo long because I kinda use gaiwa like a support group, as in 'group therapy' ^^).
Well, even so, your advice is still good, and supports my theory too; words encountered in context... Songs, funny conversations, or interesting articles, will probably stick better than if we just keep trying to force ourselves to recall the word in isolation.
Also, I smilled when I read how you learnt benpi. It was almost identical to my first encounter with the word. Is it just me, or do the Japanese discuss such things a bit more often than we prudish Brits? Also, have you found that you too discuss breaking wind and so on much more often than you did before you learnt Japanese? It has it's own verb.. koku.. I shouldn't know that!! And food.. its always about the food...
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Anki
Feb 7, 2015 19:59:56 GMT
Post by Jembru on Feb 7, 2015 19:59:56 GMT
I think it's working! Does anyone remember this from page 2; I was just looking for something and stumbled on a forum thread (I didn't note the forum, some Japanese learners thing) about anki. One of the posters wrote 'You should be able to do 100 reviews in 10 minutes or less'. <blah blah blah> The kanji is fine. I can reel off 100 kanji reviews in around 8 minutes. The other one though, where I was giving the Japanese, took me over 11 minutes (closer to 12). That was a year ago, and yet I never improved. It always took me 12-15 minutes on average to do 100 reviews (including the ones I missed so had to review multiple times though, which admittedly bumps the number up to more than 100 and is something I didn't consider a year ago). Having separate decks for tricky vocabulary and newly added vocabulary, that I can custom study to go over missed cards (and usually do so even on days where I'm ignoring my main deck and so on), is helping me to get through the main deck without too many misses, as well as helping me to focus more on the words that need the most attention. Tonight, I was about 30 cards from completing my daily reviews when anki suddenly froze and I got the 'wanna close down?' message. I chose to refresh and then when it took me to the menu screen I saw THIS.. on the bottom of the screen.. I promise this isn't photoshopped (haha, as if any of you think for one moment I'd know how to use photoshop ^^). I don't think it was a glitch either, because I definitely did have around 230 reviews due today, so it's about right. So I guess so far so good. If neglecting my main decks was causing harm, I wouldn't be able to rattle through them with so few misses, so my idea must be working. Of course, this could be because of the reading and writing cram I did at the end of last year. Maybe I'm just more familiar with Japanese characters so can read the cards faster. Either way, there doesn't seem to be any negative effects yet.
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Post by Jembru on Apr 17, 2015 23:09:54 GMT
I finally have something worth writing about! So, you know how I'm trying to study more immersively? Well, I decided to start adding images to anki. This is of course a little time consuming, but it's not nearly as bad as I expected. As I go through the English->Japanese deck, if a word can be easily illustrated I type it in Japanese to google images, save an image and then replace the English with the image. Of course, I'm also adding images to new cards if appropriate. I'm moving these cards to their own deck and I've found them much faster to work through than the other decks.
In doing this, I've discovered a few words that I had mistyped when I first made the card, so have been saying wrong all this time! ^^
It also means there is less English in my anki decks now, which is helping me to get over the habit of translating from English to Japanese when I speak. If anyone else has this habit, or just wants to get through their reviews a bit quicker each day, then I definitely recommend using images instead of English prompts whenever possible. I wish I'd tried this much sooner.
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Post by Jembru on Nov 18, 2015 22:05:10 GMT
I've completely changed how I use anki, so I thought I'd pop by and share in case anyone else wants to try! Last week I was discussing with Bokusenou the importance of immersion and the concept of a ' language bubble'. I've noticed that a massive shift has happened for me this year, and I assumed that it was just part of the process of moving from upper-intermediate and into advanced level. But Bokusenou helped me to realise that it might not have anything to do with my perceived level, and much more to do with the methods I'm using this year. That is, the way I decided to reduce the use of English while studying. Had I done this sooner, it's possible that this shift I'm feeling could have happened much earlier in my studies. Bokusenou directed me to some AJATT articles. I'd stumbled by AJATT before, but I'm generally distrustful of anyone claiming to be 'fluent' in a relatively short time. However, I enjoyed his writing style and general energy, so looked into the technique he was peddling. Unable to open the links on the site itself for some reason, I instead found this article. It was spookily similar to what I have been doing this year, even down to my rejection of any study method I didn't find enjoyable, but there was a few key differences. The most notable being how I use anki. I've been adding example sentences to anki for almost 2 years now, but only to the back of the card, and under the answer. This made it too easy to skip the sentence altogether, which I did, 90% of the time!. This meant I'd inadvertently fallen into the trap of learning words out of context. This genuinely does cause me problems too. Just last weekend, at a light festival, I'd wanted to tell a Japanese friend how moving I thought the whale was (erm.. this whale...), I suddenly panicked mid sentence when I realised I couldn't remember if I was 感動した or 感動された.. I guessed right, but honestly, it was 50/50! So I'm currently making a few changes to my anki decks; - Editing the back (answer) of cards so that the example sentence appears first, with the reading below, so I HAVE to read the sentence if I want to find the answer, and removing all English.
- Where the meaning isn't obvious from the sentence, I'm writing a definition in Japanese or including an image*, again, under the example sentence.
- I changed the title of my reading deck from 漢字 to 読解, and where possible I'm changing the front from single reading words, to short sentences, with just the readings of any words I might get wrong, in hiragana on the reverse. Again, no English.
- I'm gradually slotting my picture cards into my main deck, so that eventually I can delete my picture deck.
- I'll eventually do the same with the reading deck so they're mixed in with the English -> Japanese cards.
- Some of my cards are short phrases/expressions (English -> Japanese), particularly of things you'd only say when speaking to another person and thus can't easily practice by yourself. I'm adding more of these, marking them with a speech bubble, and while they're included in my main deck, I have also made a custom deck for reviewing just these cards alone.
So that's it! ..for anki changes at least.. I realise that using sentences instead of single words is going to slow down my reviews, but I don't mind, and so far, it doesn't seem to be making a significant difference (adding about 5-10 minutes to a daily review of around 400 cards). The time consuming part is in the editing. (@_@")
*Did you know that you can add images directly through the editing screen on ankidroid? I didn't, but I'm very pleased to have discovered this. Just make sure the word is written in kanji rather than kana (or English would work), and that there's nothing else in the field, or you'll get some weird suggestions! ^^).
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Post by Jembru on Jan 23, 2016 22:34:01 GMT
Me again!! Just wanted to swing by and update on how it's going so far. I also thought I'll give some examples of the changes I spoke about in my last post. Although they tell you not to have too many categories, I have a few separate decks, but I move cards between them as I get more familiar with them, with the exception of my synonyms and antonyms decks which are just to reduce the amount on English on my cards, and of course the deck where I add unusual English words that I want to remember. (deck 6 was gradually emptied into the main deck, and has been deleted since I took this screenshot) New words always go into deck 1 and this is the one deck that I do without fail every day, even when I'm busy. These words need the most reinforcement if they're to become permanent memories quickly. Once I feel confident with a card from deck 1, I'll move it to either the reading deck or the main deck depending on the card type. Adding sentences has been amazing! I regret having single words for so long. I recently heard a recording of myself speaking Japanese from about 8 months ago. I said the sentence '彼女は根性な人’. This is not the right use of 'konjou', which I know now because the word is used in a sentence in my shadowing book '小さいのに根性(の/が)あるね’ (he's pretty determined for such a youngster). The reason I used it as an adjective is that on my anki card, konjou was just a single word. Instead, I should have listed it as 根性がある and then I'd never have made the above mistake last year. These mistakes litter my Japanese, and now I understand why. I've learnt to keep my sentences as short as possible to keep study times down, and I now use bolding on my reading cards. The bolding means I can race through, ignoring the sentence if I need to, but I still tend to glance the sentence so can see how the word is meant to be used. I sometimes include yomigana for other words, in which case they'll appear in order with the target word in bold. So for example, my cards look like this.. As you can see, I'm removing as much English from these cards as I can so that study is more immersive. I often add definitions and other examples on the back, so by embolding the reading of the word in question, my eyes can quickly check I was right without having to wade through everything (the reading isn't always at the top like this). As for my English-Japanese deck, once I can quickly recall a word and am confident that it is in my active vocabulary, I edit the card and add it to the reading deck. So a card that began its life like this.. FRONT: Behind the house (or building) BACK: 百姓家の 裏手ひゃくしょうや うらてBecomes: FRONT: 百姓家の 裏手BACK: ひゃくしょうや=農家の住まい うらて=ビルなどの裏 Then it's moved to the reading deck. It is often the case that these words I know well phonetically, aren't familiar in kanji form, so then I have to fail the review and start again, but it's better than writing a new card altogether, and I'm finding that learning to read words I already know is helping me to pick up the readings of kanji, many of which I still only know the English keyword for. The other big change, is the conversation cards I mentioned in my last post. These are awesome! They are short, natural phrases that are handy for conversations. The kind of thing that won't generally come up when writing blogs on lang8 and so on, but that you might need when chatting with others. They're mixed in with the Eng>Jap deck but I mark these cards with a little speech bubble so they're instantly recognizable. They're tagged so I can use a custom study session on my way to meetings with Japanese friends. Here's some examples of these cards to show you what I mean. I get these phrases from my phrasebook, shadowing books and from dramas I've seen, and I've got close to 100 such cards already, and am adding more all the time. They're really, really handy for those who use Japanese conversationally! It's taken a lot of editing and my daily reviews do take a bit longer than they were, but honestly, after a few months of trying this I can tell you that these changes have benefited my Japanese so much, that I urge anyone using anki to consider using some of these techniques. You won't regret it! But like me, you could end up regretting not doing it sooner! There's one thing I wanted to add. I was complaining on Line that you can't customise your anki cards. Of course, I'm talking about having cards with cherry blossom backgrounds and pretty menu screens, but Bokusenou shared a link with how to at least change the colours of the cards. At least until such as a time as full customisation is available (and as someone who has been using anki for nearly 3 years, it would be very welcome), I guess this is better than nothing.
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Post by Jembru on Mar 8, 2016 16:41:52 GMT
After discussing my anki cards on Line I realised that my system is clear as mud, so over the last 3 or 4 weeks I've been taking a tone of screen shots as cards appear in my reviews, in order to better illustrate how I make my cards. Not everyone has the time or interest in making their own cards, but I've always been quite precious about only adding words as I come across them organically, and these days it's even more important to me that I create my own cards, as I only add words I could recall after a study session. I've found this method very effective though, so I want to share it on the off-chance that someone else might benefit from it too. I've edited my previous post to include images where possible, and I want to share some images here to show the card types I didn't discuss above. Main DeckMy main deck contains the most English of any other deck, because most cards are either English-Japanese, or they're conversation cards which are also English-Japanese by their nature. However, my aim is to keep English to a minimum where possible, so use photos as much as I can. You'll be surprised how much you can convey with the right image. Nouns are easy of course; I'm sure everyone can see that ひづめ is a hoof. But so long as you're choosing the photos yourself, you can often convey verbs, adjectives and more abstract nouns through images too.. like.. and even.. (Okay, so this one has technically got the word on the image, but I just see that as a nice bonus reading challenge! ^^) I often use images taken on my phone of things in my everyday life to really personalise my cards. I use screenshots of videos I saw a word in and so on too. Like this one from a PDRさん video; By writing a prompt under the image, I can sometimes get more than one use out of the same image.. It's really difficult to convey such abstract ideas in images unless you made the card yourself though. For cards that can't so easily be turned into picture cards, I eventually edit the English out and turn them into reading cards, moving them to the kanji-only deck. If the word is too easy in kanji, I do a sentence search and look for a sentence with a word I know but can't read yet, and paste the whole sentence, changing the keyword to the one I can't read. This way, I still get to remind myself of the existence of the known word whenever I see this card. Synonyms and Antonyms decks I just have time to quickly show you what these two decks are all about. They're just another way to bypass the need for English really. You often find in Japanese that you already know a different word with the same or similar meaning to the word you've just learnt. I'm incredibly liberal with what I class as a synonym or antonym, although I'll include examples if their nuance is a little too different. These cards frequently feature just single words, although sometimes contain short sentences if I feel it's necessary. Some examples from these decks are.. And chosen especially for Logan because it features his favourite Japanese word; I hope my system is a bit clearer now, and that I've won over some of those who only use pre-made decks. There really is nothing like having your own collection of personally relevant flashcards! And for those who might argue that it's time consuming, well it definitely does take considerably more time than downloading a pre-made deck, I won't argue with that. But I've used vocab lists compiled by other people on memrise before and from my own experience, I was failing items far more often compared to when I'd taken the time to make my own cards. So I would argue that the time spent making your own cards is worth the time you'll save from having to review the same word over and over and over, as well as ensure the words you DO learn are words you'll actually need when you use Japanese! Besides, after 3 years of using anki, I have close to 4,500 cards. If it took THAT much effort to add my own, I'd have considerably fewer, trust me!
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