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Kuji’s Krazy Log II | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 217 of 706 24 June 2013 at 8:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Rock My Anki World
Today my Anki world was unexpectedly rocked. Let me explain. I had a few minutes between two of my classes today, so I was doing some Anki reviews. While doing that, I came across this sentence: 車窓に 消える 風景 (which means something like "the scenery passing by the window") I was not sure if I had put the right readings for the Chinese characters into the Anki card, especially the first and last compounds in the sentence. So I found another teacher who is Japanese, and showed her the Anki card. She said that the readings I had in the card were, in fact, correct for those kanji. However, the sentence itself... well, let me just quote what she said: "I understand what the sentence is trying to say, but it just looks so unnatural." Another teacher who is Japanese walked by and agreed with her. Now, I would not be so surprised if I had made this sentence myself, but I didn't. I got it from the Japanese/English dictionary at YAHOO! JAPAN, which I previously thought to be a reputable source for my language needs. So I did some searching on the Internet, and lo and behold, it turns out that some of the sentences at sites like YAHOO! JAPAN, ALC, and others, are not always natural. (Someone even said that Khatzumoto at alljapaneseallthetime.com said the same thing.) Those sentences are often altered to help Japanese learners of English better understand English phrases (some of which are also not natural, by the way), or there may be other reasons that the phrases are not natural. Whatever the reason, this has frustrated me to no end, as a great majority of the cards in my Japanese deck (I'd estimate it at 75%, or roughly 1500 cards) come from YAHOO! JAPAN, and probably another 5% come from ALC. My goodness. The first thing to learn from this is to be really, really careful about where you get your example sentences, if you are concerned about them being natural. If you are getting them from a dictionary, best to get it from a really reputable company, maybe even pay the big bucks necessary to obtain those kind of dictionaries. Otherwise, go for books, magazines, and respected newspapers. Google search (not Translate) is another option as well, but you need to be careful about where you get the sentences from. If you are reading a book or watching a DVD, and you come across a new word, then that is no problem. You can just pop that sentence into Anki. But if you come across a random word you want to learn, and you want an example sentence for your Anki note, it is pretty difficult and/or time-consuming to search through books and magazines, newspapers, and reputable web sites for nice, simple sentences. Because of this, what I am now thinking about may be radical, controversial, and sacreligious at the same time: put vocabulary or collocations only into Anki. THE HORROR! Oh my God, don't let me faint. Give me some water. Hear me out, though. My thinking is this: no context is better than incorrect context. If I put just a single word into Anki, I may not have an idea about the context, and I'll probably fail it a few times, but if I come across the word in a newspaper article, then BAM, context provided. That's better than putting the wrong context into Anki, pounding it into my brain, then trying to un-learn that context when I run across the right context in a book, or trying to un-learn an unnatural phrase. So right now I'm seriously thinking about just reviewing words and collocations in Anki. If I have trouble with a word, and I later come across it in a book or another good source meant for natives, I can put that sentence into the Anki card at that time. Otherwise, why bother? That's all well and good, but what about all those sentence cards I currently have? Some of the Japanese cards come from my intermediate Japanese textbook, which I trust (my wife says the sentences are good). However, I never tagged any of my cards, which brings me to another lesson learned: It's a good idea to put the sources in your Anki cards. I don't want to remove those sentences; like I said, if you trust the sources, sentences are okay. In any case, it is going to be difficult to convert all those sentence cards into word/collocation cards. But do I blow up my Japanese Anki deck? (Or my Portuguese one, by the way?) I worked hard on those decks for over a year now, so I would hate to see all of that work go bye-bye. I think I may just have to put my head down and start editing cards as I come across them, maybe just marking them as I review them, then edit later. Whew, that is going to take a while. But it might save me some headache later, so it may be worth it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 218 of 706 24 June 2013 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
One of the first things I found out when I started out with Japanese was that many of the online sources of sentences use (or used) the Tanaka corpus, which was considered unreliable. Now I don't know whether that's still true, but it did make me cautious about where I sourced sentences.
I've used to worry about just "cramming vocab" but I've found that, although the cramming doesn't teach you how to use a word, when I hear it in a lesson or in a text book then it seems to get "activated". Luckily I've (almost) always tagged words and sentences with their origins. I've not picked up much from the internet, so it's all book chapters and lessons and so on. Rather than throwing away everything, you could tag it all with something obvious (like "unreliable" or "unverified-source"). Then as you come across a sentence that you originally found in a book or a TV show, you can remove the unreliable tag and mark its true source. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 219 of 706 25 June 2013 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah, I heard that too. I know that websites like WWWJDIC, Denshi Jisho, Tangorin, ALC, and Tatoeba.org use sentences from the Tanaka Corpus (although the volunteers at Tatoeba.org are "adopting" some of the sentences and making them sound more natural). But I didn't think that YAHOO! JAPAN's dictionary would have unnatural sentences. From what I can tell, they get their data from some well-known Japanese dictionary publishers, so that was shocking to me.
I'm starting to come around on this as well. I have a few single-word cards in my Anki deck, because I couldn't find simple example sentences for them. Those words are harder to "stick" at first, but once I encounter them in a book or on TV, they end up sticking. In fact, sometimes I have the opposite problem when trying to remember new words when they are in a sentence. I can pass them easily on Anki, but when I encounter the word in a new context, I sometimes have trouble recognizing the word, or I have to check my brain and deconstruct the sentence that my brain has remembered to find that word. That problem can sometimes be solved by adding additional cards with sentences containing the same word, but again, if I am going to be very selective about what sentences I put into Anki, is it worth the trouble?
That is a tremendous idea, dampingwire! Thank you very much! I'll do that. I think that when I come across sentences from my Japanese textbook, I can usually recognize that I got them from there, so I can tag it as such. In fact, I just remembered that I did something sort of like tagging for sentences from the grammar sections. When explaining a grammar point on the back side of the card, I begin the explanation with "GRAMMAR:". So a good starting point for me would be to search for "GRAMMAR:" in my decks and tag those, and tag the rest as "unreliable" for the time being. Again, thanks! Edited by kujichagulia on 25 June 2013 at 3:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 220 of 706 25 June 2013 at 11:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree with this and I'm sorry that a large part of your Japanese deck has become unreliable. There are many shared Anki decks around with sentences from big and pretty trustworthy online Korean dictionary sites but I've never used them because the translations to English were often funny (I mean with rarely used vocabulary so not very natural) and I was afraid the same could be true for the Korean sentences.
If you read my log then you'll know that I use single-word cards exclusively to learn vocabulary and it works well for me. It's true that some words don't want to stick at all, especially those of Chinese origin, but that's life. I firmly believe that learning words without a context (at first) is a good approach - if the reviews are not too dull or difficult for you. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 221 of 706 25 June 2013 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ah, no problem. It's shocking, but at the end of the day it's a lesson learned. I'll recover from this.
I'm always reading your excellent log, Evita. I like your approach to studying and Anki, even if we don't share any target languages. :) (Although I want to learn Korean sometime in the future.) Ever since I've started to read your log, I've been seriously thinking about just doing words in Anki to learn vocabulary instead of sentences. I learned vocabulary like that pre-Anki (with paper flash cards). But I've always been afraid, because everywhere I look on the Internet, people say "Do sentences in Anki! Do sentences!!!!" and nobody is saying "Do words! Do words!" So I've been trying to be faithful and do sentences for a year now. I'm still not convinced that sentences are better for me than just vocabulary. Now because of this "incident", I'm forced to find out if doing just vocabulary will be alright. But I'm not really worried anymore about getting the right context. The way I see it, if I can quickly add words to Anki and "pump" more vocabulary into my brain, I can better enjoy books, newspapers and TV shows, and in those sources I can get the correct context. And I can use the time saved in Anki reviews to read more of those books and newspapers, and watch more of those TV shows. Anyway, we will see how this experiment goes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 222 of 706 25 June 2013 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This advice comes with a health warning (proceed at your own risk) but sometimes there's no
better feeling than dropping an Anki deck. I always found Anki to be a great way of providing a vocab boost in the short to medium term but for me, despite the whole SRS methodology, I find it quite annoying for long term use. I also agree with Evita that single words are fine, as long as you don't get bored! In particular, I think it can really help give a short term boost which can be enough to help break into reading stuff for real. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 223 of 706 25 June 2013 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wise advice, g-bod. I'm using a shared deck for Chinese with 20k sentences. There are several ones beyond my level. I can't take more than 10 new and 10 reviews each day. I don't envise myself finishing it in a lifetime! I think it is useful somehow, but I'd also feel a great relief in letting it go =D I'd rather have 100 decks of 200 sentences, as I like the feeling of accomplishing stages.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 224 of 706 25 June 2013 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I guess it depends on a combination of factors but the main idea is "what you put into it" versus "what you get out of it". I had three Anki decks going for most of last year but at two different points I dropped two of them, probably because the ratio in my mind was not in favor of "what you get out of it" anymore. We're not going to keep any decks going forever so dropping them is a normal thing to do. You just need to find the right moment.
This statement makes sense if you regard Anki as just a collection of sentences without the SRS aspect. If you count in the SRS aspect then you can never finish a deck, you have to keep reviewing it so it doesn't make sense to split one deck into smaller decks. I value the SRS aspect of Anki very highly, that's why I usually think bigger decks are better than smaller ones. They're easier to manage and to review. As for your big Chinese deck, I'd suggest suspending the cards you think are beyond your level. I know I hate learning a phrase without knowing why it's exactly like that. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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