dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 17 of 91 04 January 2015 at 1:15pm | IP Logged |
Warp3 wrote:
What I did recently along those lines was utilized Anki 2's ability to
create nested decks. |
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I thought would be a good thing to do at the start (one for Minna No Nihongo, one for
JfBP etc.) but Anki quite soon suggested that I had too many decks. I don't know what
would have happened if I'd ignored it.
Anyway, I consolidated into one for sentences, one for kanji vocab and one for EN->JP,
plus a few random ones from the internet.
I moved my (now rarely touched) other language Anki decks into separate subdirectories
and set up the appropriate shortcuts on the start menu. (This is all on Linux Mint, so
it may not work under Windows).
When I consolidated, I tagged each sub-deck so if I do want to study just Minna No
Nihongo, I can do so easily with a touch of filtering.
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Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5527 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese
| Message 18 of 91 04 January 2015 at 3:36pm | IP Logged |
My nested deck structure is fairly simple. Under the main 日本語 (Japanese)
deck I have 4 subdecks: かな (Kana), 例文・文法 (Vocabulary and Grammar), 名前 (Names),
and 漢字 (Kanji).
The Kana deck is a tweaked version of a Kana deck I downloaded.
The Vocabulary and Grammar deck is where I input words, sentences, grammar patterns,
etc.
The Names deck is a bit of a unique deck. The front contains a celebrity name in Kanji.
The back contains the Kana reading of that name and a photo (usually a screenshot from
a video) of the celebrity in question. This deck has worked wonders for learning readings
for Kanji that frequently appear in names. I also quickly discovered how many ways you
can spell the same name in Japanese using completely different Kanji. For example, I'm
up to 3 very different spellings so far for the given name "Tomomi" and have a least a
couple different spellings for "Hitomi".
The Kanji deck started life as a downloaded RTK deck (one that is pre-tagged to designate
which ones are/aren't RTK Lite characters and contains two high-ranked stories from
kanji.koohii.com for each character), but I've been modifying it as I go through RTK
tweaking some of the stories (mostly by replacing them with other stories that I like
better from kanji.koohii.com) and adding Korean and Japanese readings to the keyword
field (to better differentiate between similar English keywords).
Edited by Warp3 on 04 January 2015 at 3:43pm
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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 19 of 91 04 January 2015 at 4:02pm | IP Logged |
Warp3 wrote:
The Names deck is a bit of a unique deck. The front contains a celebrity name in Kanji. The back contains the Kana reading of that name and a photo (usually a screenshot from a video) of the celebrity in question. |
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That is such a beautiful idea, I think I might have to steal it!
I find Japanese names to be particularly problematic.
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druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian
| Message 20 of 91 04 January 2015 at 5:11pm | IP Logged |
I think 2015 will be a rewarding year for you :) In my experience, starting to read is rather painful and slow-going, but with every book you get closer to the threshold where reading becomes nothing but fun and a method for improving your languages without even noticing that you are. At least it went that way with English. I'm not quite there yet with Korean, but I feel like I'm getting pretty close (compared to the many starting points - first children's book, first novel, first novel I actually felt like I was reading not solving a riddle, etc.). Good luck with all your goals and languages!
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Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5527 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese
| Message 21 of 91 04 January 2015 at 6:03pm | IP Logged |
Steal away. I'm glad to see that deck idea was useful to someone else as well.
On the topic of Japanese name difficulty: On AKBINGO! (a variety show featuring members
of idol group AKB48), they've had survey battles a few times (they survey a certain
number of people on the street with the answer being one of 4 selected members) and it
is interesting to see that even native Japanese people often get the names wrong on the
first try since they can be read so many different ways. One example fresh in my mind is
that 河西 (Kasai) was one of the members of one of the surveys and several participants
said "Kawanishi" instead when voting for her since those Kanji can be read that way as
well (and both are valid family names in Japanese).
This is one aspect where I greatly prefer the relative simplicity of Korean. If I see an
unknown Korean word in Hangul there is a 99% chance I can read it correctly. Even if the
word is displayed in Hanja (Chinese characters) instead, there is still a near perfect
chance of a single reading since most Hanja only have one Korean reading (based on the
Sino-Korean root). This would be the equivalent of Japanese only having "onyomi"
readings for Kanji.
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TimmyTurner93 Groupie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3659 days ago 45 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese, Japanese
| Message 22 of 91 05 January 2015 at 4:53pm | IP Logged |
Just popped in to say hey g-bod. Even though we are nowhere near the same level in
Japanese I'm going to pester you as much as I can and ask you what you're reading and how
much you've read. Hopefully I'll pick up a few recommendations for the very far future. +
you're learning German and French (2 languages on my European hitlist).
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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 23 of 91 06 January 2015 at 7:40pm | IP Logged |
宇宙人のしゅくだい - 小松左京
Uchuujin no shukudai - Komatsu Sakyou
I've finished my second book of the year (although admittedly I read about half of it in 2014!). 宇宙人のしゅくだい is a collection of short stories with a sci fi theme aimed at students half way through elementary school. And in case it's not clear from the title, it was in Japanese!
First the positives: it was a very easy read. I'd put it up there with something like よつばと! for ease.
Then the negatives: pretty much everything else? I accept that it's aimed at 9 year olds, but I think even the 9 year old me would have been bored by this book. The stories were very simplistic and took a rather unnecessarily moralistic tone. No interesting twists, just predictable and preachy ones. If it wasn't for the fact it was Japanese and easy (and I'm behind on the Super Challenge), I would have dropped it halfway through.
I think I need to start pushing myself out of children's literature in Japanese, because I've had quite enough of it and I think my next book or two in German are likely to be children's lit anyway. But I'm finding the prospect quite daunting. It's slower, harder, and dictionary lookups of kanji based vocab is prohibitively time consuming.
I stuck with a dead tree version of Der Kleine Prinz, but ended up reading half of it at my desk making lookups with an online dictionary as and when I felt the need to. Not quite as slick as the Kindle dictionary, but still very time efficient. In contrast, if I see an unknown kanji word I either have to try and guess a possible pronunciation of each character to input it, or use a drawing pad, or count the strokes. The whole job for one word takes a few minutes, rather than a few seconds.
Also, I have a whole shelf full of Japanese children's books I collected a few years back when I naively thought reading thousands of pages in one month for the Tadoku challenge was both achievable and a good use of time. I'm maybe halfway through reading them and I know I'm being led astray by the sunk cost fallacy, but still, I feel bad about giving up on the rest.
Edited by g-bod on 06 January 2015 at 7:43pm
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druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian
| Message 24 of 91 06 January 2015 at 8:30pm | IP Logged |
Maybe you could guess the meaning of the Kanji words you don't know and do extensive reading in that regard? I don't know the percentage of Kanji versus other words in Japanese novels or non-fiction book, so I don't know if it would make sense to do so... is it at all a possible strategy?
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