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Do I really need Anki to learn kanji? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5916 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 1 of 11 14 December 2011 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
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Anyone who has taken an interest in my posts over the years might have noticed I have a love hate relationship with Anki. This year in particular I have dropped and then in some cases restarted a number of different decks.
For a long time I felt that it would be impossible to tackle the related "problems" of kanji and vocabulary without Anki, or at least a similar flashcard system. However I am pretty fed up of the daily demand Anki puts on you. As I have had more real life commitments than normal this autumn, I first started "cheating" by not reviewing properly, and then simply stopped reviewing altogether. It's not even installed on my pc right now. What I have noticed is the lack of Anki does not seem to have impacted my ability to read kanji words but my writing skills are definitely diminishing. But then I read Japanese as a matter of course and rarely write it so I guess this is a natural consequence? I also don't know how well I am able to learn to read and write new words without Anki because I haven't really tried. This autumn has been about maintenance and at least over the next couple of months I want to focus more on using what I already know in better ways. So my question is, now my schedule has freed up again, should I enslave myself to Anki once more? Or can I trust myself to pick up kanji readings and vocabulary through other means? In terms of writing, might it be better, or at least more flexible and/or interesting, to pursue other methods (textbook exercises, scriptorium, keeping a handwritten journal)? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5315 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 11 14 December 2011 at 4:05pm | IP Logged |
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I read so many posts -- here and elsewhere -- from people who purport to be working with huge Japanese decks, like 6,000 or 10,000, only to eventually confess that they can't really speak. So what's the point? Or else they'll claim to know all kanji, but they can't use the words. I guess it depends on the goal.
Still, many people swear by SRS. Maybe it's a good way for them to expose themselves to a large vocabulary they hope they will eventually come across and recognize. I don't know if they do. Many people swear by specific methods only because they like them, not because they actually work. I think that if you expose yourself to a sufficient amount of native material, and spend some time writing, you will naturally encounter all of the most common kanji that are actually useful for you. I'm not sure exactly what level you are at, but I'd recommend concentrating on actual use of the language. If you read something, write about it. Of course, I'd also recommend you talk about it, but you are asking about kanji :) Personally, I've gone back to SRS a few times and I give up every time. It's just not for me. Unless I know exactly how a word works and I can use it spontaneously in speech, I consider that I don't know the word -- so if I come across some Anki kanji and it gives me some abstract translation, it's really frustrating. There are decks with sentences, but I already know most of them and it's a waste of time. And I'm not prepared to waste time inputting my own either. Actually, I sense from you post a certain sense of guilt, as if you were afraid that not using Anki could be detrimental to your learning. It's not -- you don't need to use Anki if it doesn't feel right. A lot of people succeed without it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Dshödsh Diglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5150 days ago 14 posts - 20 votes Speaks: Swedish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 11 14 December 2011 at 4:30pm | IP Logged |
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A lot of people misuse srs, IMHO. You claim to maintain Japanese regularly. This works as a form of spaced repetition in its own right, and using Anki for vocabulary, kanji etc. that you encounter frequently anyway is a complete waste of time, even if it means that you won't forget the odd word here and there. What Anki is most useful for is not to overload you with your current level, but to expose you to things you've learnt, but wouldn't remember otherwise. The point being, Anki is most useful for remembering words you've learnt but are low-frequency words, given the level of material you're using.
An example of this is your writing. Apparently you don't do this frequently enough to remember it by yourself, and this is where Anki comes into play. Of course, whether it's important enough to you to review it frequently has to be your choice. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7115 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 4 of 11 19 December 2011 at 10:31am | IP Logged |
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I've used Anki and originally Supermemo for quite a few years and I've had the same
usual frustrations as many others. But with these few helpful tips you will soon feel less frustrated. 1) Use Anki (at least initially) for passive learning. I was trying to actively remember words from English to Chinese for a while. Chinese to English is much better there's less ambiguity in the meaning and it won't take so much time to think of the answer. 2) Make your own set of cards for learning. If you download a set of random sentences or words from the internet your learning will have no real meaning to yourself. If you do download these ready made decks 'mine' them for useful sentences and extract them into a new deck rather than using all the sentences. 3) If you want to learn a word chuck in a sentence with the word to give it context. Without a sentence the word is sterile. Even better chop up some audio for the word; put in a picture; use text to speech software (TTS) to bring your sterile word to life. If you can cut up a film then even better - CONTEXT CONTEXT CONTEXT. 4) Use your daily life (if your in your target language country) to bring decks to life. I rarely meet a new Chinese character these days but when I do I'll take a photo of the sign menu etc. Or even I'll record an announcement with my recorder. Again it's about context. It's real it was important when you encountered it so you'll remember it. I even take photos of text messages in Chinese with a word I'm not sure about and throw it into Anki. It makes your cards YOUR cards and you can get pretty creative (well I have fun anyway). 5) If you do have to go active with your study make sure the answer isn't open ended i.e. you just give and English word and then say translate it into Chinese. I tried this and of course sometimes there would be several words in Chinese that could be the answer. I would end up sometimes thinking for 30 seconds or more what the word might be. I would also demand that I get the pinyin, tones and write the character perfectly. This type of learning is simply inefficient. Keep control of your cards and keep the answers simple. This is a bad card Q: = question A: = Answer (excuse the simple example)... Q: Translate this word into Chinese write the character and pronounce the word correctly. Q: Hello A: 你好 ni3 hao3 A: 你好今天怎么样？ (Hello how are you today.) It's bad because there's too much to remember (especially once we get to more advance vocabulary). There may well be many other ways to say hello in the language - 你早，晚上 好，嗨，吃饭了吗... These other ways of saying hello may well interfere with your answer. Again forgive the example it's very simple and of course 你好 would probably be your first choice answer. A better progression would be to break the card down. Lets see how... Q: What does 你好 mean in the sentence below? Q；你好今天怎过的么样 A: Hello A: Hello how are you today? Q: How do you pronounce the word 你好？ Q: 你好今天怎过的么样？ A: ni3hao3 Q: Write the character represented by the pinyin below Q: ni3好今天怎过的么样？ A: 你 Q: Write the character represented by the pinyin below Q: 你hao3今天怎过的么样？ A: 好 Q: Write the characters represented by the pinyin below Q: ni3hao3今天怎过的么样？ A: 你好 NB. I find it's usually a waste of time actually writing the question into the question box e.g. Write the characters represented by the pinyin below. I find that if I make the card right the context of the card will tell me what I want to remember/answer. Again it's about making the cards yourself rather than downloading somebody else's pack. 6) This next tip follow from the one above. Make answers easy. You don't want too much information in one card. If you get it wrong and there's 5 things to remember (tone, pinyin, character etc.) in the answer you won't be efficient in your learning as you won't know which of the 5 parts you should be focusing on more. Having said this you must play with this yourself. For myself, when I have a word I want to translate from Chinese to English, I usually demand that I provide an English translation and the pronunciation of the word. Why? Simple it's just that the time it would make to do two cards doesn't justify what I would reap back from the card. This is simply because it's not very often that I don't know the tone of the character. If I was starting Chinese from scratch though I would definitely divide this information into two cards. As a rule of thumb if it takes over 10 seconds to remember an item then you should probably fail yourself on it. 7) I use Anki for passive memorization (mainly) as such I chuck in a lot of stuff that I would come across again. Sometimes I will even put very easy stuff in So I kind of divulge from Dshödsh opinion that Anki is only for learning rare non-frequent words. My thinking is this like this... I've forgotten German before a language that used to be my strongest. Anki for me provides insurance for this. One day I won't be in China and I know very well how quickly a language can fade. What is important is how you treat the information. If for example I listen to a podcast and I can understand it all I will still record it into Anki. A waist of time some might say. However, I treat this information very differently to recordings or sentences where there are words I don't understand at all. I'll make a card like this. Q: 你听得懂吗？（Do you understand) Q: Recording MP3 A: Script taken from the podcast and English translation. I'm ok at using Cubase or Audacity so it takes me seconds to cut up the audio. Using the truncate silence in Audacity you can even take out the silence in the audio to speed it up. Though there is a lot of information in the answer (i.e. maybe a paragraph of speech) as long as the audio is easily translated then it's not a difficult question for me. So people will be rolling their eyes now thinking what a waist of time it will be listening to this card again and again. This is where you make Anki work for you. If you go into 'Deck Properties' you can change the time for the 'initial button 4 interval'. This sets the time for when you will see the card again (when you initially encounter the card). Set this high 1 month 2 months 3,4,5,6 - a year! Then it's out the way. Maybe you'll come across that 'easy' word a year later and you'll have found you've forgotten it. Great! Good job you took the time to put it in. I've certainly had this "OH MY GOSH how could I have forgotten such a simple word/tone/character" before and this is where I've been thankful that I took the time to record it. Who knows maybe you come across this word a year later and it's easy again ok no problem. You click 'very easy' and the chances are you won't see the card for another 5 years. Of course a note of warning with this. You obviously don't want to start recording every easy sentence you come across. Common sense still has to be used. Keep your learning materials at a level that's right for you. 8) If you set the 'initial button 4 interval' level to 1 year, 1 month etc. make sure that you only click button 4 (VERY EASY) when it really is very easy. That is to say, you might actually think a card is easy because you've only added it the day before! Or an hour before. You could give yourself sometime between adding new material and reviewing it to take this factor out of the equation. Remember the intitial button 1, 2 and 3 can also be tampered with in the 'deck properties' menu. 9) Ah the guilt at not keeping up with your cards can lead to you misery and throwing in the Anki towel. If you follow this next tip you certainly won't be doing this. People get caught up with how many cards they study a day. It's an obsession I've had too. I make myself a target like: I have to revise all the old cards and learn 100 new cards. The cards build up and build up every day there's so much many more cards to review than the previous day. Then what happens? Suddenly you have so many new work family and friend commitments you think you don't have time to review the 500 cards that you used to be able to review every day you end up demotivated and don't do anything. The simple trick is to work Anki by TIME and don't get obsessed by the number of cards. If you stick to an hour or two hours a day then then you won't get overloaded. When work gets too much slow down and do 30 minutes a day instead. At the same time you can still add stuff to Anki that you will use later. This way you're still looking at new material and your studying won't get tired. 10) Some people will not want to add tons of cards that they can't review the next day. I have to keep learning new stuff everyday and as I said before I like to make a record of what I've learnt. Currently I have 1000 cards that haven't been reviewed yet (actually this is very extreme even for me). Now of course sometimes I will come across a word that I don't know that I've added already but usually I have a feeling in my heart that I've come across this word and added it. I just do a search and check that I've added it. There's passive learning for you！You have no idea of the word but you know you've seen it. Of course I wouldn't add the word twice. Though perhaps the whole sentence might get added. Some people will not like having tons of unlearned cards because they might well want to review the stuff they've added that day. This is not a problem There are two ways you can do this. The first way is to go to 'study options' in Anki and select 'Show new cards in reverse order added'. This will allow you to work on your newest material added (assuming you've made it through those 1000+ cards to review, that you've let build up haha) 11) I would say this 11th tip is the most important for not getting stuck in the SRS grind. Go to 'settings' - 'deck properties' - 'advanced'. Then look at the leech threshold. It should be set for 16 as its default. This means you will have to answer the same card wrong 16 times before it takes it out of your deck. Unless you have a small deck with a set of items you MUST learn, then this in my opinion is far to high. Once your deck reaches a few 1000 you will be wasting your time learning a few items that for what ever reason you can't remember. Maybe you can't remember simply because it's not an important word or there's interference from another card. So basically you need to set the leech threshold to much lower. I find 3-5 works best for me. It syphon out the cr@p that I just can't learn at that time and lets me concentrate on new stuff and revising stuff I know well already NB. I would keep the leech threshold high if you need to learn say 100 items for a test or even you're learning something like a new writing system like bopomofo or the Arabic or Russian script where not knowing a new item is not an option. 12) Lowering the leech threshold is not just good for everyday studying it's also an excellent technique for when you've let your cards build up. Recently I went away on holiday I didn't have time to review so much so when I came back to Anki I put my leech threshold really high to get rid of the junk I didn't know so well and therefore allow me to keep the study 'fresh'. 13) You should know that once a card becomes a 'leech' it becomes suspended. I.e. they're taken out of the learning deck for review. Periodically I will look through my deck and look at all the leeches. I will then re-use many of them. Sometimes I find after 6 months of further studying that suspended leech suddenly isn't hard at all. Other times I find I might have to reformulate the question. Some people will panic when their cards turn into leeches as we feel it's a FAIL! Remember the leech card is always there at a later date to be 'mined'. Also you'll probably find that even though you couldn't remember the card well enough, just reviewing the card will have given you some benefit in a passive capacity at least. 14) Usually I leave the new cards until I've reviewed all my old cards first. But, to stop reviews becoming stale I find it's good to sometimes mix the new cards up within the review cards. I will do this if I know I have a good long study period in front of me. 15) Not really so much an Anki tip but it's something you can do with Anki. I put in a lot of recording into my Anki. Often I will just passively review it in my MP3 player when I can't be in front of my computer. 16) Another handy tip to finish up. If you have an Iphone or Android phone why not go portable to take the pain of being tied to a computer. This way you can make more of your dead time and cut up your reviews in the day. Honestly I've not had much experience with this, though I did used to use Supermemo for the old Pocket PC phone. It was a great experience for studying on the go. Maybe someone here can give us some more information on the reliability and usability of Anki on the Iphone and Android. I'd like to know if it handles audio and pictures well. 11 persons have voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5583 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 5 of 11 19 December 2011 at 3:58pm | IP Logged |
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I think you first have to ask yourself if you're fine with just being able to read kanji or if you also want to be able to write them from memory. Personally, I know that I'll never need to be able to write kanji by hand, so I just focus on being able to read the kanji.
About the SRS, you don't have to use it. I've tried the SRS method several times and it doesn't really help me. Lots of reading does the trick. Hell, just a little reading everyday would probably be more beneficial than SRSing kanji. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6531 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 11 20 December 2011 at 12:13am | IP Logged |
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idk about iPhone/Android but i recently switched to Anki (from Mnemosyne) because you can use it anywhere where you have an internet access. i use it on my phone mostly. it syncs with the one on your comp so all is good :-)
haven't tried audio/pictures though. the special characters are displayed just fine. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5916 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 7 of 11 20 December 2011 at 2:12am | IP Logged |
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First of all I wanted to thank everyone for your thoughtful answers. I think I am inclined to agree that Anki seems to work best for passive learning. Also if I had to learn for a test I would probably use it! But I think I've reached a turning point in my studies where I can make better use of native materials to build up my passive ability. If I can only spare twenty minutes in a day for Japanese (which happens sometimes) I think I would benefit more from spending that time with my head in a manga rather than catching up on Anki reviews.
Obviously for practical reasons it is more important to me to be able to read kanji than to write it, but at the same time I would like to reach a point of at least being able to use the elementary school level kanji. But again, maybe I would be better served by practicing writing through keeping a journal or similar. Arekkusu, you are probably right that there was an element of guilt in my first post, but it was not so much about worrying that my future studies will suffer without Anki. It was more a worry that I may have been wasting my time using it all these years! I don't think that's quite the case, but I also think I'm ready to take a different approach now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6531 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 11 20 December 2011 at 3:41am | IP Logged |
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You can continue using Anki during those moments when you have too little time to actually open a book. or even while walking somewhere, heh, with your cell phone in your hand. one or two repetitions at a time still count :-)
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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