Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Sat Jan 28, 2017 6:50 am

I went in and just deleted all of my "mined" vocabulary I had from December/November in Anki. I had made a deck. I forget exactly the time period but after the JLPT I did my best to make it studiable adding pictures from Anki and whatnot. But doing it was just exhausting and I don't know how many times I failed certain cards. My leech settings were really high.. 20+ or so. My Core deck never had issues like this and I kind of knew it was because it had vocabulary more appropriate to my level. Studying German I noticed that my brain was really good at filtering out and learning words in the correct useful/frequency order. I had a vocabulary book grouped by theme but also split between first 1000 and 1000 to 2000... and of course when I studied a theme I would study every word equally... and to my surprise... without exception, when I came back to review later on I had forgotten all of the 2nd group but had learned first. Which made me think and I think that the brain will filter out words according to what you know and how useful new words really are for you. So trying to brute force it with Anki is just... retarded. But using Anki to reinforce words that you're actually ready to learn is a really good thing. Taking vocabulary off of a good frequency list gives you a good chance to learn words that you're ready for which is why I generally remember Core words easier than from stuff I read. Even if I like the stuff I read.

So maybe the leech feature is a silver bullet to make Anki word for you for vocabulary just find and throw in there. But what's the best setting for it? Researching with Google I found a short thread where people said they set it to 8 and were shocked at the default 16. The consensus was that 6 would probably be better but everyone I think is a little stubborn about giving up on words because they were doing 8 even if they thought 6 was better. I saw somewhere that the old supermemo had a leech setting of 6. Someone did some graphs based on his personal data of different material. For Core he showed that at 6 he would end up suspending about 40% of the words and learning 60%. I. Don't know how I would feel about learning 60% of Core but maybe 60% of random words from books and news would be ok. I don't know his level of Japanese and how quickly he was adding words to Core or what order he was doing Core. His Japanese for busy people graph showed over 90% of the vocab would be learned with a leech setting of 6 I believe which is so much better and shows that maybe he should be sticking to that instead. Actually, if you can get such a nice result with a leech of 6 using the right material then maybe that's the setting you should be using for all material and let it filter out the words for you. Assuming there's no test involved that you must pass.

So I'm going to try using 6. Last night I set it to 8.... a half hour later to 7... and then today to 6. I think I'm going to leave it at 6 for a couple weeks. I really don't know how it works in that if I miss a word today... Anki reviews it for me and I miss it a couple times more before I remember for today and it's put off for tomorrow or whatever. Is that just one leech point or 3 or 4? I guess I'll have a better idea when I see Anki tell me something is a leech for the first time. It's interesting how I've been using SRS for several years now but stubbornly didn't tweak the leech setting, unrealistically wanting to remember everything I stuck into Anki.

Some people say that your flashcard is to blame if something is a leech - you need a better example sentence or definition or something. I think that's true maybe 10% of the time. I think really that you should just suspend it and maybe re add it again after a few months instead.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Fri Feb 03, 2017 1:51 pm

No new leeches so far. My new mined vocabulary deck is too new however but I have it setup on my on my Core deck. Although I mentioned that I am better at learning core vocabulary... I am currently learning the 6 to 9k words which are rather hard and I'm getting some fails. I have the deck setup currently as a listening sentence deck. Some of the sentences are long enough and contain enough information using more common vocabulary that you kind of know what a word means even if you don't know the word. That's rare though. A lot of Core sentences are awfully brief, but the voice actors pronounce everything super clearly. I think it's harder for me to understand new vocabulary that I hear rather than reading the kanjified word. So this is a good deck. But it is getting a certain amount of fails. I am thinking of setting up two cards per sentence - one for reading and one for listening.

That's how I setup my newest subs2srs deck I just made a couple days ago. I actually rather hate the subs2srs program. Not through any fault of the author but getting my Japanese subs to match up with the English subs and audio and all is pure hell when it doesn't just fall into place right away. Studying these cards really is a lot more fun than studying your standard vocabulary lists though. I learned a lot of vocabulary that was truly beyond my current Japanese level as a beginning student using this program. It was fun to listen to so I studied the heck out of it but it was over my head so it was hugely time consuming and not so useful. I only made a couple decks. I think it's a lot more level appropriate now. I'm using Code Geass right now as my study material. I hadn't seen the series until about a week ago and I was watching it without subs as I always do and generally getting the story just fine but at the same time I was really really relying on the visuals to understand many scenes. It's probably jargon but they used a lot of vocabulary that I just didn't know regarding just about everything military. I couldn't really hear it at all either as they said it.. and I thought about trying out subs2srs again. Reviewing the deck I made with subs2srs, it's got a lot of pretty hard vocabulary. And some easier vocabulary that's just used in contexts that I wouldn't have imagined it would be. So the deck grew pretty quickly... I was including words I knew just to get my head used to the appropriate context and all. But something happened I wasn't expecting. I kind of thought I had really nice listening comprehension. But I don't. At least it can use more improvement despite me being in Japan over a year now. I had cards in which even with the dialogue in Japanese I couldn't hear every word the voice actor was saying. To my credit I fixed a few small mistakes in the subs too but mostly I'm in awe of whatever Chinese person made the subs (I think some Chinese guy did it based on some info at the beginning of the file). I had setup the deck as a listening deck but I changed it to a sentence reading deck... and I am unsure if I want to have two cards - one for reading and the other for listening. I probably will do both but I may give up. I wonder how useful it is to me to strain to understand the voice actors speaking their chopped up Japanese a bit out of context. I'm thinking it's very useful but we'll see.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Sun Feb 05, 2017 10:27 am

Doing an update on my phone from McDonalds in Chofu, Tokyo. It happened again. I tried other something and the mcdonalds girl said something and I had no idea what she said. Actually twice. Whatever she really said will forever be a mystery and I won't be able to study and learn from it to avoid it in the future. Such is life in Tokyo. But when I asked he to repeat it she spoke super slow 時間 and I finished the thought for her really quickly. Maybe I should have let her say a whole sentence nice and slow. Maybe it would have actually been the same sentence I didn't understand the first time? This would have been a Japanese first if so. But I cut her off after one word and answered her question.

Someone uploaded the subs to Ghost in the Shell 1995 movie and they match up perfectly with the English subs of the torrent I found. (No, the police have yet to deport me for torrenting but it could happen maybe). So I added several hundred new cards to my deck. And just as I remembered, the Japanese is super hard. They speak in jargon a lot, and a ton of 漢語 (words of Japanese origin). I wonder if the idea is to actually make the characters sound Chinese a little? probably not that far but it has hat impact on me at least. Compared to Geass, so far anyway, the speaking is slower and easier to understand. But the sentences are longer and chock full of 漢語. I decided not to make the deck a reading deck after all. Even though the speaking can get fast and it's hard to hear everything, reading just isn't as fun as listening. And I don't really want to test myself twice on a card.

I'm also listening to an audio book I bought a couple years ago called Check out this audiobook: “もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら” by 岩崎夏海". It's a light novel about a cute little Japanese girl who decides to be a manager of her baseball club. I'm not really sure yet what her duties are as a manager but she bought a book about managing s business and is using that to guide her to be a good baseball club manager. The audio book is tons easier to understand than the two animes I picked for my subs2srs decks. The reader speaks really clearly and the vocabulary is easier. I think the Core vocab is really useful for it in fact and listening to this book seems like a wonderful way to get your reps in. Forget Anki haha. Well maybe not quite. Listening to Japanese is a lot different than reading it though. You get too used to the kanji I think. I know here's a lot of vocabulary which I can read but not understand when I hear it. This would include a lot of 漢語. But it is gradually getting better. I don't know if other learners sometimes feel like the foreign language isn't a real language and how can it really be used to communicate as effectively as English, I get that a lot with Japanese. I feel like this is a terrible mental block holding me back. Listening to audio books (and other audio) helps I think.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Mon Feb 06, 2017 9:22 am

Last night I sat down in the couch next to whom I thought was a cute new share house member but was in fact Saki with a new haircut. Anyway, instead of participating in this big business English seminar which most of the members were doing, she was looking at her phone but had some Beginner Chinese books next to her. She's my favorite Japanese person to talk to because she isn't actively studying English and she is fun and outgoing. It turns out she and another sharehouse person are both going on vacation to China in March. Not together, just coincidentally. I don't know how seriously she'll study Chinese but it was fun talking about Chinese, kanji, and doing a little studying with her. I said I had no intention of studying it personally but then I went upstairs on my computer and checked out a beginner course on Memrise. This course uses the simplified characters. I started studying it and it was fun. The course is called learn Basic Mandarin Chinese. I've gotten through 85/404 cards. There's some weird words like 疋 which as per the course means a bolt of cloth. I can only assume they're teaching the parts of kanji but with a course of this size it seems out of place. But I can now say I am, I'm not, I like beer (strangely, the kanji for beer is pronounced pee...) and I know and I don't know. I'm learning the functional words like who, where, there, which etc.

The grammar of these simple sentences really is like English. Subject verb object. Not that I care a lot as I don't plan to learn this language to a high level. Like Japanese, Chinese has a question sentence marker - 吗 (ma). I'm assuming Chinese gave that to Japanese. I am guessing that Chinese had a big impact on Japanese vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar.

From what I gathered talking to Saki, a lot of the formal Japanese that they don't use much and therefore I probably don't know much borrows directly from Chinese. At least the kanji do. The pronounciations are different but but not always and sometimes they're close too. I would think that learning new pronunciations for kanji would be much easier for Japanese students compared to westerners. Of course, they still have to study. A lot of people are bad at that.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Tue Feb 07, 2017 2:00 pm

I finally tried out something that I had almost tried a couple years ago. I made my sentences in my sentence deck all kana using the kana:reading function in the Japanese Support add on for Anki. So on side one I'm reading all kana. I also have it read the card to me at the same time (why not, and it helps me see the spaces too just in case although I generally don't need it). Generally, when I study Japanese, it's using kanji with or without furigana. I haven't ever tried just hiragana before. I complained to myself that using kanji retarded the learning process because kanji have a meaning attached to them making you too reliant on seeing the kanji so when speaking or listening you (well me anyway) struggled a lot more than you would if you were studying a language with an alphabet.

Granted, I haven't been studying like this very long yet so it's too soon to call it a breakthrough but it feels really right. I'll have to make Anki test me again using the kanji because I need to be literate and just seeing the kanji on side 2 probably won't cut it.

I was doing listening cards with audio only but it was really just too hard with new material. Especially if the sentences had more than one new word or were just long in general or the speaker talked fast (not so much a problem in the Core deck but anime rips definitely have fast speakers. )

If this goes well I may just go ahead and share this with anyone else I know in japan who studies Japanese but doesn't make any progress. I don't need it, but it would be nice if the Japanese add on could add spaces for beginners. No kanji does make seeing the spaces even harder.
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cathrynm
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Languages: Japanese(JLPT N3), Finnish(beginner), English(native)
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby cathrynm » Tue Feb 07, 2017 5:20 pm

Yeah, that's an interesting method, kana only. I think this maybe is part of my issue, that I'm too dependent on kanji. That listening I can often confabulate, or drift off.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Wed Feb 08, 2017 2:43 am

cathrynm wrote:Yeah, that's an interesting method, kana only. I think this maybe is part of my issue, that I'm too dependent on kanji. That listening I can often confabulate, or drift off.


Maybe give it try^ ^. At first it's a little weird but you adjust quickly. One drawback I think is that you get a little depressed thinking how nice this language would be if they got rid of the kanji but that won't happen in our lifetime. But it's so much easier on the brain when you take kanji out of the equation. You have to think that some day they'll get rid of it.

But I really, when I see a sentence I can literally feel my brain using the context and words I know in the sentence to help me remember any words that don't immediately click. I'm sure this thought process transfers to listening improvement. For me, listening is an interesting experience in Japanese. I have a huge vocabulary I think because I've been studying so long and so hard. But my brain still tunes out stuff it doesn't recognize. It doesn't play with the words and use the context very much. The effect is that people say my Japanese sometimes just turns off. Obviously more studying helps that anyway because the more words I know the less this will happen but I think studying without kanji will also help.
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cathrynm
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby cathrynm » Wed Feb 08, 2017 8:48 pm

This is how Finnish is, kind of. That the written language is completely phonetic, the intonation is weird but it is simple and consistent, so even without understanding, I can sound it out in my mind as I read. For me, this can create a false sense of comprehension as there are a lot of words that sound similar, look like they are derived or aren't, or are false friends, so I just spin off into weird guessing.

And no I don't think Kanji will go away. If anything, computers will increase the use of weird of obscure kanji. That it's too easy to IME the slightly tricky charater to add a bit of literary allusion. I see this on Facebook, Japanese don't seem to hesitate to drop in oddball characters.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Thu Feb 09, 2017 6:24 am

cathrynm wrote:This is how Finnish is, kind of. That the written language is completely phonetic, the intonation is weird but it is simple and consistent, so even without understanding, I can sound it out in my mind as I read. For me, this can create a false sense of comprehension as there are a lot of words that sound similar, look like they are derived or aren't, or are false friends, so I just spin off into weird guessing.

And no I don't think Kanji will go away. If anything, computers will increase the use of weird of obscure kanji. That it's too easy to IME the slightly tricky character to add a bit of literary allusion. I see this on Facebook, Japanese don't seem to hesitate to drop in oddball characters.


I do think it will go away... just not in the foreseeable future. But that's neither here nor there as I agree that we have to learn kanji or be illiterate in Japanese. It's more our grand children or their kids (or their kids) I think that one day will not have to.. even if computers make it so easy to 'write' kanji.

I wanted to comment on what you said about false confidence because I think it's an interesting phenomenon. Sure you can get a sense of false confidence in that you read stuff and think you understand it when in fact you only partially understand it (or maybe flat out misunderstand it) but I think this is a good thing. Learning a language is so daunting an endeavor that whatever it takes to keep you hanging in there and moving forward.. I say, "yes please, and thank you." I had this a lot with German. Of course, when I double checked stuff, I saw how what I thought I understood I really didn't understand, or it was incomplete. So I didn't throw my dictionary away by any means. But we've all heard many many times that as a foreigner you shouldn't be looking up every word you don't know. This false confidence I think is what gives you the courage to move forward reading a book without looking up every word you find. And I think it may help your brain to absorb words and grammar better. Confidence is so important I think for remembering. Stuff will come up again. It will have another chance for you to see it, and reality check it in the new context. And you can correct it this time. Or the next time.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N2 (Japanese)

Postby kraemder » Thu Feb 09, 2017 7:06 pm

I don't know if this is a valid studying strategy (probably not hehe), but I'm trying to sort of put myself in the frame of mind of a child as I study. Pretending I'm not a 中年のおじさん but more like an 8 or 10 year old who is curious and impressionable and doesn't think thoughts like.. kanji are stupid and illogical and alphabets are so much better. I was talking to a guy in my sharehouse from Belgium. He's a 25 year old computer programmer (video games) who taught himself English by playing Pokémon in English when he was 7 using a dictionary his older sister gave him. He speaks English like an American and says he considers it a mother tongue along with Dutch. The younger you are the easier it is. I kind of wonder if I could hypnotize myself to think I was 10 or something when reading Japanese books/manga etc., would I learn better? Would be nice.
Last edited by kraemder on Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:58 am, edited 2 times in total.
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