More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

[kraemder]

I've been wanting to update but just putting it off a bit and repeating that over and over so even though I'm not in the best of moods I'm going to blog a bit. So it's been 3-4 months since my last update. Rereading my old post that seems so long ago. Not that a lot has changed. The guy who made the YouTube video I linked above had a live stream over the weekend where he mined his 20,000th card for his Japanese Anki deck. Insane right? I haven't heard of anyone else reaching such a high number. If you watch his stream you can see that he's not too picky about what goes in the deck. Basically, if it's in the dictionary, and it's not in his deck, he's probably going to make an Anki card for it. Fair enough. I'm not too picky either and put pretty much the first and every word I find into my Anki deck. I might be getting more disciplined though.

So if you read my last post you saw how I was struggling to make SRS and sentence/vocab mining work for me. I basically abandoned those old decks from before. I'm currently using Evita's vocabulary deck again. I saw a YouTube video which inspired me to try production cards again but alas after a few days I've gone back to recognition cards. They're just so much easier and faster to review and since I'm not in Korea with lots of opportunities to output.. well.. why put myself through that. But I think it's a pretty good video so I'm going to link it:



It's a language school for teaching Spanish and they advocate both production flash cards and learning phrases of three words. Their experience is that more words is too much and makes studying the flash cards too difficult. Even three words can be too much depending on your level of the target language and how used to flash cards you are I think. But I'm going to try it out except with recognition cards. I've gotten into using LingQ again. I'm actually doing it the way it's intended with the colors to show all the links turned on. I had found them to be very distracting and had turned them off but I really want to increase my vocabulary so I turned them back on. I'm making myself do a point of view switch however. The colored words are like the difficult words in a text that you're not supposed to know and have footnotes. Of course I'd like to know them but it just seemed like I was doing flash cards while I read and instead of an immersive experience. It's going better but if I turned off the colors that might be better I'm not sure. I'm looking up way more words with the colors turned on so it's more intense.

I'm currently reading Dragon's of Autumn Twilight in Korean as translated by DeepL. I obviously have no idea how good the translation is. I have seen a few obvious misses like where it translated the word "staff" as a staff member or employee instead of a cane or big stick. But it seems to generally get it right. I'm also pretty sure all the sentences even if they're not great translations are grammatically correct. I'm a few chapters in and I've gotten used to the vocab they're using so it's going better. Of course I chose this book because I read it as a child and really liked it. I looked at the English version gain when I wanted to make this e-book and the writing is ok but not quite the incredible read that I remember. However, in a foreign language it's pretty good reading. I'm just bored of Harry Potter and need something else to read but reading books I've never read before is quite hard. I bought some graded readers hoping that would work but they are incredibly boring. I've all but given up on them. I try to read a little sometimes.

Lastly I bought a lot of credits from https://study.flexiclasses.com/. I'm set to take about 4 classes per week the next three months (what was I thinking?). I really hope it helps. I have taken two classes this week already. In theory they're group classes but they don't seem to have enough students attending so I'm always the only student. I would love it if there were other students. Grammar is better when learned in a group I think. They do offer some other languages so if I get tired of Korean I can dabble in something else or brush up my Japanese some. They don't have any Spanish though. That's a language I've been meaning to learn forever and I'm trying to study it at least a little bit along with Korean.

[kraemder]

it's Saturday afternoon. I had a Spanish lesson with my Spanish iTalki tutor. We just did free talk for 30 minutes. It was my second lesson with her and the first lesson last weekend was quite painful but I did talk for 30 minutes so I was happy. I want to brush up/improve my Spanish as I've been meaning to do this for years but with my current focus on Korean and then I still try to use Japanese some to keep it from getting too rusty etc, I didn't know if it's possible. I was thinking it would be nice to at least read something. I have a graded reader from way back and I tried reading it but it's pretty dull. I was thinking it would be nice to read on LingQ but I have a lifetime KOREAN subscription... so if I got the monthly subscription going again then I'm losing money I spent on the lifetime subscription. But on a whim I took a Mandarin class on https://study.flexiclasses.com/ and it was fun so I decided I could read in Mandarin and Spanish so it's worth it. I have Pleco on my phone and some graded readers from it but for some reason Pleco doesn't have a pinyin feature. I can't believe it really. I would have to speak pretty damn good Chinese to not want pinyin on the characters given the choice. So much for Pleco. I got the LingQ subscription shortly before bed last night and got a little Chinese and Spanish reading practice in. It was fun and I'm glad I got the subscription. Also, I think the whole way LingQ tracks words will work much better both for Chinese and Spanish as compared to Korean.

The 30 minute speaking class in Spanish went better than I expected. I was kind of dreading it since I hadn't studied or anything. I didn't know what I would talk about. She's just a free talking tutor - she's there to work with me but I have to think of topics and or if I wanted to do a different activity I'd have to introduce everything to her etc. But it went much better than a week ago. This phenomenon happened before way way back. I think I studied Spanish once a week just reading for 30 minutes or something and I slowly improved. This blows my mind as compared to Japanese / Korean where I waste countless hours studying and immersing and can't feel any progress. My Spanish is already better than my Korean after just these two chat sessions. I have no natural ability for Korean (or Japanese) and it's only through sheer stubbornness that I'm able to progress and I can't feel any of the progress at all.

I enjoyed the Mandarin class enough that I downloaded an Anki vocab deck for Mandarin. I was rather surprised that there didn't seem to be a solid vocab deck in the shared deck list that was pure vocab but included audio/English/simplified/traditional characters etc. They had many sentence decks and Chinese character decks. I eventually found one meant to study writing the characters but otherwise filled the bill (it wasn't just individual characters but included all the HSK vocabulary). I just had to go in and edit the layout etc to my liking and make it completely different from what the deck author intended. It looks quite nice now though. It blows my mind how many westerners want to learn not only to read/speak/type Chinese but also to write it by hand. I get that there would be a few people wanting to do this but I'd think the majority would get disillusioned and give it up. When/where are you going to write stuff out by hand? The last time I wrote something in English (and I'm living in America mind you) was when I went to the doctors and had to fill out some forms. It's just not a useful skill but it's a very difficult skill. If you want to learn to write Chinese characters from memory you will need to practice an insane amount of time. But I digress. To each their own. Learning Chinese in the first place if you look at it from a practical stand point is not very practical. It's just a hobby.

I'm taking two more flexi classes tonight. One in Korean and one in Mandarin. I'm looking forward to the Mandarin once because it's just beginner and I'm not really expected to know anything anyway. The Korean one is low intermediate and I probably will have seen the grammar already but I'm taking this because I can't use it in conversation yet and the class is probably going to be a little painful. No pain, no gain. Maybe. I'm getting in the habit of linking a YouTube video in my posts. Here's a YouTube video of a lady explaining Chinese pronunciation. Actually it's part of a series. The videos explaining Chinese pronunciation are really well done - I'm very thankful to have found them. They're exactly what I was looking for. But In this video she just gives advice based on her experience learning English. She gave some example recordings of herself speaking English over the past two years to show how she improved. There's no video or text just the audio. I personally don't hear much difference at least on the first listen between two years ago and now. Which is depressing. People can work really hard on pronunciation but aside from becoming more confident and speaking faster, often, the way you sound towards the beginning of your studies is more or less how you're going to sound after you get advanced. But you can totally speak with more confidence, quickly, and spontaneously to give a better impression I think. And of course some people are the exceptions.

[kraemder]

One nice thing about posting those YouTube links in my Journal is I can go back and watch them again as needed. I stopped Chinese and then last weekend decided to pick it up again but just a little. I'm not going to do any immersion or anything for now. I had signed up for a lot of Korean lessons on Flexiclasses.com and I took many classes but I'm not going to meet my goal of doing 50 in the 3 months I signed up for. So that makes the cost per class go up a bit. The classes are ok. I chose the site because they offer group classes but the only group classes I've done are when I specifically go looking for an already booked class by someone else and then I also sign up. Since there's nobody near my level in Korean at the moment that only works for Japanese. I took a class with a Chinese girl who is living in America. It was fun. Too bad that can't happen with Korean.

My Korean output is terrible compared to any other language I've studied. I was hoping taking these classes would help that and it was but decided to change my flash cards again and see if it helped. Side 1 has English/picture and I have to remember the Korean. I was surprised this worked well. But I'm doing it with Evita's vocabulary deck which I've studied a lot over the years just recognition style. I don't know how hard it will be for when I try to learn really new words this way. But I noticed right away that after I studied, later that day, Korean would just randomly pop into my head and I would sometimes translate some of my English thoughts automatically into Korean. So studying like that really does get me thinking in Korean.

As far as immersion goes I'm trying dual language study style. I'm reading books on LingQ and using the machine translation sentence by sentence as I go for the most part. Sometimes I turn off sentence mode and just read for a bit without using the dictionary but that's a minority of the time. I'm watching the K-drama Doom at your Service. I was mostly watching it with English subs but sometimes without. However, I think I'm going to try dual subtitle style using Language Reactor where it shows both Korean and English and then pauses the video for each sentence so it's more like reading a book.

[kraemder]

I guess it's been a month since I updated. Since the class credits with Flexiclass ran out I haven't been doing any online classes. I did look briefly for other options - I really want group lessons. iTalki has been "testing" group lessons for years now (I think?) but still only offers it in a few languages and Korean isn't one of them. I purchased the Integrated Korean textbook series to brush up my grammar and they've been collecting dust. I bought Beginner 2, Intermediate 1 and 2. And I think the workbooks but I'm not sure. I cracked the Beginner 2 book open and started just reading it. Just like Steve Kaufmann says to do with textbooks. I think the books are a bit more digestible than the Korean Grammar in Use series which feels just like a reference book. It's just review of course. When I took Korean in the classroom before Covid we used this book. But because the class went slow they didn't finish it. I don't remember how far we got but maybe about halfway. I remember I didn't like the way they introduced new grammar - it seems like a footnote. They should have big capital letters and attention grabbing fonts/colors. And they don't tell you how to conjugate the new grammar point either. But in the back of the book they have an appendix and it has the conjugations for all the grammar. This appendix is actually super useful. It's still mind boggling they didn't include grammar conjugations in the lessons though.

I'm currently reading Solo Leveling or Only I Level Up on Ridi (나 혼자만 레벨업). Ridi is an ebook reading app for some Korean company and you can buy ebooks on there etc. It's quite nice really and links to Naver so you can lookup words while reading on the Naver dictionary website. It's not as fast as LingQ assuming the LingQ dictionary has the definition already and you don't have to well go to Naver and copy it into the LingQ dictionary. But the books are nicely formatted as opposed to if you rip the ebook and upload it to LingQ.

I had initially planned to read the Korean Manga but I found out that is rather difficult to do since you need a specific app but it's only available in the Korean app store. So I read the English version instead and even paid for it . Which is helping me as I read now since I know what happened mostly. The first book in the series is free on Ridi. I'm not sure if I can buy ebooks as a foreigner but we'll find out when I finish it. I'm getting into a nice groove reading it now so it's going pretty quickly. I think the secret to reading books in a foreign language is all about tolerating ambiguity and I'm getting used to that again. Of course I went through this with German and Japanese but you unlearn it after you get better at the language I think.

I'm not doing anything with Chinese at the moment. I use Japanese still when I watch anime and on HelloTalk. It's kind of surprising how many quality streamers there are online. On HelloTalk there's several Japanese people streaming from people cooking, talking, teaching, or doing karaoke. It's quite fun.

[kraemder]

If I can update once a month, I think that's not bad. I did update daily while studying Japaense but those days are gone lol. I was so excited about Japanese. Those were the days.

We had layoffs at my work and I still have a job but it really got me thinking how knowing Spanish would actually help me a lot if I had to job hunt again (as opposed to any other language I've studied which would just be something to tag on because it makes me seem smart). So I got back into studying Spanish again for real after I don't know how long. I was studying Spanish somewhat seriously for several months prior to going all out with Japanese. At the time my motivation was the - I use it on the job at least a little bit (it's more than a little now though) and it would be cool if I could speak it. So I went looking for Anki decks, study materials, and I bought a lifetime Spanish subscription on LingQ. I have to say it blows my mind how much LingQ costs when it's essentially just an ebook reader. But nobody else seems to want to make a decent ebook app for language learners. The Kindle etc just has a dictionary as an after thought but the processor is so slow that highlighting text and looking stuff up while better than a paper dictionary is still a few seconds while on LingQ it's just 1 second or maybe less. Those seconds add up and I find reading a book on LingQ at an intermediate level (or less) to just be such a better experience that I will pay lots of money if need be. So much for my bank account. I also got the lifetime subscription for Japanese .

I got the Japanese subscription last night and I found I was able to use Epubor Ultimate (another lifetime subscription a couple years ago...) to remove the DRM from my Japanese Kindle books and load it into LIngQ. I have to use Calibre to remove the furigana (sad, I love furigana) because LingQ doesn't handle ebook furigana at all and makes a mess of it. LingQ adds it's own machine generated furigana which is very hit and miss. I wonder if they've not been using the same furigana app from when LingQ first add Japanese to the platform which must be like 15 years ago. It seems like it just sticks a random pronunciation from all the possible pronunciations in the dictionary onto the text. I know if I use Chat GPT to get the furigana for a sentence its accuracy rate is extremely good and nothing like the LingQ AI one. If I could edit the furigana readings manually so they displayed properly that would also be good. With all the other users on the app, over time it would create a much improved Japanese language reading experience. But I don't think it lets you edit the furigana manually. I asked early today but I'm not optimistic.

That said the experience reading Japanese on LingQ is still better than on a Kindle or a paper book. Because despite how much I brag about my Japanese, I still don't know a lot of words when I go to read a light novel. Light novels seem to draw upon a larger vocabulary than other types of books. Go figure. I suppose they use more "big" words because the topics are so frivolous that they need to do something to make it seem more professional instead of something a kid wrote in his Japanese class for homework maybe. When I read foreign languages I prefer light reading. And the experience on LingQ despite the weird furigana is much improved over other ways of reading. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Especially after struggling with Korean for several years now. Korean has a nice alphabet which I appreciate but my vocabulary is still abysmally small and insufficient to read it properly. Even on LingQ I'm looking up so many words it feels like work instead of fun. Reading Japanese it feels like a fun experience again (and I can try to learn tons of new words if I want to...). So I'm happy with my expensive Japanese lifetime purchase. I looked for cheaper options but there isn't any really that I could find. Maybe on Android there are. The popular app for reading Japanese at the moment is Satori reader which is maybe more expensive than LingQ and has great furigana but that's because you can only read their edited content. You can't import your own. By far I'm more interested in importing my own content.

The LingQ lifetime Spanish subscription was also a success. It actually motivated me to get the Japanese subscription as well. I'm using it to read The Eye of the World translated from English and it's so nice. Again, compared to Korean. I've studied Korean more than I've studied Spanish but it's just so much easier to read Spanish. It being a book I read in English already and a translation it's pretty easy. Anytime you read something translated from another language they usually change the language a bit so it kind of resembles the original language. At least as much as you can without breaking any grammar rules etc. My Spanish was a bit rusty of course but a few days into reading on LingQ and when I went to read my book it was already to the point where I was just reading for fun and it didn't feel like I was studying really.

I don't think I've mentioned this in my journal but I'm not sure so sorry if I'm repeating myself. I joined YouTuber Oriental Pearl's Discord channel a few months ago. I got to do an hour chat session with her and talk about language learning and it was really fun. I really respect her for her passion and discipline for learning languages. Anyway, she also made a very short YouTube video on how she uses flash cards for studying languages. I blog about how I keep changing up my flash card routine because I'm never really happy with it. She didn't go into detail in her video probably because she didn't know how interested people would be but I was interested and she answered a few follow up questions for me. It's actually super simple. She uses paper flash cards with a key ring. She has an "active" set of 50 cards on a keyring which she studies every day. If she knows a card the following day, she will remove it from the keyring (and replace it with a new card presumably) and then store it in a box. In about six months she will check the card to see if she still knows it. I could have asked more follow up questions for more specifics but that was basically enough to get the gist and I knew I would probably adapt it a bit if I chose to copy it. Well, I am going to copy it (again haha). I tried it briefly but went back to my old style recognition SRS cards which I tend to do. I keep going back to it because they're easy enough and I kind of enjoy doing them. But when the intervals get big invariably I start forgetting lots of words and I like adding words so my deck gets bloated too much and it's just not something that feels manageable. With her method you never get deck bloat and you're always learning new material so it stays fresh. Properly done SRS is mostly boring review and not very much fresh material.

I'm currently doing a 60 card deck instead of 50 cards (pretty arbitrary, but I think you could go to 75 cards or so and it shouldn't feel like it's too many but 50 may be a better number who knows). I didn't ask her how she tested herself or if she uses sentences versus vocabulary cards (the big debate when it comes to flash cards haha). I'm currently not using sentences but I may copy a sentence onto side 2 if I want to. It's a production deck. For this to be useful I think it has to be. Just recognizing and remembering the meaning of a word after an interval of one day is just not that much work I don't think. But active recall is a lot more difficult but just getting the interval up to 1 day doesn't seem so bad. If you're one of those people who can use SRS for active recall and also increase the interval indefinitely with an 85% or better success rate using Anki then God bless you. I think being able to actively recall the card a day later is enough of a seed in my mind for something to grow. If it's a word that's right for me level at least. That said I might keep a card in the deck a little longer than the first day I get it right again. But not too much longer. I think I'll get bored of the card anyway but some cards you barely get it and as long as it's one that feels pretty good (albeit just on a 1 day interval) I think I'll put it aside. I don't know how she organizes her cards I suppose she could have separate piles for cards she learned for each month labeled so she can keep track of when six months are up. I could do something similar with my app too. I might not though. I might prefer to just keep adding new cards that seem interesting into the routine and keep it fresh.

I really like doing active recall. It truly feels like you're exercising your brain in a way that's different from just regular immersion. But when combined with SRS and the intervals get big and the reviews pile up it just seems like something isn't as it should be.

[kraemder]

Maybe I'll update more often. Work has been exhausting. Don't work in a call center at an insurance company. It's not worth it. I wish I had the job skills to do something else. Anyway.

I have put the Oriental Pearl short term flash card routine on hold for now. As I said in the previous post, I like actively recalling vocabulary instead of just reading it and passively understanding it like my SRS cards. However, as I'm studying 3 languages right now, and have a full time job, I'm not always immersing or using all three languages every day, and doing active recall flash cards got hard. I noticed this with Korean. If I stuck to Japanese I think anything would work since my brain has adapted to memorizing Japanese pretty well at this point. Korean is still a work in progress. I'm actually working on some vocabulary cards from last March so it's old vocabulary. It's very miscellaneous and includes vocabulary I was seeing in light novels at that time, to words I just randomly looked up because I was wondering "how do I say this in Korean?" Some of the words still feel relevant and others not so much but I was just going through the list. Basically it got hard. I didn't want to give up. I decided maybe if I just imagined real life situations I could use the vocabulary in then that would help. Not even full Korean sentences just in this situation this vocabulary might pop into my head. It involved a lot more time and effort to review the cards this way but it really did work. I remembered them better. But then I decided to try some of my recognition reading SRS flash card decks for comparison and it was so much easier. Plus, if I wanted to, I could just as easily think of real life situations for these words while reviewing too. So I put the production deck on hold. I was thinking though I might want to do it again but just reduce the amount of cards down to 15 or 20. I'm doing three languages so that adds up and then if I'm having a bad day, getting 15 cards wrong in a row or nearly all of them wrong, usually I want to quit about that number instead of continuing.

I think the 1 day production deck works well if you're focusing on one language and you know you'll be immersing or using that language pretty much every day. Then you'll likely maintain the words you get right. They should stick around in your memory for about a week I am guessing and so there's plenty of opportunity for them to be reinforced naturally then. But if you're doing multiple languages or busy and not getting lots of immersion/study/speaking time in, then it seems less effective because a week will go by with no reinforcement and then they're gone. Your Korean brain may get a little benefit from the act of memorizing it but the word itself will be gone, and you may be better off with the reading SRS deck which is what I'm thinking for myself right now.

With that in mind I decided to finally add all the professionally recorded and paid for audio I have for my 5k Korean sentence deck based on the 5k frequency dictionary (which I also own) but the deck is available for free in the Anki shared decks, to my Anki deck. I had all this audio from over 2 years ago and I only added audio to a few hundred cards of the 5000. That's because it's a major pain to add the audio as I have to individually add it to each card. I had two voice actors, one male and the other female to give my deck nice variety. This variety totally worked well I think but it made adding the audio to the cards a big hassle. And the lady voice actress seems to have skipped a few sentences (my korean was not good enough to proof read their work at the time). Anyway, I spent over 12 hours yesterday getting this done and it's FINALLY done. I can now set my deck to insert cards RANDOMLY instead of only the first few cards in order and I get proper native audio on the cards no matter what. Unless I'm really unlucky with the almost 2500 the lady actress did. I think it's missing 22 or so sentences so not so bad but it made me cry inside when I found out.

I started the deck last night before bed and it was really nice and I'm reviewing it now and it's great. It's really just like the Japanese Core 2k/6/10k deck which is what I wanted. These are just random isolated example sentences so in a way the professional voice acting is a bit overkill but the audio quality is so nice. Just like the Japanese Core deck. If you're studying Japanese you should totally get that deck. I can't believe it's free. You probably think I'm crazy but now that I have the deck completed and ready to go I don't regret spending the money on the voice actors at all. I know I'm going to use this deck for years to come and I'll get the value out of it. I credit a lot of my Japanese to that Core deck. It was just so nice.

It would be nice if I could just get native audio for example sentences for cheap for my Anki decks without hiring a professional but I don't know how to go about that. The website Rhinospike.com is still around but at least for Korean or Japanese getting native speakers to do recordings is just too hard. I've had entries sit around for years without a response and then suddenly I get a response. Years later is too late. I'm no longer interested. And the quality is very hit and miss. I have a nice microphone when I do the recordings for others but most other people are using their smart phone mic if you're lucky and if not then something worse. You can't argue with free but the lack of response is a bit much. If anyone knows any other platforms I could use please let me know. I'm thinking of asking people on HelloTalk to read a few sentences and see how that goes. I don't know the best way to get audio off HelloTalk into Anki though.

[kraemder]

I just wanted to give a quick update. My latest Korean language partner who cancelled on me Saturday morning (she assured me that 1 A.M. her time would be ok but then begged off saying she needed to go to bed... I totally saw that being a problem lol) was kind enough to record the sentences for me. There was like 20. I forgot one . I hate how careless I am sometimes. I hate having to ask her to record another sentence already but she seemed happy enough to do it. Anyway, it sounded like she was recording next to a big fan of some kind. Like everyone recording in general. But her voice sounded quite nice otherwise and I was very happy with it. Well, it being 2023 maybe you can remove the background noise. I did a Google search and sure enough you can do it. There's websites that offer to do it for you if you upload the sound file. I tried that but then they wanted money. Nope. Looked again and Audible has a built in feature to do it. The text explanation on this website was not doing it for me though. It's pretty impressive how unintuitive video/audio editing software is. I mean, it's like they make it hard on purpose. I go onto YouTube and the first video that pops up seems credible. I've gone onto YouTube looking for tech help and you would expect someone who takes the time to post a video on how to do something... to know how to do it. But it seems that expectation is wrong. Many people seem to just like posting videos and so they make videos on how to do stuff they don't understand. This video was just like those. It seemed so credible. Following the directions it DID seem like the audio sounded a little better but it was not very drastic. Nothing like I was hoping for. I had to play it next to the original to make sure it was indeed better. I looked at the comments and they were full of people thanking this guy for his great video and it helped them so much. Well I looked for another video and I was surprised that a YouTube short was able to explain how to do it in under 60 seconds and it was even correct. Completely correct. I was now able to remove ALL the background noise (well, I did leave a little tiny bit but because changing file does change the audio you want to keep too) but literally, when she's talking, you cannot hear the fan at all and even if she's not I don't think you will notice it. So I have this fantastic audio that's really really close to being as good as the professional voice actor audio I paid lots of money for. Of course, getting people to record lots of audio for you is going to be a hassle, but if you know how to clean up the background sound then you will probably be really happy with the resulting audio file and enjoy listening to it repeatedly for your studying.

Here's the YouTube short if you want to do the same thing: https://youtube.com/shorts/g3W3zy9ENCs?si=z9Lu6_m-VrE9NbA7

*edit* I forgot to mention how I got the file into Audible. I basically recorded the recording. I couldn't find a way to download the file directly. There's a web version of HelloTalk so I had that up and then I played the audio while using an app on my Windows PC to record system sound. It would be cleaner if I could download it but this worked really well.

[kraemder]

Work computer is down so I’m updating on my phone. I have settled on making my decks all vocabulary recognition decks but with a sentence on side two with audio and the English translation. As mentioned in the previous post I have great native audio for this one sentence deck with 5k cards. After switching it to a vocabulary desk I’m enjoying it more and I don’t think I’ll have any problems getting burned out and quitting. Most people on the internet advocate for sentence cards and I just always feel so guilty that I never stick with those. But I was doing the reviews and I’m memorizing the sentences as a whole which means if I forget the target word I usually can guess the meaning of the sentence anyway and then guess the word. Basically I don’t think sentence cards are even better. I need to stop feeling guilty. Forget Matt vs Japan lol.

I’m hoping to finally make some grammar flash cards that aren’t just good for cramming but easy enough to do that I can maintain them and stay up on SRS reviews. I don’t really think whole sentence cards are so good for the reasons mentions previously. I asked Chat GPT for advice and here’s what it said:

For grammar flashcards in Korean, focus on concise explanations and examples. Break down complex rules into digestible parts. Use one side of the card for a grammar point, and the other for its usage in a sentence. Review regularly to reinforce your understanding through spaced repetition.

It seems like it doesn’t recommend sentence flash cards either although that’s what you’ll find if you look for pre made decks in Anki. I don’t think they’re terrible but not ideal at least for me. I’m trying to think how to make it feel like I’m doing a vocabulary card instead. I’m thinking I can get an example sentence and just cut out the target grammar in the sentence and put that on side one and then on side two include the whole sentence plus an English translation with the grammar part in bold for both Korean and English. It would be so nice if this managed to trick my brain into thinking it’s just vocabulary . I would be an unstoppable language learning beast!

[DaveAgain]

I’m hoping to finally make some grammar flash cards that aren’t just good for cramming but easy enough to do that I can maintain them and stay up on SRS reviews. I don’t really think whole sentence cards are so good for the reasons mentions previously. I asked Chat GPT for advice and here’s what it said:

For grammar flashcards in Korean, focus on concise explanations and examples. Break down complex rules into digestible parts. Use one side of the card for a grammar point, and the other for its usage in a sentence. Review regularly to reinforce your understanding through spaced repetition.

It seems like it doesn’t recommend sentence flash cards either although that’s what you’ll find if you look for pre made decks in Anki. I don’t think they’re terrible but not ideal at least for me. I’m trying to think how to make it feel like I’m doing a vocabulary card instead. I’m thinking I can get an example sentence and just cut out the target grammar in the sentence and put that on side one and then on side two include the whole sentence plus an English translation with the grammar part in bold for both Korean and English. It would be so nice if this managed to trick my brain into thinking it’s just vocabulary . I would be an unstoppable language learning beast!

The BrianJX blog mentioned turning grammar exercises into flashcards:

I have two grammar books that I bought about 25 years ago in Italy. I turned almost all of the exercises in those books into flashcards. All in all, I would say that would be several hundred cards. The reason is, knowing the answer once is not the same as knowing the answer every time. Only by repeating the question many times will it be burned into your brain.

http://brianjx.altervista.org/#_Toc415769757

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(I found making flash cards a pain, so I just use the free version of Clozemaster.com.)

[kraemder]

I’m hoping to finally make some grammar flash cards that aren’t just good for cramming but easy enough to do that I can maintain them and stay up on SRS reviews. I don’t really think whole sentence cards are so good for the reasons mentions previously. I asked Chat GPT for advice and here’s what it said:

For grammar flashcards in Korean, focus on concise explanations and examples. Break down complex rules into digestible parts. Use one side of the card for a grammar point, and the other for its usage in a sentence. Review regularly to reinforce your understanding through spaced repetition.

It seems like it doesn’t recommend sentence flash cards either although that’s what you’ll find if you look for pre made decks in Anki. I don’t think they’re terrible but not ideal at least for me. I’m trying to think how to make it feel like I’m doing a vocabulary card instead. I’m thinking I can get an example sentence and just cut out the target grammar in the sentence and put that on side one and then on side two include the whole sentence plus an English translation with the grammar part in bold for both Korean and English. It would be so nice if this managed to trick my brain into thinking it’s just vocabulary . I would be an unstoppable language learning beast!

The BrianJX blog mentioned turning grammar exercises into flashcards:

I have two grammar books that I bought about 25 years ago in Italy. I turned almost all of the exercises in those books into flashcards. All in all, I would say that would be several hundred cards. The reason is, knowing the answer once is not the same as knowing the answer every time. Only by repeating the question many times will it be burned into your brain.

http://brianjx.altervista.org/#_Toc415769757

-------------
(I found making flash cards a pain, so I just use the free version of Clozemaster.com.)

That's an interesting Blog. When you see he memorized Pi to around the 1150th digit just for fun you know he might have a better memory than the average person. Which doesn't mean he can slack and still learn just that I might copy his flashcard method and while the cards worked well for him, for me they're all leeches . I see he makes full on sentence translation production/recall cards. Wow. I have tried that in the past and 90% (or more?) of the cards were leeches haha. It's like trying to memorize a script for a foreign language speech contest.