Not all those who wander are lost

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sfuqua
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Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Nov 28, 2022 4:21 am

Up to 548 kanji.

OK, the wall is getting higher, and I have to change some things....
I had one good day with my RTK deck, thought I was really making some progress, and then today came along. I had greatly increased the number of steps for new cards and lapsed cards, and I wound up slogging though cards for three hours.
Calculating my cards in the future, I think in a couple of months, as I get near to the end of the deck, it looks like I will be doing eight hours of anki a day.

This is not a viable plan. I need to reduce my number of nreviews a day. I'm going to try 10 words a day tomorrow, which means around 200 days from here.

I've also got to do something with Japanese pronunciation. I don't want to develop super bad habits of pronunciation. I also need to learn at least a few phrases of basic survival Japanese, I looked at tutors online, but that demands coordinating with someone else, which is kind of hard, since I am a substitute teacher who never knows if he is going to work or not until the last minute.

I can get Pimsleur Japanese from the library and use it for pronunciation, but I hope I can come up with something more pleasant. I do have Assimil Japanese, and shadowing it would probably be useful.

I may just do MattvsJapan'ś JP1K deck. It seems to have good audio, and it claims that one can take off sentence mining after that. It involves learning 1000 words in the context of 1000 sentences. Since Matt seems to think this might make a good first deck in Japanese, maybe it won't be too hard. Maybe...

Lightening the load on RTK should leave some room for something else...
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Dec 05, 2022 9:30 pm

Wow, have I learned a lot. About Japanese. About how my brain works. About the Internet… :D

I kept reading on the net (there is a ton written about learning Japanese), and I noticed that there are some popular opinions produced by a few people who have YouTube channels and followings, but that actually many of their opinions and approaches are far from universally supported. Many of these Internet experts have read a couple of papers from the '80s and are not experts on second language acquisition, yet they speak as if they are. Some of the products and materials they advocate are untested and of very questionable value. Despite their enthusiasm, many of them have a very superficial knowledge of teaching and learning, and materials design. They have enthusiastic followers who are not very well-informed either.
Many of them give inconsistent suggestions. :shock:

“The best way to get a good accent is to avoid talking.” :o

“The best way to get good grammar is to ignore it.” :shock:

“Anybody who disagrees with me isn’t up-to-date with the current second language acquisition research. Let me quote this paper from 40 years ago to prove my point.” ;)

“You can’t learn a good accent, you have to acquire it. Don’t pay any attention to accent, and it will be great, as long as you buy my course on pitch accent.” :D

"You can't learn Japanese, you have to acquire it. But first memorize 2200 kanji and 7000 sentences. Then you can start to acquire it." :D

"I just watched anime a lot. Oh, I memorized 2000 kanji and all the kana. Oh, I used to repeat the same anime over and over, talking along with it. Oh, yeah, then I met this Japanese girl,.." :shock:

How many times did they repeat themselves with that "Japanese girl?" What sorts of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation did the "Japanese girl" provide, and did it affect their learning? :D

They have worked hard, but I think a lot of them may have done more traditional learning than they think they have. Many could use a good ESL or linguistic graduate degree to recognize what they are doing. Of course, a more nuanced approach may not get them many hits on the Internet. If they just want to say that they don't believe that a usual language class is a good place to learn a language, I agree. But I think that a good FSI or DLI classroom with plenty of drills would be better, at least at some stages, than it would be to just watch anime with the subtitles turned on and then turned off. :o

Many of these experts, however, have what appear to be amazing results in their Japanese learning. They have a ton of resources on how to prepare native speaker material for immersion. They are good at creating enthusiasm for learning Japanese. The whole community has produced some absolutely wonderful software and other resources.

Above all else, many of these internet experts have tremendous practical knowledge of what worked for them, and this information is invaluable.

Japanese is a beast of a language, a category 5 language according to FSI. It takes time and work to get to the point where one has good comprehension of spoken and written language. But how does one get to that point? I know I’ve said it before. You can call it whatever you like, but my approach to this beast of a language is going to be based on an approach advocated by that famous American politician and philosopher Sarah Palin,

I’m going to
“Drill, baby, drill!”
13 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Dec 08, 2022 4:20 am

I've settled on working through a kanji deck, which is ordered in the order kanji is taught to kids in Japanese school. This means that it starts off with common and easy to write kanji and gets harder and rarer as it goes along, or at least that is the idea. I am also completing a deck on radicals, those kanji or components of kanji that appear in all other kanji. There are 214 of them, so this won't slow me down much. I noticed that a lot of my problems with remembering kanji had to do with me not recognizing the components of the kanji. If you just try to remember it as a block of random lines, it is very easy to forget it immediately. I've also turned each of my kanji cards into a pair of cards, recognition and production. Heisig claims that writing the kanji is vital for remembering it, and I started out thinking he was crazy, but with something as complex and alien as Japanese characters, getting to the point where one can picture the kanji well enough to draw it can make it stick in the head. This approach, with a lot more review and repetition, seems to be working. :D
If you read about Japanese, you will hear how learning the kana shouldn't take more than a couple of days. I guess I'm a dummy. True, learning to recognize and read the kana is pretty straightforward, but writing them is still making me feel like an idiot. I have massive confusion between hiragana and katakana. They are two systems that cover the same sounds, but they are completely different characters(usually) and they are used in different places. Hiragana is much more common, in that it is used for native Japanese words and grammatical markers, but I keep mixing them up when I try to write. I am brute force drilling these things, and they are fighting. Reading, easy, writing, I suck.
I always write every kanji and kana I review, whether I am going in the recognition or production direction.
Many people insist that one should learn material somewhere else, and review it with anki. I think that anki also makes a good tool for drilling. If you set the time to the next review down to seconds, you see the character again before you can forget it, even if it is a monster to remember.
I´m using a schedule of "5s 10s 19s 38s 5m 2h" for new cards and lapse cards. It is shocking to me, but all those less than a minute reviews go very fast. They really get the shape of the card into the brain, and when one gets up to the more normal minutes or hours intervals, they are more accurate.
I am going against the way that many people use anki, but I think they are missing something. ;)

The other things I am using with this frontal assault on kanji is a couple of grammar decks with sound taken from various anime, ⁣https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782, and https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2133117190. These decks are cool in that one is learning grammar using sentences from anime, and the audio sounds cool.
I will quit or slow down the grammar decks if they get annoying, but they seem like a way to get audio into the mix, and also learn about Japanese grammar.
I extracted the audio from the Jlab deck and have started shadowing sentences and words that I have already covered in anki, and it seems to make Japanese roll out of my mouth better...

Japanese is very challenging. I'm watching a couple of hours of anime every day. I have a lot to learn about what kinds of anime I like. A lot of anime is pretty awful, but some of it is amazing. I recently watched "Your Name" and was blown away by it. The movie starts out as a cute romcom, and I watched the first hour thinking that I would finish it, even though I am not exactly the demographic for it, and then, all of a sudden after an hour, suddenly and seamlessly the movie was a completely different genre, much darker and more interesting. I like ithis anime a lot, and one of the things that I am looking forward to as I go further is studying the sub2srs for this anime. I'ḿ now trying to explore other works by Makoto Shinkai, and I'm having a good time.

I'm moving slowly and grinding my way into Japanese. It is fighting back, but I won fail if I don't quit :D
I wish I was going faster, but I can't go faster than the fastest I can go.
I'm pretty happy.
10 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Dec 08, 2022 3:58 pm

For me with Japanese, this seems to be absolutely true:
:D
https://cademcniven.com/posts/20210410/ says

After using 1 5 60 900 4000 6900 for awhile, I was introduced to the idea of “micro-steps” by nocompo on Discord. These steps frontloaded the effort by cramming hard upon first seeing the card. After the cramming period, the steps would be normal again. So for example, the steps might be 0.08 0.16 0.32 0.64 5 1440.

These micro-steps aren’t really useful for reviewing known information. However, they are fantastic for learning new information. When it comes to learning vocabulary, it’s incredibly useful to gain repeated exposure up front before trying to start testing on it.

I decided to try out this concept by using the steps 0.32 0.64 5 60 900 4000 6900.

Of course, adding these extra micro-steps would add to my number of daily reviews. Despite that, I found that my total review time actually lessened. This is for a couple of reasons.

First, it made me stop failing the 5 minute interval nearly as much.

Suppose your steps are 1 5 60. Say you pass the 1 minute interval. Then you have to wait 5 minutes before seeing it again, but by then you’ve forgot it. Fail, and wait for the 1 minute interval again, before getting another shot at waiting another 5 minutes. What if you fail again?

I found that for difficult cards, those first 2 steps were what was dragging me down. I needed some more exposure to make the words start to stick before I started testing myself on them. With the micro steps, even if they don’t stick it only takes me a few seconds before I see it again, not a few minutes.

Second, I found that by the time I got to the 60 minute interval, I would know the words much better with the micro steps setup. Originally, by that point I would have to really struggle to recall a word after 60 minutes. Perhaps I would spend 20-30 seconds racking my brain to think of the reading/meaning. However, with the micro steps setup my retention for the 60 minute step is 98.5%! My retention is much higher, and along with that, my answers are much quicker.

After this setup for awhile, I eventually decided to drop my longest step — leading to my current setup 0.32 0.64 5 60 900 4000. The reason for this is simply because after reaching the final interval, it was soul crushing to go back through all of the micro steps and work my way back up again. My new graduating interval is 5 days to reflect this change.

February 2022 edit: As pictured, my steps are now 0.32 5 60 1300. There are a couple of reasons for this that I’ll explain so you can decide for yourself what to make your steps.

First, I removed the longer steps, so my longest step is only 1 day after seeing the card for the first time. This is because failing the longer intervals got really frustrating over time, and I didn’t notice enough benefit to warrant keeping them. Instead, I keep a 1 day interval for my last step just to make sure I know it well enough, and then let the algorithm handle it from there. This is something I’d recommend for pretty much anyone at this point.

As for the microsteps, that’s a bit trickier. As you learn more words in your target language, it becomes increasingly easy to learn new ones. Microsteps are incredibly useful in the beginning when learning words is difficult, but once you get better they become unnecessary and just add extra reviews without much benefit. For that reason, I still recommend microsteps at the very beginning, but at some point I think it’s better to mellow out to something similar to my current steps.
4 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Dec 10, 2022 8:12 pm

Just a quick note about how bad card design in anki can make your life miserable.
I have been failing and being annoyed by kana. I noticed that I most of my errors have to do with interference between hiragana and katakana characters that code for the same sound. When I try to produce them, the mnemonics for each interfere with each other.

This is annoying, since i can read kana slowly and laboriously. I should be able to do a card on it.

I find it hard to differentiate between "no" hiragana -->の, and "no" karakana-->ノ.
I did a little test and I discovered that "no"-->"の ノ" is easy. I can easily remember whether a given kana is hiragan or katakan by remember whether it comes first or last one the card.

Problem solved. Kana is easy. :D
2 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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Teango
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Teango » Sat Dec 10, 2022 9:52 pm

You're doing great, sfuqua! Rest assured, Japanese is a tough nut to crack but totally worth it. When it comes to consolidating kana, flash cards or drills will only take you so far. This is largely because the contextual cues are more or less the same each time you test yourself. Combining the kana in a wide variety of meaningful ways is where the real action takes place. You learn to deal with different patterns of priming and build resistance to competing interference. In this respect, I find that writing out lots of sentences on a daily basis (including making a concerted effort to regularly switch between hiragana and katakana) really helps cement in the differences between the characters, remove the need for mnemonics, and render the overall process more smooth and automatic.
5 x

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Dec 10, 2022 10:52 pm

Thanks, Teango; all of this is just a rush to get through to where I can do stuff with the Japanese, and I'm about done with kana, now that I am using a better card design.
I have found writing to be vital for remembering kanji, and I need to add writing kana to my routine.
I'm backfilling, practicing writing with the 500 kanji or so that I "know".

Japanese is a little frustrating at first since there is no good way to get a hold on it.

So far it looks like getting a bunch of kanji and sentences (all with furigana) into the head seems like it is a good way to get a beachhead with this wonderful language.

I've noticed that you are using Genki and formal instruction for your learning. I keep meaning to buy a copy of Genki, but I keep seeing notices that it is difficult to use outside a class, and I keep buying manga that I can't read instead :lol:

Do you find it useful?

One thing that I find nice about this Japanese chapter in my life is that my wanderlust has dropped off considerably. Japanese is sucking up all of my wanderflust right now. I wouldn't have noticed Japanese if I hadn't been looking at Chinese a few months ago. I can't really explain where my recent obsession has come from.

Japanese is cool, I should have started it 40 or 50 years ago.
9 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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Teango
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Teango » Sun Dec 11, 2022 8:37 am

sfuqua wrote:I've noticed that you are using Genki and formal instruction for your learning. I keep meaning to buy a copy of Genki, but I keep seeing notices that it is difficult to use outside a class, and I keep buying manga that I can't read instead :lol:

Do you find it useful?

There are a plethora of textbooks out there that can offer you a useful foundation in Japanese. Minna no Nihongo is standard fare in Japan, while Genki seems to be the popular choice here in the US. Having tried both in formal academic settings, I found Genki much easier to study outside class, particularly given that the instructions are written in English. However this probably comes at the price of Genki's less comprehensive scope and missing out on Minna's whole "immersive kana from the start" shtick. I guess it all depends on how you use the material and what you want to get out of it.
9 x

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
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Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Dec 16, 2022 3:05 am

Japanese has a ton of shared anki decks, and I have wasted a bit of time trying to figure the "best" one. This is a waste of time, since my Japanese is at such a low level that I can learn new things from almost anything. I seem to have settled on doing some sort of variation on a Heisig RTK deck, some sort of deck that teaches grammar, and some sort of deck that involves reading sentences, with furigana a tthis point. I keep floundering and switching between decks(tying to preserve what I have already studied), and I think I am wasting time. I need to keep moving forward and avoid zigzagging around.

It is more important to keep moving forward than to spend too much time thinking about what the best way to move forward is. A thousand kanji and a thousand words in my brain would make everything better.

Iḿ not sure that I am accomplishing anything scanning through manga and looking for things I can recognize, but it does tend to keep motivation up.

As I write this, I am tempted to just drop everything except my RTK deck and just beat my head against it.

It is thrilling to see Japanese I can read, even if I can pronounce it.

I'have hiragana pretty much under control now, although itś not fast. I guess everybody who learns Japanese lags on Katakana, because it is less commpn.

Now, if I keep up my assault on an RTK deck and I read furigana, hmmn, that would mean that I could sort of kindof read simple Japanese in a couple of months, hmmn...
10 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Dec 31, 2022 11:37 pm

I haven't been around the forum as much as usual, because I have been.... wait for it... studying Japanese. :lol:
My big problem is keeping my new cards down to a manageable level. I find that I can comfortably add a little less than 20 new cards a day without starting to have my anki reviews go into a death spiral. Only so much Japanese can fit into my brain each day. I can add more cards, but I won't remember them. There is no point in trying to rush, I just have to give time for the neural pathways to grow. 20 cards produces a bit of strain. I could learn faster if I just skipped kanji, kana and so forth, but romaji just doesn't really seem like Japanese... :o

Today, I learned 20 new Kanji; tomorrow I'm going to add in another deck tomorrow and drop the cards per deck down to 10 each, I think.. I may just keep pounding through Kanji's. It feels like progress, even though, even if you know all of the Kanji in a passage, you can't really understand much of it, nor can you pronounce it. But at least it looks familiar and you can take a stab at understanding it. :D

The big religious debates in much of the online communities I follow seem to fall into these questions:
1. Should you finish a deck of the main Kanji with English meanings before you try to learn to read Japanese? --Decks like the RTK decks I mentioned earlier.
2. Should you study Japanese words in the context of sentences, or should you just learn the words? Or sentence cards which count success by accuracy on only one of the words in the sentence?
3. How long should you study anki courses before you start mining sentences and doing anki sentences?
4. How much should you study grammar?
5. Should you just wait for fluent speech to start pouring out of your mouth?

I think I am going to work through a kanji deck, and at some point I will add in a deck or two with "targeted sentence cards." Most experts say that one shouldn't try to write kanji until one is advanced, but I find that I can't remember what I can't write, so I am learning to write them too and I am trying to produce the "reading΅ or pronunciation of the kanji, even though I am not failing the card if I miss it.

I think I have been a little unfair with some of my criticism of some of the online Japanese experts. When you look at their advice that seems contradictory and the dates at which they gave it, sometimes it turns out that they changed their mind over a multiyear period, which is not surprising. One person, who earlier claimed that he had,"just started speaking one day," now advocates waiting until you can listen to an audiobook with pretty much complete comprehension, and then spending 50 hours shadowing Japanese audio books, several hours of recording yourself on camera and then listening to yourself, and finally spending many hours listening to one, single native speaker whose language you admire and then attempting to imitate them. This all sounds quite reasonable to me, and is quite different from the "Input of i+1, which automatically leads to acquisition, which automatically leads to fluent production," which was what most of these folks were claiming a few years ago. :o

There is an app and a procedure to produce cards from a subtitled movie or show that produce anki cards with audio from the show and an image from the show when the subtitle was captured. This can produce some very nice decks that not only look like the show you want to understand, they sound like the show you want to understand. And getting familiar phrases down for one show tends to lead to better comprehension on all shows. I've started to comprehend big chunks of Japanese when it is a phrase that gets repeated a lot in different contexts. Cool! I haven't really tried working through a deck for a specific anime and then listening to the anime. Soon, maybe… :D

I am still a beginner, although not a complete beginner. I have a long, long way to go. And I can only move ahead a bit each day. Trying to go faster just causes a system crash. :(

I have to be patient. I have a pretty hard slog for the next couple of years, but Japanese is soooo cool… :D

Hard=Satisfying.

I'm happy and I am enjoying myself. :lol:
Last edited by sfuqua on Sun Jan 01, 2023 5:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...


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