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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4986 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 193 of 1702 01 January 2012 at 8:19am | IP Logged |
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Happy new year =).
I'm taking a short break from my Heisig marathon weekend to post here. I am at about 1200 kanji in my deck now. I did a ton of reviewing yesterday and some more today. The due pile is just growing though despite that. A little scary but oh well. I'm gonna put the balance towards adding new cards over doing reviews since well then I can look at Japanese text online or in anime and try like hell to remember what it means heh. Obviously when I get through the whole heisig list then it will all be due cards so eventually that pile should move in the right direction. A few goals for this year. I want to be able to read Manga and understand most of what I read without help from outside sources. That would be awesome. I think that's going to be my biggest goal. I am obviously going to continue to work on speaking and listening but being able to read Japanese would be the coolest. So that's my goal. Be able to read god damnit. This is a little different from what I wanted when I started out studying Japanese - I just wanted to understand the dialogue in anime. I felt that way in part because I was so intimidated by the Japanese writing system. But Heisig has given me hope. I really want this to work out. So back to the Heisig marathon weekend thing. I wonder how many kanji I'll have in my deck when I go to bed Monday night. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4986 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 194 of 1702 01 January 2012 at 11:24pm | IP Logged |
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My long rant didn't post for some reason...
Ok to rant again briefly. It's come to my attention that Flashcards Deluxe, the flashcard app I use on my ipad, has a bugged spaced repetition algorithm. Ugh. Now my motivation to study has gone to crap. Basically when you go to do your reviews it's supposed to give you cards in sets of 20 (or whatever you define). If you get one (or more) of those cards wrong it it supposed to include that card in the next set of 20. Or so one would logically think when one reads the instructions and selects the option to repeat missed cards. So this never really was my experience. I got frustrated of course but never took the time to really analyze it and email the author. For all I knew his idea of repeating missed cards was more sophisticated than my idea of doing so and he's the author of this app and should know. Well as I sat down yesterday going through my due cards I missed quite a few. I'd see the English but the kanji and the story to go with it were like on the tip of my tongue (in some cases not so much but still). No problem I told myself - it will repeat them in the next set and I'll get it next time right? Well to be honest I had my doubts there as I've said I've had a lot of frustration in the past when I had a large amount of due cards. NONE of the cards were to be seen in the next 20. Nor in the 20 after that. Or after that. I'm not sure when the cards started to show themselves again but it was a lot of cards. The ones I really almost knew I did manage to get the 2nd time around and after a LOT of time I got enough right that the app seemed to fix itself sort of and I was seeing my missed cards more often. I spent several hours on due cards yesterday. I'm pretty motivated to do well this time with the kanji so I actually did take the time to send a message to the author to figure out what was happening and (hopefully) there was a setting I could change to make it easier on me. His response was quick which really impressed me for New Years eve (he's always been good about replying to customers). However, his response was like "that shouldn't be happening. You must be doing something wrong." He explained a bit of how it's supposed to work and what I should be seeing in the deck's statistics etc. This morning I took the time to reply and give an example citing the deck statistics to show that I'm not crazy. I haven't heard back yet (could be a while I'm sure if he has to actually sit down and troubleshoot it himself). And if it requires a patch then it'll be a couple weeks probably at best before I can get the update from the app store. So I'm bummed. I looked at Anki a little. I already actually have the ipad version but I haven't been too impressed with Anki. Namely it only supports 2 sided cards and doesn't have text to speech and doesn't support downloading cards from Flashcard Exchange where I got the Heisig deck I'm using right now. Still it's super popular and there's a ton of decks you can download meant just for anki. I downloaded a few Heisig ones but they just had the English/Kanji and none of the stories to go with it. I'm wondering if anyone knows of a Heisig anki deck with good stories too? I think Anki supports a "third" card side for hints which is where the stories for the kanji could ideally go. I'm assuming that Anki's spaced repetition system doesn't have any bugs. Who knows. Ugh. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 4838 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes Studies: French | Message 195 of 1702 02 January 2012 at 6:02am | IP Logged |
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If you open anki, go to download, type in " Heisig ", and go through the results you will see that some decks do have stories :)
best of luck! Edited by fortheo on 02 January 2012 at 6:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6422 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 196 of 1702 02 January 2012 at 8:28am | IP Logged |
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Anki actually has a lot of special features for Japanese. And it does support three sided cards. Mine all have three sides, one for the expression, one for the reading (it makes furigana for you, but occasionally they are wrong if the word has several meanings so you need to check and fix them), and one side for the meaning, where I just copy and paste definitions from Rikaichan as that is very easy and fast - you just hold the cursor over the word so the definition comes up and press c, then you can paste it onto the card.
All this is explained in a video on Youtube. I don't have the link handy, but if you go to the help section of Anki and look under Japanese, there is a link there, I think. If you don't find it, you can probably go on Youtube and search for Anki and Japanese. Really, ANKI is great, and you can also download decks made by other people. I got a nice one that has all the major Harry Potter vocabulary in example sentences, so I don't have to make my own deck. One more thing - if you like to write "long rants" then before you click the post button, highlight the whole thing and press ctrl-c, that way if something goes wrong, you can paste it in Word and save it to try again later. I always do that now as I have lost many rants do to a bad internet connection. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4986 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 197 of 1702 03 January 2012 at 7:04am | IP Logged |
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heh yeah I should have done that. I think I hit post and then the screen started refreshing and I assume it was sent and walked away.
I'll be trying out anki. I'm still learning it. I got my current deck to import but it didn't know what to do with the 3rd field (which is the stories) and made them into tags whatever those are. I looked at the help tutorials and they seem good to get you started but don't specifically address 3 sides decks. I'm sure there's more fan videos on youtube though. I heard back from the app author again. Now it's working as intended. He forgot he made changes to the spaced repetition code but it's not bugged and it's just the way he likes it. He gave me a couple work around tips so I can have more control over what cards are tested. I'm still using this deck but I definitely plan to try anki. btw I'm up to 1436 cards in the deck now. So I've "studied" that many kanji using heisig. I haven't memorized that many kanji but I got them right at least 3 times in a row in my deck at least. I only reviewed for an hour today (as opposed to like 6 or 7 hours of doing new cards). I'm not sure how much reviewing I'll do before I finish. I'm definitely focused on at least getting through each kanji once. Looking at kanji now is a whole different ball game. I can readily identify tons of primitives although a lot of kanji the stories don't come up for me so quickly (hey I'm watching anime so it's not like I have much time to think). But I think I'm pretty happy with hitting up so much kanji like this. It's really a total immersion effect. My brains inundated with it no doubt. However, once I get through the 2000 or so kanji I'll have to keep right at it or it'll go away. Right now any kanji I look at is familiar and even if I don't remember the story, looking at the story I'm like oh yeah! I actually did like 100 or so kanji a month or 2 ago and then put it down but when I picked it up again they were all gone (unless it was kanji i knew before I even studied heisig). So I don't want that to happen and will be reviewing quite a bit. If nothing else I'm motivated. If you read my journal you'll see how much I really really hated kanji and so I'm really really excited to see that this barrier might be falling away. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4986 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 198 of 1702 03 January 2012 at 7:08am | IP Logged |
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oh thought I'd add one more thing. Doing this Heisig kanji thing is kind of like reading a story. As I read through the primitives in heisig and then start in on the deck I'm always curious to see what story the guy who made the deck wrote. Some are pretty lame, just listing the primitives almost but some are pretty funny and clever and it helps keep me interested.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6422 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 199 of 1702 03 January 2012 at 8:04am | IP Logged |
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Here is where ANKI explains about how to use Japanese.
This is the Youtube video for Japanese support. I don't really remember exactly how to do it, but it involves installing a plug-in and such. It was pretty easy. Even I managed it. Edit: It just occurred to me that since you are using this for Heisig and not sentences, you might not want the usual Japanese layout of Expression, Meaning, Reading. Try the ANKI FAQ which explains how to add a hint that you can selectively show. That would probably be best for your situation. That way you could have the keyword on the front and if you can't figure out the kanji, you could click the hint button and see the story. Then you flip the card and the kanji is on the back. I've never tried the hint button myself, so I can't guarantee how it works, but it sounds like it might be useful. Edited by Brun Ugle on 03 January 2012 at 8:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4986 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 200 of 1702 13 January 2012 at 5:21am | IP Logged |
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Well I was locked out of the site for over a week. I changed my email and the confirmation email they send out doesn't work anymore due to spamming. It's hard to find a way to get in touch with an admin when you're locked out. Don't change your email address on a whim!
Anyway. I'm at about 1500ish cards in my heisig deck right now. Although I'd like to finish it up I've been working pretty much only on due cards. I work it every day but I don't usually get the card correct on the 1st try. It's a little odd since when I'm going to sleep my mind wanders to that kanji deck and it replays lots of cards even ones I don't get right on the 1st try when they come up. I'm expecting that'll change though and just need to be patient. I talked to the author of the app some more and he did take a closer look at my issue. I have a work around but also it seems he found the bug and by making my spaced repetition settings closer to the default I won't encounter the bug. When the new version comes out I won't have to worry at all. So that's good. I looked really really hard for another spaced repetition app that did 3 sides and I couldn't find one. Many other apps have this feature on their to do list but haven't done it yet. Anki doesn't; at least not the way this app does. I'm not sure what the people that have Anki and claim to have 3 sided card decks have but it's different. It sounds like they have link two double sided cards to each other so one will always folllow the other but it's still 2 sides, just one card is setup to follow the other. I couldn't figure out how to make an effective hint button although there's some instructions in the faq. It's weird. You have to cut and paste a huge block of code into your deck template which i did but didn't see any hint button. I gave it up. I think there's a plug in for anki that adds furigana to your kanji though which I'm pretty curious to try out (and plan to do tomorrow). I've been doing just Heisig the past few weeks now but with my Japanese course starting next Tuesday I've gotten back to studying vocab. I'll probably do some Rosetta Stone or something too. I started over on my Japanese Pod 101, 2000 essential vocab. I've got like 500 or 600 in my deck of the total 2000. Anyway I'm fascinated by the Kanji heh. So much so that it's a pretty big distraction from just studying the vocab. So much so that I've been doing the vocab deck with my eyes closed to adjust. I kind of like studying that way anyway. The app interface is so simple that you don't have to even look at the ipod to do it. Just swipe down for a wrong response, left for a correct, and up for a strong correct. Anyway, I'd really like the furigana so I could start learning the sounds of the kanji in addition to the meaning. My cards have the kana so I can sorta figure it out but the bigger words I'm never really sure what the pronunciation is for each Kanji character. I was reading the All Japanese, All The Time blog some. It kind of motivated me when I didn't have access to post in this forum. I read about how the author really believes in spaced repetition and that it's essential to use it every day to be effective. Apparently he knows 4k+ kanji (the entry was old so he may know more now I dunno). So I'm making every effort to get time in for my spaced repetition decks. Regarding the Heisig deck - I seem to be slowly reducing the amount of due cards each day. It starts at about 1200 and change and ends the day at about 1150ish. I guess I'll add more when my curiosity for more Kanji gets the better of me. With 1500 in my study deck already I either know, or "should" know almost every kanji i see in my vocab cards. It's really cool. I went ahead and downloaded Nakama 1 kindle version. It looks like a great version of the text book and has been ocr'd so I can cut and paste from it for making decks etc. I am suffering a bit of insomnia at the moment. I really hope it clears up since being tired stinks and it's hard to focus and study and learn. Ugh. Part of that is that I think about kanji in bed. I'm obsessed lol. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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