Comments on: Chinese Project Notes 11: Constant Improvement, SRS Image Hack /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/ You don't know a language, you live it. You don't learn a language, you get used to it. Sat, 04 Jul 2020 16:09:19 +0900 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1.13 By: Jon /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-48874 Sat, 17 Jul 2010 05:55:59 +0000 /?p=251#comment-48874 Currently I’m using this format:

Front:
Sentence (full Kanji, etc) as is – black no highlighting, etc.

Back:
1. Hiragana Translation with particles and points of interest highlighted.
# The hiragana is in red,
# Kanji in black enclosed in (parenthesis),
# particles in [brackets],
# points of interest are blue.

2. Translation in English, but in Japanese sentence order with particles.
# Regular text, no emphasis.

Example:

Front:
速達便なら明日の午前中に届きます。

Back:
そくたつびん(速達便) なら あした(明日) [の] ごぜんちゅう(午前中) [に] とど.きます(届きます)
fast delivery mail / if possible / tommorrow の morning に to arrive.

Notes:
# I found そくたつびん interesting so its in blue.
# The dot in とど.きます(届きます) marks the end of the Kanji and start of Hiragana.

Why do this?
Well, I’m using the CORE 6000 Anki deck and so I’m not sentence mining these sentences myself. The result if I just did it normally would be that I don’t get that massive learning increase that comes from inputting them in the format that I like myself (the difference is a 50% initial bounce in recall for me according to deck stats.)

Also, I’m weak with grammar and I’m still only 50% through RTK; hence, there is a LOT of Kanji and grammar I don’t know. This allows me to start on those vicious little compounds now. I also get the chance to look up the words/particles/etc. and see examples of them in use (which I may or may not add to another grammar deck later.)

Oh and it’s also sort of fun to do it my way 🙂

Note: Time per card is about 2.4 minutes once you get the process down and as there is vastly less repitition involved when seeing the item the first time the time is made up elsewhere.

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My dictionary: Japanese for IPhone. Cheap and accesses EDICT/JPTL/shows stats, etc. EDICT is alright (hardly the perfect dictionary), and I’ve found this app useful. Oh and has Furagana. Bye bye all!

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By: iKnow – La risorsa "quasi" definitiva « languageez /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-24745 Sun, 13 Sep 2009 07:10:53 +0000 /?p=251#comment-24745 […] madre lingua giapponese ed una immagine a tema. Insomma, è la risorsa perfetta per il nuovo metodo di revisione suggerito da Khatzumoto. Come se non bastasse, un volenteroso patecipante al forum di […]

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By: Tsuioku /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-17488 Sat, 28 Mar 2009 11:30:38 +0000 /?p=251#comment-17488 Two other things I thought of that differ between our methods:

Once I’ve written and corrected my sentence, I read it back to myself. I guess this is my way of checking whether I have the correct reading for all the words etc ( I don’t enter this separately like you do), but also it’s meant to improve my reading: even if I can associate sounds with kanji, it feels as if associating kanji with pronounciation and meaning is a game of its own so I practice it as well.
Lately I’ve been testing a fun little game where, after I’ve read the sentence out loud, I play the audio again and try to talk along (or sing along! :D) with it. THAT’S SO HARD! 😀 the speed is usually quite high and I think I haven’t yet learned when I should pause for breath in Japanese, because usually I’m out of breath after a sentence. ^^ I’m not sure it’s a good idea to do this though, because like they said on antimoon, you don’t want to learn bad pronounciation habits. Well perhaps as long as I do it with the sample audio I’m okay.

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By: Tsuioku /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-17487 Sat, 28 Mar 2009 11:20:33 +0000 /?p=251#comment-17487 Hi all,

Khatz, referring to the length of the audio/text, you said:
” you generally want to keep things shortish, even as you get better”

What makes you say that? I’m trying to lengthen the audio fragments I use, going from 2-4 seconds to, at the moment, 8-10 seconds and perhaps beyond (into Outer Space! oh wait). I’m using fnn-news as my main sentences source, so because of that I’m getting used to all the “newsy” words and this makes the effective length of sentences shorter: if I already know 4 seconds’ worth of an 8 second audio…yeah. 🙂 But also I figure it’s useful to train your “audio memory”, or perhaps “audio processing capacity”. Some sentences actually are 10 seconds long, why not force yourself to get used to that sentence length? Of course this only works if you restrict yourself in the number of times you repeat the audio, else you can still chop the long sentence up into small pieces. I haven’t been doing sentences for very long, but I can imagine putting a cap of 1-3 repeats on mature (interval >= 21 days) sentences.

For the rest I think this approach is great, pictures are fun, audio is challenging, and not using any native language text is very good too.
I usually embed proper nouns into normal sentences anyway, I think it’s more fun that way, doing them in separate reps is too dry repetition for me.
Also, I don’t learn the writing of all proper nouns, when there is a news item about a murder in some little village, I usually write the name in hiragana but I put the kanji next to it in brackets, because I don’t require myself to memorize the name but seeing it like that still helps me learn 🙂

Alright, hope you can reply to my post, especially the first point, actually I welcome replies from anyone 🙂
Thanks for the website, helped me a lot!

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By: reineke /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-15011 Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:22:52 +0000 /?p=251#comment-15011 Hey Khatzumoto

I feel honored. Sorry, I missed your answer.

Khatzumoto said
May 29,2008 @4.56 pm

Short answer: wait till next year to find out

Long answer: There is no “proven old method” per se…

Short answer: I am still waiting.

Long answer: Your previous series of “iterations” has proven successful. Finding better solutions or attempting to find better solutions requires a lot of time. If you come up with something that works well for you, it makes sense to stick with it.

Sir Richard Burton:

“My system of learning a language in two months was purely my own invention, and thoroughly suited myself.”

Now, let’s leave aside the fact that we’d dearly like to master such a “system”. We can also extrapolate three things:

1 Experimenting is good – within reason. We cannot achieve no. 2 without experimenting
2 there is such a thing as a “proven old method” that can be applied to a wide number of languages. Sorry, I’ll side with Mr. Burton on this one. You’re not “established” enough. However for optimum efficiency no. 3 must apply as well.
3 we need to find something that thoroughly suits us

If all of the above has been satisfied, you are mucking around or experimenting for the sake of experimenting. You’re wasting time.

If you disagree with no.2 you’ll spend a lot of time experimenting and trying to find the best approach for each language. This is inefficient.

Now, you can also say that you agree with no. 2 but that you have not yet come up with a satisfactory approach and that you should be allowed to continue experimenting. Khatzumoto is therefore not perfect (gasp!) and needs more time for his kung-fu. I’m ok with this – within reason. You are doing language-related things so I “suppose” it’s ok to experiment a little longer. I would not worry too much about challenging myself though especially when juggling several things at the same time. But that’s just me 🙂

“You know me, reineke, it’s Khatzumoto! Ah paid ja befo’! Sign the treaty!”

Uh, I need a little help understanding this one. Peace treaty? 🙂

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By: OrangeNut /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-14831 Sat, 03 Jan 2009 06:21:39 +0000 /?p=251#comment-14831 This is really cool, and I’d love to try it out. You are using a TTS to get the audio, right? Can you tell me which TTS you are using? Thanks. 🙂

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By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com » Japanese Websites: Street Signs /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9551 Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:01:19 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9551 […] so, like, yeah. I’ve been doing lots of stuff with images lately. And then I figured, hey — you might want to do that, too. So here are some links to […]

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By: khatzumoto /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9210 Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:52:29 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9210 @Jerry
>I immediately recall the entire meaning and can pronounce it without error
This is a GOOD thing!! LoL…It’s just like I’ve started to “read” Japanese simply by seeing it, without any effort to actually process it…just like my English.

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By: khatzumoto /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9209 Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:51:07 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9209 @saleem
Nice idea on the context…I used to do that, but stopped.
Now that I’m focussing on making and keeping my SRS items much shorter, I’ve started again. Thanks for the tip 🙂

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By: khatzumoto /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9207 Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:48:23 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9207 @Nuke-Marine
>Don’t sweat that you’re going to memorize sentences in your deck. Keep adding items. Liken it to the fact that you’ll memorize lines to some dialogue from a 13 episode series you liked. You’ll still want to watch more series and rewatch your series that you liked.

@Daniel
>In the end, aren’t all we doing is trying to memorize all the little phrases to be able to pull out of our butt-crack and throw them back into a real conversation? For me, if I could memorize all my SRS items, I would be super happy because next time I see a fairly similar sentence in real life, I wouldn’t have to figure it out, I would just have to remember what it means (which seems easier and faster to me).

Good points. Great examples.

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By: khatzumoto /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9205 Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:41:20 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9205 @quend
That Latin thing is ROCKING MY SOCKS…thanks for the link!

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By: Flashcards, Flickr, and Italian | Mukokuseki /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9158 Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:01:46 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9158 […] learn at least a little Italian, so I have been, working their lessons into my study. After reading this post on All Japanese All the Time and doing some research into how Rosetta Stone works (and has become […]

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By: Jon /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9079 Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:02:28 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9079 This seems like a good idea; in fact I’ve used this method to learn words before that don’t have an English translation, Japanese words like 振袖、 襖 etc. but didn’t think to use it more generally – I’m gonna try this from now on for words I think I might have difficulty with.

Also, Max – that podcast looks really useful, thanks for sharing – makes me wonder how many more podcasts like this there must be?!

Talking about images, I like this site because of the (admittedly simple!) pictures that go with everything being described – www.avis.ne.jp/~casy/tenku/seikatsu.htm – plus, it’s stupid and so appeals to me a lot…

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By: Tony /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9078 Wed, 04 Jun 2008 04:43:49 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9078 Google images may work really well with this idea.  Yesterday I found a news article on fnn-news.com that said ”一見すると、ブタの赤ちゃんのようにも見えますが、よく見てみると、ウリ坊独特のしま模様が入っているのがわかります”  I didn’t know what ウリ坊 was though, but if you put it in google image search, (at least with japanese preferences) it’ll show up 😀

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By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com » Just Because It’s Not Painful, That Doesn’t Mean You’re Not Learning /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9077 Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:01:19 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9077 […] seems to me that a lot of people may be concerned that adding pictures to SRS sentence items (just as they were concerned with adding stories to SRS kanji items) would make things too […]

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By: Max /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9076 Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:56:08 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9076 I don’t know if this has been posted or not, but I thought this was a pretty useful site: www.njuku.com/

It’s similar to the site Jon posted (www.voiceblog.jp/japaneselistening/) in that it’s a podcast with an exact transcript provided. Unfortunately, it’s also not being updated anymore. All the same, looks like there are some good sentences for the mining.

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By: Jerry /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9072 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:17:16 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9072 I have experienced the memorization problem mentioned in these recent posts. When a sentence pops up, I immediately recall the entire meaning and can pronounce it without error. I haven’t worried about this, figuring it’s just the outcome of reviewing some of these sentences many times over the last year.

My concern comes in when I encounter the kanji in readings outside of my SRS and I forget how to pronounce the kanji or its meaning. So have I learned this sentence or not? This seems to happen with those “middle aged” cards more than anything else. Maybe there’s a maturing process as well? I also have to encounter the vocab in real-life before I own it totally.

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By: saleem /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9066 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:38:32 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9066 Apologies if somebody’s already mentioned this, but sometimes with short phrases it helps me to include a small note as to the context in which I learned the sentence.

For example, the following just came up in my SRS, might not make sense to anyone but me, but just an example of the notes I sometimes give myself:

—–
Q:
ただ埋めあわせだよ。

A:
うめ‐あわせ【埋め合せ・埋め合わせ】
[名]スル埋め合わせること。おぎない。「約束を破った―をする」

(robot talking about the trip he’s giving his wife in Pluto)

1. うめ‐あわ・せる【埋め合せる・埋め合わせる】別ウィンドウで表示
[動サ下一]うめあは・す[サ下二]損失や不足を他のもので償う。補う。うめあわす。「赤字を借入金で―・せる」「忘れた結婚記念日を―・せる算段をする」
—-
I feel like it helps me retain a sense of the usage. BUT I make no claims to be a tested expert here, just throwing that out there.

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By: Agro Rachmatullah /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9065 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:30:08 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9065 Interesting use of images! I myself use images for my Mnemosyne entries on plant taxonomy but none specifically for my Japanese studies. (although you can refute that, because most of the plants come from reading Japanese texts)

For my Japanese word entries, currently context-bound words are sufficient for me. I also haven’t tried playing around with audio btw.

It’s always nice to see the nitty gritty on how people use their SRS.

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By: Daniel /chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack/#comment-9063 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 04:18:20 +0000 /?p=251#comment-9063 In the end, aren’t all we doing is trying to memorize all the little phrases to be able to pull out of our butt-crack and throw them back into a real conversation? For me, if I could memorize all my SRS items, I would be super happy because next time I see a fairly similar sentence in real life, I wouldn’t have to figure it out, I would just have to remember what it means (which seems easier and faster to me).

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