I see, I’ll just have to go for it anyway… :S

Unless you find economics or medicine interesting, there’s no “need” for that vocabulary. I know plenty of perfectly fluent English speakers who have trouble with political or economic terms. (Much less medical/scientific terms.)

Do everything you want to be able to do in Japanese. SRS what you need to do those things. If you need to know, say, 経済(economics), you’ll find it in a good context. If you don’t run into it, guess you didn’t need it.

There’s no magical cut-off point to learning a language. You’ll be learning new words until you stop having Japanese input or stop breathing. So don’t worry so much about what you haven’t learned.

Although I did learn a lot about how the language worked from these sentences, I just found myself beating my head againts a brick wall and I’d slow down. So I would avoid doing reps and just watch anime or movies intead.

The Kanji was stopped completely a week before that. I just hated reading through the damn story again. And your article about the new way to do it has now given me the motivation to just restart. Restart the whole kanji learning process. I had gotten through RTK 1 and got my feet wet with RTK 3.

I found myself only wanting to do sentences. The Kanji became a real pain. I think because the stories are in English so it’s like, HEY! I NEED JAPANESE PLEASE! I can’t waste my time on English.

But Everything has been coming a long. I’m comprehending more and more in movies and anime and when my friends speak to me.

Today, I chatted with my freind in Japanese only! I was going to go back to english to explain a few more things, but I just decided not to! Yeah!

That’s just me though, I think there are other people who suspend around here, maybe they can comment.

What about suspending cards. Say you have a bunch of cards that are just as u mentioned “shoulders” like sentences you should know vs ones u want to know. instead of deleting, how about suspending for indefinite amounts of time. if later an occassion presents itself where u need to know the word, u can look it up in your anki as if it were a personal dictionary.

ideas/comments?

帰りましょう　今が　チャンス!

Really obvious meaning (totally relevant to this discussion, weird), I learned it a looong time ago, yet it’s fun enough to not delete. If I get it right, I don’t see it for 1.2 years. I’ll mark it as right then.

一方, On the other hand, the next card to come up was… no, okay 30 cards later this came up:

ゲラゲラ

Actually, I got it right, and I wouldn’t have to see it again for 2 months. But, it’s a stupid onomatopoeia which I’ve never seen more than once and it pretty useless, so it get’s deleted.

And just for kicks, I deleted 祖母, because I always want to read it as そば because of 曾祖母 (with ひばば and ひいばば　and ひおおば). I don’t care how important it is, I fark it up every time and it it’s flat out not important to クヨクヨ over.

In fact, I just started deleting everything that ain’t a sentence, so these also went (even if I got them right and knew the meaning):

粉雪、鱈場蟹、睨み (already have this in a great sentence)、達人、画工, 事情, 幼少​, 熱海 (静岡県), 幼時, 幼齢 (lot’s of 幼’s), 留守 (yeah, i know how important it is), 緒戦, 特徴、微か、農村, 会員​, 修道, 災害, 学者, 表札, 軍拡, 導入, 残念乍ら, 悟了, 倍増, 骨頂, 操作, 不慮​, 行動, 戸棚, 泰平無事, 浦人, 傷病, 発意, 等々々… (extra points if you know why I had all of these random words).

And stupid sentences: 改めて会合を開きます, and 真央ちゃんはぶさ可愛いと思うよ (I may regret deleting this when the olympics are on TV, but whatever)

Oh, and 可変式風向 was far too random, so I added some lame context like: 僕の　暖房は　… が有りますよ.

I find that at first, it takes just as much time to delete entries as it does to review a sentence; but as with anything else, the more you do it, the better and faster you get at it. In that case, Khatz gave great advice with 1) Delete 2) Review 3) Add sentences, in that order of importance.

Your final (if ever) 10,000 sentences is yours to choose, it’s your canvas, your masterpiece or whatever, so you really only want the best, most interesting, relevant stuff in it that you enjoy.

@Grilled Pineapple
That happens to me alot, but it seems to be happening more and more as i expose myself to Japanese and trying to understand it more in depth. After a while it will all come to you.

Have you ever had a moment where you read a sentence and even though it had a word you didn’t “know” you were able to figure out what it meant? Or maybe you looked up a single word in a sentence and what was a meaningless jumble of words suddenly became crystal clear? And with those moments came that “whoa” feeling? Maybe try adding only those sentences. The ones that aren’t so difficult that they require a page of definitions, not so easy that they bore you, but just right, and most importantly have some sort of impact on you personally (whether it be excitement, interest, etc.).

Also remember that immersion is 90% of AJATT. The SRS is just there to help you remember _what_you_already_know_.

I think there are a specific set of words that are really often used in the dictionary, I found myself seeing them again and again, they’re mostly sort of academic abstract ideas, for example: 範囲 (boundary) or 対象 (subject). I found that after I got over this set I had a lot easier time understanding the dictionary. Also, It’s okay to use English! Immersion isn’t a strict law. I use English definitions from time to time, or I click back and forth between English and then look at the Japanese definition again. This will kind of give you a direction for the kanji that you might understand even if you don’t get the words. When I find myself clicking through opening tons of tabs in the dictionary, I try to just click until theres one I can understand and throw that in the SRS, saving the other words for later.

Lastly, language for cards can come from anywhere online. I’ve found that the funnest way to find example sentences is google images. You can look at pretty pictures, (but seriously on’t google images 異物 unless you want to see open surgery on tumors) which is funner than the dictionary definitions, and you have a little caption of text to let you browse through several examples quickly.

I hope this is helpful for anyone, but writing about it makes me realize that I don’t have all the answers. I’d like to hear other peoples Ideas about Drewskies dictionary problem too.

I’m more concerned with the fact that most of my J-J sentences are coming out of a dictionary. My favorite question when I’m AJATTing is “Would I be doing this if I were using English right now? Would I like it? Would this be ‘spare time’ or work?” Reading a dictionary strikes an extremely negative chord with me. So you may say, “Hey, you don’t like the dictionary, you like fun sentences, get fun sentences!”

The issue is that I constantly feel vocabulary starved. “Fun” sentences, for me, are sentences that are grammatically interesting, use a word I don’t have a feel for but have a definition in my deck for, or have a word I don’t understand in a context I do understand. With a very limited vocabulary, satisfying “in a context I understand” is really difficult, so the incentive to milk the dictionary for more words is difficult to resist. I’m just worried I’m driving myself into a wall here, and I just can’t tell yet.

So I guess what I’m asking for is if anyone has had similar experiences. If you’ve taken a lot of definitions from dictionaries in the past, did you get tired of them? Did you use them as a stepping stone, then clear them out later? Are they still hanging around? Should I even bother being concerned?

And thank you, Triplej. Nice to get such a well-sourced response. 🙂 I actually needed that ‘there is no grammar’ article re-read, even if it’s not related to this post.

1. Get the Kanji Stroke Order Font, very cool: sites.google.com/site/nihilistorguk/

2. Skip around. (Heisig isn’t going to come to your house and beat you up if you go out of order, is he?) Knowing simple kanji is easier to start with, but knowing useful kanji is a lot more fun.

Go to the Asian market and buy some rice crackers, and then learn all the kanji on the front of the package. It’s easy to learn (there’s probably only a couple kanji you won’t know), and next time you go you will be able to read an entire package, on the shelf. I find it’s always way more fun to be able to apply what I’ve learned, and it’s also easier to remember if I can associate it with something in the real world. I also know all the signs on the Chinese restaurants on my bus route. 🙂

walkthrough to FF8 in full japanese! it has other games as well.

Don’t forget that to really understand, to really have a feel for a word, it has to be seen thousands of times in hundreds of contexts. Losing that one card with that one context isn’t going to hurt much. =)

Also don’t forget that a good immersion environment acts like free SRS reviews. All of the words, phrases, sentences being spoken, sung, shouted through your headphones are constantly causing your brain to subconsciously review those words, without any effort at all. It’s almost cheating.