- Sun Tsu and Language Learning
- Famous Japanese People
- Timeboxing is Scary
- A Goldmine of Japanese Dubbed Shows
- Learning Japanese = Playing a Video Game, Part 1
- Learning Japanese = Playing a Video Game, Part 2
- Are you learning Japanese the wrong way?
- Deletions
- Improving Your Life Through Japanese
- What is it about these MCDs? Part 2: The Awesomeness
- What is it about these MCDs? Part 3: The Format
- What is it about these MCDs? Part 4: The Active Output
- What is it about these MCDs? Part 5: The Variety
- What is it about these MCDs? BONUS: The Easy Button
- 10,000 Sentences Is Dead
- 10,000 Sentences is Dead. Let the MCD Revolution Begin!
- What is it about these MCDs? Part 2: The Awesomeness
- What is it about these MCDs? Part 3: The Format
- What is it about these MCDs? Part 4: The Active Output
- What is it about these MCDs? BONUS: The Easy Button
- 12 Free MCD Examples
- A New MCD Card Format for Japanese (Even Lazier and More Effective Than Before)
Ever notice how we like to do things that are easy, and we don’t like to do things that are hard?
For example, maybe you aren’t really into this episode of “Is the Food Delicious or Not?” but the remote is out of arm’s reach, and you’re pretty comfortably settled onto the couch, and you have an adorable cat lying on top of you. Guess what you’ll end up watching.
Well, there’s good news for us lazy slobs. MCDs are insanely easy to make.
Surusu can create up to 512 MCDs in a single click.
Not a Surusu user? AJATT+ member tokyostyle created a plugin for Anki that automatically generates MCDs. As if this didn’t get him enough awesome points, he constantly checks feedback and suggestions from the users who post their comments in the thread and updates/tweaks the plugin accordingly.
Copy/pasted for non-AJATT+ members:
Main Project: code.google.com/p/mcdsupport/
Development: github.com/tarix/mcdsupport
Installation
1. Click File -> Download -> Shared Plugin …
2. Search for “MCD Support for Anki”
3. Select “MCD Support for Anki v1.2”
4. Click OK
5. Restart Anki
Deck Preparation
1. Open your Sentences or MCD deck.
2. Click Settings -> Deck Properties …
3. Click the “Add” button
4. Select “Add: Japanese MCD” and click OK
5. Close the Deck Properties window
Adding MCD Cards
1. Open your Sentences / MCD deck
2. Click Tools -> Add MCD Cards OR Press F9
3. Paste the passage you want to learn into the “Text” box
4. Add any notes you want on the back of the card to the “Notes” box
5. Add the words, kanji, kana, etc. you want clozed in the Clozes box
6. Make sure all of your clozes have spaces between them!
7. Add any tags you want these cards to have
8. Click the Add button
* If all goes well you will soon see a small status line telling you how many cards were just added.
Try it out and leave some feedback for tokyostyle on the forum.
So now you have no excuse to not try MCDs. Make some and post your thoughts/insights/revelations in the comments!
So MCD’s are basically the Mcdonalds of SRSing. Quick, cheap, addicting, and makes you fat (with Japanese knowledge) in no time =P
This is great! I was just thinking how awesome it would be if Anki had easy MCD creation like Surusu! I was just too lazy to learn how to use Surusu after getting used to Anki, so this will help a lot.
That is, it will help a lot once I finish RTK (won’t be too much longer).
tokyostyle should upload his Anki plugin to mediafire and post it in the comments.
It’s already publicly available through anki itself and has been for awhile now.
Or if you want to manually download it, go to his github link in the article above and click download zip.
Cheers boss.
Can someone explain what exactly MCD’s are ? i still don’t get it after reading everything.
A block of native text on an SRS card with a small piece blocked (clozed) out. Fill in the blank, get a cookie and pass the card. Everything outside the blank is only relevant as context to help you find what fits there.
I use anki 2 to create multiple cloze deletions. It works like a charm.
The plugin is available for Anki 2 and makes MCDs even faster and easier to create.
Furthermore the plugin will have Mecab support, thanks to a generous GitHub contributor, which will allow you to create insane amounts of MCDs from a single cut and paste.
Can you please explain how to create MCDs in Surusu? I signed up specifically for this feature and spent 30 minutes trying to do it without any success. A quick example would be much appreciated.
Super easy. Im doing Bilingual cards right now so lets do that.
Click the add button in Surusu.
On the Front of the card type in the Japanese sentence followed by the translation.
Front: これは猫だ
This is a Cat
On the back I usually put Kanji readings and any extra “relevent information”
Back 猫＝ねこ
Then you scroll down to the box that says “[Base] Clozetext(s)” and paste the Japanese sentence there and separate each word you want to make a card for with white space, like..
これ は 猫
Then click “Create Cloze Cards” and you’re done! It usually takes awhile for your new cards to show up though. Up to 10 hours once for me.
The result of the above would create 3 cards..
########は猫だ
This is a Cat
これ########猫だ
This is a Cat
これは#######だ
This is a Cat
That looked way better before I hit post..
The example i posted was a single sentence, but I like to put 4 or 5 similar sentences on the front of the card to get a bit more context on the bilingual cards.
I’m also making bilingual MCD cards right now. Instead of putting the English translation on the front, I’ll put it on the back. This kinda retains the feel of the traditional sentence cards, but with the MCD format (MCD/traditional hybrid?)
Here’s an example…
Front:
手＃＃＃＃＃＃＃出せなかったの？
Back:
紙
＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋
て・がみ
“You couldn’t send me a letter?”
＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋
手紙出せなかったの？
When I grade my reps I only take the cloze deletion portion into consideration. However, having the sentence by itself on the front forces me to read and find a translation.
Thank you for sharing the plugin with the regular AJATT blog viewers. Tried it and worked beautifully.
I’m probably being really frigign’ annoying by now, but honestly, I’ve been getting great answers to my questions here, so, one last off-topic question, guys?
Up until now I’ve been mostly using ready-made sentences to learn vocab (core2k), but recently I finally started reading stuff, blogs, manga, books (I really like the blogs). While reading stuff is fun, just thinking about stopping and adding stuff to Anki makes me go “ewww”. In addition to that, I find it much harder to remember words from sentences I got off the web, as opposed to Core, which is further discouraging.
What do you suppose might be the problem? |D
I kinda agree with you about adding stuff to Anki. There are a few times that I add things to Anki:
I add stuff I can copy/paste from blogs and other websites.
If I’m reading manga on the computer and find an interesting sentence. (I do this for motivation to keep reading too, because I rather dislike reading things on my computer for some reason.)
When I’m bored and I just really want to learn something I like better, I’ll go ahead and add that to Anki as well. I’ll usually try to find a transcript of it online first; amazingly, there usually is one. I’ve had to resort to typing some of it out before too though.
I try to make adding stuff really quick and simple and this plugin has helped with that. When I’m doing the reviews for the first time, I’ll go ahead and add the definitions to the cards that I need them on as I come across them because I wouldn’t have the self-discipline to do it all at once after adding the cards.
There is a little difference between reviewing the pre-made decks like core2k and cards that you make. You really just need to find a card format that works for you. I have cards in about 6 different formats in my deck and some of them are definitely better than others. I used to use the core decks but I eventually lost motivation to do them because I found the sentences all too uninteresting. If you don’t have that problem with them, they can be a really good starting point. However, you’ll eventually outgrow them, so it’d be nice to get in the habit of making your own cards before that time comes. The benefit to using the cards that I add are that I know exactly where they came from and it is even a little nostalgic in the sense that I can look back on what I was reading/watching/listening to at the time. And if something gets too uninteresting, I don’t really hesitate in deleting it anymore.
Ultimately everyone’s preferences are different and you just need to experiment a little and find something that works for you.
One thing I recommend is to do what I’ve been doing lately. Though this mainly works if you work on a computer all day like me.
I keep a text file and just keep adding things, at end of day I wrote a script that adds the files to Anki automatically. But you can easily just import them manually end of day, or week, what have you.
example of text file.
地図 (ちず);map
地獄 (じごく);hell
成功 (せいこう);success
成長 (せいちゅう);growth
市販 (しはん);commercially available
製品 (せいひん);goods
etc.
This helps a little with the issue of adding stuff to anki one at a time, you can do sentences, too.
頑張って！
Care to share your script? Or is it Top Secret?
To me, every little thing helps (as I’m quite lazy and tend to procrastinate a lot). I even made a slightly simpler (if you’re a windows user) batch file to open Anki for me every hour. (It’s only simpler because it doesn’t require any outside programs except a tool from Microsoft (free) to give a SLEEP command)
I might rewrite it in Python (’cause I know more of Python and it will work better for anyone).
There’s actually a very useful plugin uploaded to Anki that can add vocab cards from text files, called “Yomichan.” It’s nice due to the fact that you can add multiple different words from a single fragment of text (like the first segment of four-character compounds) and that you can pick up where you left off when reading a text file. I use it for adding vocab from visual novel logs I keep around, or from digitized books. You can even import the sentence the word was in, for extra context.
Hope this helps!
Thanks! I’m sure this will help a lot!
After using my batch file for a while, I’ve found it’s intrusive enough to annoy me, but I have yet to do any reps when it pops up. “Next time” I tell myself.
It does work though, so I’ll just have to be more disciplined. I’m not going to whip myself, but telling myself to do my reps before continuing what I was doing will be good enough (I only do thirty cards per session, so it’s not like it’s a lot).
Hm, that’s actually similar to what I was going to try. But unfortunately, it’ll have to wait, because my computer has broken down yet again, so I’ll just have to stick to reviewing stuff on my iPod.
But I do second the question: do you think you could share the script? I’m sure it’d be a lot of help to other lazy Anki users – or at least ones that don’t have enough knowledge to create such a script themselves xD
I wont try to guess what フレヂィー is doing, but take a look at ankisrs.net/docs/FileImport.html. Anki can import files in a simple format into decks, the question and answer just need to be separated by a tab, semicolon, or other special character. If it helps you can open a deck, choose “export” from the “file” menu and then choose “cards in tab-separated file” as the format. This will give you a file in the same format you’d use to import cards. If you’re uploading whole sentences you can then use the “Regenerate Readings” action (ankisrs.net/docs/JapaneseSupport.html) to generate the furigana, assuming you’re using the Japanese plugin.
Hi guys.
Has anyone heard/used Michel Thomas method? I’ve only started learning Japanese and I went for Michel’s course because I had used it before (to learn Spanish) and I must say it worked perfectly for me. After a month or so (to be honest I didn’t study that hard), i was able to hold a simple conversation with a native Spanish person. At the same time I discovered Anki and I’m using “Heidig’s Remembering the Kanji” deck.
Just wonder if there’s anyone out there who used Michel’s method to learn Japanese…
Rob
I used Michel Thomas along with sentence decks and a sprinkle of this and that I found it fun and a good way to pick up the grammar and get a feel for particle use. I would never rely on it as a primary base for learning your nihongo, tho!
Appreciate the add-on and the articles. I’ve since incorporated MCDs as a way to contextualize the individual kanji’s of compounds, while relying on sentences to contextualize the meaning of the compounds themselves. It has been too early to tell whether or not this is effective, but I certainly feel like it’s going somewhere
Thanks again dude, this site has been the primary catalyst for the path that I started down 6 months ago.
Can’t make Surusu work!! The Clozed stuff is too difficult and the interface too wacky for a non-computer nut like myself!! 😐
allow me to change my opinion on this.
i figured out how to set-up the phrases i want clozed… this is the real deal.
this is SRS evolved. this is the next step. you literally just continue reading or listening to what you want, as you input it. it is so much more exciting and satisfying than plowing through an SRS deck filled with 20 kanji in a single sentence.
congrats on this excellent new system, AJATT members!
So im working on my kanji but im interested in these MCD’s that are so easy but i have nooo idea what they are this series has confused me and im curious if someone can explain it to my like im five or something
I would just like to clarify i meant “so easy” and that i dont intend to start them until i finish RTK1+3
How do you do this:
Deck Preparation
1. Open your Sentences or MCD deck.
2. Click Settings -> Deck Properties …
3. Click the “Add” button
4. Select “Add: Japanese MCD” and click OK
5. Close the Deck Properties window
How do you do number 1? Everything I try does not allow for me to go to number 2. I cannot find any option in Anki, with mcdsupport installed, that matches number 2, and I have no idea what number 1 refers to.
I know. I’m totally clueless.
I found some installation instructions updated for anki 2.0
code.google.com/p/mcdsupport/wiki/Install
I’d like to know if there is a way to set a note for each clozed word, e.g.
“My cat has teared my new shirt.”
Cloze 1: “cat”
Note 1: (dictionary definition) a small domesticated feline mammal
Cloze 2: “teared”
Note 2: to cause (material, paper, etc) to come apart or (of material, etc) to come apart.
So, when I’m reading cloze 1 the card should show:
——-
“My #### has teared my new shirt.”
*a small domesticated feline mammal
——-
and cloze 2:
——-
“My cat has #### my new shirt.”
*to cause (material, paper, etc) to come apart or (of material, etc) to come apart.
——-
Can I do this? D:
I second the last question about separate notes. @cel pintat de vermell – if you have found a solution, let me know!
*torn