Comments on: What is it about these MCDs? Part 1: Introduction

By: Ashley

Ashley — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:02:38 +0000

I’ve always found it hard to remember what most podcasts teach because of the lack of review between lessons. But after learning about cloze deletions, I’ve been trying them out with some podcast dialogues.
It’s helpful for learning short phrases and sentences or grammar points. I especially like to use this method with question and answer sentences.

By: Method Change-Up: Sentences Are King | allnihongo.com

Method Change-Up: Sentences Are King | allnihongo.com — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:16:16 +0000

[…] something called MCDs (Massive-Context Cloze-Deletion Card), a concept first introduced to me by this post at AJATT. I decided to give it a go in tandem with my sentences to see how I liked it. In fact, it […]

By: Secret Recordings of Khatzumoto Speaking Japanese! | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:07:52 +0000

[…] Bonus: The MCD Quickstart Guide — to help you get the most of your sentence packs by turning them into MCDs, the most […]

By: The Plan In Timeline | Project Korean Fluency

The Plan In Timeline | Project Korean Fluency — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 02:42:26 +0000

[…] Complete Handbook Of Korean Vocabulary (Roots of Sino-Korean Origin). – Start 10000 sentences OR MCDs. Start relating Chinese characters to hangeul and reinforcing weak grammar points when learning […]

By: MCBs? | Jeff弁

MCBs? | Jeff弁 — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 16:12:22 +0000

[…] most of this year and I really love it at this point. It is a variation of Khatzumoto’s Massive Context Cloze-Deletion […]

By: Quora

Quora — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 15:42:40 +0000

What is an MCD?…

MCD is a term from Khatzumoto of AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com (AJATT). MCD stands for Massive-Context Cloze Deletion Cards. Unfortunately most of the discussion about MCD is within the paid AJATT+ forums. I don’t have a ton of experience with them, but I…

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:00:59 +0000

No problem. Just keep your head in the phase you're in. I highly recommend the Quick Reference Guide (QRG) and the MCD pack from Khatz. I have both and they helped clear a lot of things up. The benefits are worth several times their cost, and you can get a full refund if you don't like it. If you were to only get one, I recommend the QRG for giving an excellent macroview of AJATT.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:24:53 +0000

That makes a lot of sense. This in addition to professionally translated sentences seems like the way to go. Thanks for the advice!

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:22:33 +0000

Thanks for the clear response. This definitely makes me feel a lot better about what’s to come with sentences. I was starting to get nervous (making it harder to keep motivated) about how sentences would work, and this alleviates a lot of those concerns. I really think Khatz should add something about this in the FAQ section because there’s no way I’m the only one who missed that. Sorry about the double post by the way. I didn’t realize that there was a lag between when you post a comment and when it appears on the site.

By: Monochrome

Monochrome — Wed, 23 May 2012 01:40:22 +0000

Could parallel texts work?

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:24:03 +0000

Your post brings up an important point that may be easy to miss when reading AJATT. In the bilingual phase, the sentences should always be professionally translated. The most common, and easiest, source of these sentences is a bilingual dictionary. Khatz also has a bunch of sentence packs available for a reasonable price.
In the very beginning phases I used example sentences from Spanish-English dictionaries. For example:
Front: […] lo sé.
I already know.
Back: Ya lo sé.
I already know.

Front: Ya lo […].
I already know.
Back: Ya lo sé.
I already know.

Sometimes I would include an English definition of a word on the back of the card. Eventually I moved into partial bilignual cards. I drew sentences from Spanish-English dictionaries and from Spanish books, websites, etc.

Front: […] tela seda rojo.
Back: Una tela seda rojo
seda = silk

Now I am using full monolingual cards with a monolingual front of any length I want, and the back is the complete definition of the word from a Spanish monolingual dictionary.

By: ベン

ベン — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:30:50 +0000

I think this is where liberal deletion comes in. It’s not difficult to figure out which cards have clozed words which are very hard to guess at even as a beginner – you’ll hate them! Just delete the ones you don’t like and you’ll be left with all the easy – but still useful – stuff.

By: ベン

ベン — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:27:41 +0000

I can’t answer your question with experience as I went through the beginner – mid intermediate stages with mostly pre-made decks(regret that now), but it seems to me that you just need to make sure that the sentence is truly i+1. If a sentence feels really complex, there’s probably more than one thing in there you don’t have a grasp on. So, you ditch it and go for something closer to what you can confidently understand. You can come back to it later, if you like. If it was worth learning in the first place, you’re bound to run into whatever tripped you up again in the future anyway.

If you’re sure that it’s just one thing you’re having trouble with, I recommend searching for it in various dictionaries, both J-J and J-E, and reading a bunch of example sentences and some differently worded definitions until you really feel you’ve got it. It’s rare that this didn’t work for me, but if it didn’t I just gave up on the word entirely. I would invariably run in to it at some point later on and be like, “Wow, I remember stressing over that word/grammar/etc. What the hell was I even confused about? It’s so simple!”

Anyway, that’s my take on it. You’ll run into places where you feel like the gap between what you know and whatever you feel is the next ‘step’ is just too large to bridge with i+1, but keep at it and you’ll find the sentences.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:03:36 +0000

@Matt

I wouldn’t worry so much about finding translations of the sentences. Once you finish the kanji, you will be able to understand mostly what the sentence is talking about. This is where kanji is your friend, the more you know the better. Just keep going and your brain will start to make sense of it all.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 21 May 2012 07:44:16 +0000

MCD seems like an awesome technique which I intend to employ alongside sentences, but I feel like I’m the only guy here who doesn’t understand how to look up the meanings of all these authentic sentences you want to SRS. I’ve read through almost all of AJATT (currently on the kanji stage), but I couldn’t find any specifics about how to “translate” these sentences you mine. It seems easy enough for something like 今、何時ですか。where you can just look up each word individually and the meaning is pretty clear, but for something complicated, I don’t understand how to find the english meaning of your sentence. If anyone could explain this to me, I’d really appreciate it.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:56:35 +0000

This MCD thing seems awesome, but I feel like I’m the only guy here who doesn’t understand how you look up the meaning of these sentences in both the sentence method and MCD. I’ve read through almost all of AJATT (currently on Kanji stage), but I couldn’t find Khatz explain anywhere how you translate the target sentence into English for SRSing. It seems easy enough for a sentence like 今、何時ですか。where you can translate word by word and it makes sense, but for something more complicated, I don’t understand how you get the English meaning. Any help would be very appreciated.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:20:33 +0000

I think Cloze deletion is an excellent method for learning, BUT I see some difficulty in its implementation. If you are a novice (or even intermediate in your knowledge of the language) you will cloze delete a word that is very hard to guess at given the background of the sentence. To avoid this, you will spend an undue amount of time trying to figure out what word is easy to guess given the background of the sentence. For this reason, I think that I will continue the tried and true sentences method, but perhaps cloze delete particularly stubborn words.

By: rigabamboo

rigabamboo — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 01:15:36 +0000

Making a cloze deletion with just one hanzi would be my recommendation.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 05:18:25 +0000

For learning Chinese what is your preferred method? Many words are two Hanzi compounds-Does it make more sense to test the cloze on one missing Hanzi of the word that is made up of two Hanzi or the whole word (2+ etc.. Hanzi)?

By: 魔法少女☆かなたん

魔法少女☆かなたん — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 06:27:24 +0000

Actually, I’ve found that example sentences from bilingual sources tend to be…something to be avoided. Many times, the sentences are just not native quality, but it’s difficult to tell that early on. They’re still useful for getting an idea of what a certain word or expression means, but aren’t necessarily good for emulating.
So to all of the Japanese (and the rest of you!) learners obtaining sentences from Tanaka Corpus, Eijirou, tatoeba.org, et cetera, you might want to seek better (read: native) sources.