Apr
21
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So LTLR cards were incredibly effective. I learned a lot of vocabulary from them, and even more importantly got a feel for lots of grammar patterns almost effortlessly. But, unfortunately, they were quite difficult to make. Even when I was taking the stories from Ilya Frank’s site, simply editing a card to make it work took 5 to 10 minutes to create. They were a joy to review, but such a pain to add that I soon found myself not adding them.
A period of time followed where instead of doing any SRS work, I just did lots of “comprehensible input.” This was fun, and went a long way towards consolidating the knowledge I already had, and my comprehension improved tons. Gains, however, beyond bringing latent knowledge forward, were too slow.Thus entered the Reading Deck, followed by the Overlapping Cloze Deletion deck about a month later.
Normally, this is the part where I try to explain the theory behind WHY I think a new method will work, but I’m gonna do this differently this time and just explain WHAT and HOW. Basically, for the Reading Deck, I’m taking Incremental Reading and adapting it to language learning, creating highly narrow, intensive reading practice that then becomes super-easy to memorize. Most of the theory behind this is similar to that behind LTLR, so if you need convincing, see that post. I’ll probably be unable to resist explaining a little bit of the “why” as I go, but hopefully you’ll just give this a try.
So, you’re gonna need a good mono-dic, preferably one that lets you save entries. I strongly reccomend GoldenDict (with these dictionaries if you’re learning Japanese [ the dictionary file is password protected. The password is n1h0ng0 . My apologies to everyone who tried to access this file and was unable too. Thanks for the heads up Kyle and ブライアン ]). Be sure you turn on Wikipedia and Wiktionary for your language, as well as Forvo.
The great thing about GoldenDict is that you can highlight words, hit ctrl+c+c and a floating window will pop-up with all your definitions in it. This is great for reading the web, e-books, etc. Unfortunately, unlike it’s prime competitor StarDict (which would be awesome if it wasn’t so buggy and problematic), there is no way to save entries from the floating window. But, there is an option to save on the main interface. Set up a folder and in the preferences, tell GoldenDict where you want it to save your entries. It will save each one as an individual html file, with all the entries for the word being looked up.
So, as you go about your immersion, when you look up a word that is interesting to you, pull up the main interface if you’ve been using the floating window, and go ahead and save the entry. So far, so good. This should take almost no extra time to do. Remember, we aren’t fooling with this for every single word you look up on a given day, just the interesting ones.
Now, I do this towards the end of the day, but you can do it any time that works best for you, open up the folder and pick 5 (or whatever number of cards you want to add per day) and then open your SRS. Now just copy and paste those definitions in as new cards.
So, it should look like this.
Front:
掴む
つかむ
[他五]
１．手でしっかりととらえて握り持つ。
２．手に入れて自分のものとする。
３．人の気持ちなどをしっかりと手中にして逃がさない。つかまえる。とらえる。
４．物事の要点などをしっかりと心にとらえる。把握する。
The back of the card may have nothing on it. Or, if you’ve installed Japanese support, it may include the readings, looking like this:
掴[つか]む
つかむ
[ 他[た]五]
１． 手[て]でしっかりととらえて 握[にぎ]り 持[も]つ。
２． 手[て]に 入[い]れて 自分[じぶん]のものとする。
３． 人[にん]の 気持[きも]ちなどをしっかりと 手中[しゅちゅう]にして 逃[に]がさない。つかまえる。とらえる
４． 物事[ものごと]の 要点[ようてん]などをしっかりと 心[こころ]にとらえる。 把握[はあく]はあくする。
This is totally unneccesary, though, as I rarely even look at the back of the cards. My set-up just creates those by default. You could also include any notes to yourself on the back if you wanted. Sometimes I do that. Also, sometimes on the front I might include either images of the word being defined, particularly if the definition is difficult and it happens to be a noun (easy to get good images for). I also will quite often grab the mp3 file from Forvo if available and include that, since it comes up in the definition anyways.
Now, not all of my cards are definitions. I also occasionally use short news articles from http://news.kids.yahoo.co.jp/ , short children’s fables (1 or 2 paragraphs) from places like http://hukumusume.com/douwa/betu/kobanashi/03/09.htm . But more and more I find the cards I enjoy most are the monolingual definitions. There’s something so powerful about learning words this way, for me at least. But, this method will work with any short piece of reading material in your target language. Here’s a card taken from the previously mentioned Yahoo kids’ news site/
Front:
アフリカのルワンダ共和国にある国立公園で、マウンテンゴリラが双子(ふたご)の赤ちゃんを産んだそうだよ。
ゴリラは、住む位置などによって、大きく3種類に分類されて、いずれも絶滅が心配されているんだ。このマウンテンゴリラという種類は、映画「キングコング」のモデルにもなっているそうだよ。
I even have a few cards that came from segments of the Heart Sutra. Use whatever works for you.
Now, to review the cards, just read them like you were reading anything. As you go, look up the words you don’t know (again, GoldenDict is really helpful for this because of the nearly mouse-over ability to highlight a word, press ctrl+c+c and get an instant definition). I use J-E look-ups for this part, just like I do when I read, but you could use J-J too. If you are reading and a card is too difficult, frustrating, or boring, STOP. Pass the card with a “Very Easy” and move on to the next one. The idea behind incremental reading is that you push difficult material out into the future, to be attempted again when your knowledge and skill have increased. Here comes the cool part. As you were attempting to read it, any words in the definition that were interesting should have been saved, to become eventual fodder for cards of their own, thus making it a little easier to read the original card next time it comes up.
After reading the card, I grade them like this: Most cards get marked “Easy.” Difficult, frustrating or boring cards= “Very Easy.” Cards that feel very familiar, like they are right on the cusp of being memorized get marked “Hard,” or more rarely “Fail.” This is nearly opposite of how the SRS is normally used, and it will feel counter-intuitive at first. But remember, you aren’t memorizing at this stage, you are familiarizing yourself.
At this point, some of you are saying, ok, here goes Lazy Kendo again, making this too easy on himself. There isn’t any test to these cards. How can you be learning anything? Well, do you learn when you read? I know I do. Learning doesn’t have to be painful.
However, I did find that many words were getting very familiar, close to being memorized, but then getting spaced far into the future to be mostly forgotten before I would see them again. This was frustrating for its own reasons. Mostly because I’m such a greedy learner, and I wanted all those words firmly memorized. One solution was to fail any card that threatened to get spaced too far out before it was memorized. But this created way too many reviews and I had to stop adding cards for a week to get them back under control. So, that’s when the second deck was born.
Overlapping Cloze Deletion is an old technique for memorizing data, so I can’t take any credit for it. Khatzumoto-senpai has written a great deal about it over on AJATT+Plus, in a system he’s created called MCD’s (Massive Context Cloze Deletion Cards). If you want the details, I strongly reccomend you check it out, as he’s really written in great depth about it. Most of what I know about it comes from reading those articles. AJATT+ Plus has a lot of great information, as does his other website, alljapaneseallthetime.com .
Each day, after adding cards to my Reading Deck, I go into the list of Reading Deck cards, sort them by “Date Added,” go to the oldest cards, and pick one that I feel really comfortable with. Not cards I already know everything from, and not cards that are still difficult, but cards that seem like with just a bit more exposure I could quickly learn a lot from. I copy the contents of that card (remember, these cards only have a Front, no Back) and open up my Overlapping Cloze Deletion deck. I paste the content into a new card, then go back and highlight something at the beginning of the card. Usually a single kanji or kana. Then I hit the cloze deletion button and it creates the card for me. Now you should have a card that looks like this.
Front:
手懸かり
て[...]り
[名]
1. よじ登るときなどに、手をかけて支える所。
2. 調査や捜査を進めるときの、きっかけとなるもの。いとぐち。
Back:
手懸かり
てがかり
[名]
1. よじ登るときなどに、手をかけて支える所。
2. 調査や捜査を進めるときの、きっかけとなるもの。いとぐち。
Notice that the part which was clozed out (indicated by the [...]) is bold and blue in the answer. Now we add that card and then past the same information again, this time clozing out the next interesting bit of information. Again.
Front:
手懸かり
てがかり
[名]
1. [...]じ登るときなどに、手をかけて支える所。
2. 調査や捜査を進めるときの、きっかけとなるもの。いとぐち。
Back:
手懸かり
てがかり
[名]
1. よじ登るときなどに、手をかけて支える所。
2. 調査や捜査を進めるときの、きっかけとなるもの。いとぐち。
You may also notice that I skipped over some stuff. We don’t need (or want) to make a card with every single word or particle. We just want several of them. I aim for between 7-15 cards per original Reading card, depending on its length. 15 cards to memorize 1 card may seem like a lot, but the truth is that doing a lot of overlapping cards makes it much easier than just doing a few. In fact, the reason we don’t do every single word isn’t that it would be hard. In fact, it would make it TOO easy and repetitive and become boring. The magic number seems to be 7-15. Everything else will be memorized incidentally.
Now, you review these similarly to the Reading deck with a twist. As you read them, feel free to look up any word which isn’t being tested for (that means, if you cloze out the pronunciation of the word being defined, you can’t look up the kanji either, that would just give you the answer) but when it you get to the part which is clozed out, recall it from memory. If you get it right, pass the card accordingly, even if you forgot everything else on the card. If you miss it, look over the answer, fail the card, and get it right next time.
I usually only pick 1 or 2 of the Reading Deck cards per day to become Cloze Deletion sets. That’s because I still want to spend the majority of my time in immersion, not sitting in front of Anki. More new cards per day wouldn’t be so hard, but remember it is ALWAYS the reviews which bite you in the ass. Those with a higher tolerance level for SRS might do more. Just keep in mind a deck you quit reviewing because the reviews get out of hand is a deck which is doing you no good at all.
And that’s it. It’s a very powerful, extremely low-stress way to learn lots of Japanese (or any other language, for that matter). It may seem a bit complicated, dividing things into two steps like this, but that’s what makes it so painless. By the time a definition (or whatever) makes it to the cloze deletion deck, you’ve seen it so many times it is already very familiar. This goes back to the “old adage”: Learn before you memorize.
Please add any ideas you have, and feel free to ask any questions, in the comments.
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