Might be a little bit of an odd question, but I'm wondering if you guys tend to just mine obscure or not-so-obvious katakana words or just almost anything?
As for me, I keep thinking twice over if it's just a waste of space adding these logical or very obvious loan katakana words.
For example リンク "Link". This word is pretty obvious and a straight-up loan word, but I sometimes think, if I don't add this, it will probably not really be in my immediate repertoire until I actively have to translate in my head link to リンク?
So, because of this I mostly just mine katakana words like マジ and such. What do you guys think, or is this just pointless to think about?
Personally, I add a lot of katakana words. It's probably more than I need to, in the strictest sense of "need", but it's done well to improve reading speed of fairly long ones. If the word is easy, Anki will figure that out pretty quickly and stop showing me that word often.
Either way, you don't need to overthink it. The SRS algorithm should sort things out pretty quickly.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. The SRS system is pretty nice. Thanks!
I'm new to the group... what app are you guys talking about, if you don't mind?
Anki, the most popular flashcard app here to review and study added (mined) words and/or flashcards from a premade deck, like Kaishi 1.5k.
Thank you kindly!
My one qualm with adding everything willy-nilly is that if you have a consistent number of words daily (say 15 words), adding obvious katakana words like トイレ will effectively lower your amount of useful words learned that day (Anki has the option to manually up that number to say 18 words that day if there's 3 "free" katakana words, but that's an extra hassle and it would be easier to just not add them in the first place)
Not saying you shouldn't add any, there's definitely some that are absolute headscratchers. But I don't agree that it's "free" because SRS will just sort it out, it's a bit of extra friction on something that ideally should be as frictionless as possible since you're gonna have to do it every single day for years.
no problem, you find a word or 2 that are already really easy/obvious then you can just suspend the card(s) and then then do add one (or how many card you suspended) new cards, suspending a card is essentially you "deleting" but not deleting a card, you will never see it again until you un-suspend the card again allowing you to still keep the card in the data base but it will not come up again
I didn't say that you have to add everything, just that adding more than I "need" to has been helpful.
My experience has been that I run into several days of a lot of new vocabulary whenever I start something new followed by more of a lull. So it tends to average out.
When i saw ユーモア for the first time in a sentence i scratched my head so hard my husband could hear it. Then when i got to know its “humour” i feel like pulling my hair out. I would have never guessed that.
I was talking with a guy in Japan once and he used エチケット. I told him I didn't understand that word. He elaborated, after a few minutes I figured it out. Etiquette.
It’s funny how much you have to squint with your ears sometimes.
Me describing katakana to a friend a few months ago when I was drilling it hard:
I'd say I'm getting a lot better with sight-reading loan word katakana, not just in speed, but covering branching possibilities: "a" symbols like か can translate to either ka or kuh sounds, "o" sounds like ホ can translate to hoe or hoo, "e" sounds like へ can translate to hay or heh, I sounds are almost always ee sounds, except when you're using tiny katakana like ディwhere sometimes it is an ih sound, b/v and r/l interchangeability, "o" and "u" at the end of a word usually not being part of the original loan word, "a-" sounds usually translating to "ar" (カート = kart), and then you get slang (バイト = part time job) and short forms (コンビ= combination) and other language origins (アンケート= enquête = questionnaire) and straight up outdated language (ナトリウム = natrium = sodium) and whatever my original point what holy fuck katakana is a lot harder than it sounds when you first learn about it.
Either way, I appreciate that ラブ could equally be "rub" or "love" and I get it wrong every time.
It's because loan words come from multiple languages, and sometimes shit gets mixed up. アルバイト for example is a german loan word, the one you mention seems to have some kind of poor pronounciation and as a Spanish speaker it... kind of sounds obvious to me? It may also be related to how vowels are pronounced differently in English compared to many other latin based languages.
Katakana is the true end-boss of the Japanese Language.
Why is バイト part-time job, yet メガバイト not full-time job? How dare they do this to me.
バイト is just short for アルバイト which comes from "arbeit" (german).
I did grin at your joke though lmao, made me think of MEGAドンキ.
Personally if I need to look up the word I'll mine it (as long as it isn't very rare)
I only include ones that
are not derived from English (e.g. アベック, from the French word for "couple")
are non-obvious abbreviations or words whose meanings have shifted (e.g. ダイヤ which is short for "diagram" which actually means a posted schedule for trains, etc.)
are 和製英語, aka Japanese invented English words (ルームランナー for "treadmill", because room runner isn't a thing)
I thought ダイヤ was short for diamond
it means both
Your example is funny because it was the first katakana word I learned, and then ゼルダ for obvious reasons haha but yeah I do make notes or things like パーカー but maybe not the syllable by syllable ones.
Not very often, but I will for false friends or fun "phrases" like シャッターチャンス
If they're super obvious, I'll skip. And I do mean SUPER. The "kinda obvious" type I do include and I do pay the most attention because these are the ones that make you miss the most.
I have no idea what mining is, do I need a shovel?
Honestly - I rarely mine any kana words at all. I'm already mining so many kanji words where mining helps me remember their readings as well as meanings, that for kana I stick to just learning it the old fashioned way - just encountering it a bunch. Especially for katakana words where either I can rely on recognizing the western language root, or it's pretty rare to see etc.
Not even expressions? I find stuff like どうにもならない worth mining, even if you understand the underlying logic of each word and particle that makes up the expression it's still good to chunk it so you retrieve it quicker (instead of having to parse it every time)
Expressions yes - but usually those I encounter with kanji. For expressions I encounter only in kana - nope! The more common stuff like that I just slowly learn over time, especially if it's really common. Yomitan helps of course if I keep forgetting it. It can probably help me, but these usually kana only things were the things I got the most annoyed by and forgot the most in Kaishi; less stressful for me personally to learn them slowly. I usually do the same with grammar points I'm unfamiliar with; I read a couple grammar guides early on and often look phrases up in Yomitan while reading, but rarely actually look them up in depth (めいた was one I actually did look up as it was annoying me, but also I remember it despite not having mined it).
I'm not super consistent though lol because I do mine stuff way rarer like 鬼の首を取ったよう but that's easier for me to remember.
Also worth mentioning I tend to spend most of my free time reading though which makes up for the deficiency of not really mining some common expressions, and instead mining other words that are less common (but still fairly common).
Even if they're supposed to be a direct transliteration from the loan-word, I still often find them very hard to see through. So I'll just add them if it doesn't click immediately.
Aside from the not-so-obvious ones, I do tend to put "long winded" katakana words in my anki specifically for pronunciation + intonation practice.
If I cant figure it out within a few seconds ill add it. That's typically when ill look up a word anyway so its an easy yomitan click away from adding.
No. But my cards sometimes have them in example sentences for other vocab. At least I can get some katakana practice in that way.
I usually only mine katakana word for onomatopoeia like テキパキand カリカリ. I find them countless time but i can't remember what they mean without context, so i add them.
I wouldn’t pay attention to the easy to guess ones (obvious ones).
Honestly i haven't mined any Katakana words so far.
I'm 99% sure that there are other easier words that I can use in a specific instance. It's not like I need to know ズボン. I can say パンツ and will probably be understood. This example uses two Katakana words obviously but one is easier than the other.
I don't think I need to know the wasei-eigo words. Just like a German learner doesn't need to know "handy" if Mobiltelefon exists.
It makes sense in my head I swear.
That's a bad example because you really do need to know ズボン, it's an incredibly common word with very different nuance to パンツ. Also you should know synonyms in general not because you need to use them but because other people will use them and you need to understand them.
Aren't pantsu undies?
My rule for mining katakana words (and for that matter, words in general) is: I mine it if I did not understand it (and of course it's not so rare as to be a waste of time anyways). Even if, once I look it up, it's clearly just a loan word from my native tongue, if I didn't understand it, it's still something to learn.
Hmm, I think I only add like weird ones that don't seem obvious and false friends.
Katakana is one of those things when you start you’re like “oh this is easy it’s just English but slightly different, it’ll be fine”, and then it literally never gets easier. My friend has been living here for 6 years, pretty fluent in business Japanese, still struggles on katakana words. They’re so long, and you have to force all the weird English sounds you want to make away to make it Japanese.
Unless they’re painfully common, I never feel like I can skim read them like kanji, I’m always sounding them out
So yeah I mine them as I see them, just to try and get better glance recognition. It’s usually not hard to “read” them given the time, but when you’re at a bar and looking at the menu, you want to just scan it quickly lol.
Context is the best way to figure out what a katakana word means, so throwing them in a deck and memorizing them won't help much, imo.
I don't mine anything. Any word common and useful enough to mine will keep showing up on its own and mining takes time.
I think it is important to work in some katakana words! Honestly often I struggle to read katakana words (I have to read them "aloud" to sound them out and compare to English rather than recognizing them fast like kanji or words in hiragana), and I think it is because I don't study them.
Also, even if you can recognize the katakana words, it can be hard to produce them if you don't study them. I usually default to a "native Japanese" word rather than a loanword (because that's what I tend to focus on when studying), and there have been lots of times when people think it's weird because the katakana loanword is more common or is standard for that particular situation. Even for direct loanwords (as opposed to 和製英語), the nuance can be different!
English is the hardest part of learning Japanese for me. Not the most time consuming, but the most difficult.
If I don't know the word I look it up
I think I spend more time with Kanji words than Katakana words because, as an English speaker, I’m blessed to be able to automatically know the basic meaning of alot of loan words and if there are some that have a meaning that isn’t the same as English then you just memorize those exceptions: Like マンション and ゴム.
I'm in the camp of mine some of the less obvious ones and then delete them later just like I do with regular words. Usually if seeing them enough in my immersion they become redundant and cause bloat in my deck.
I only worry about katakana words that are weirdly unintuitive from an English native perspective.
I appreciate the katakana words being in my deck sometimes for no other reason than for giving me easy wins on days when reviews are kicking my butt
just add them, if you have a daily anki goal for new words, if you’re worried about that just don’t count the katakana words as words. Me personally, i mined katakana and a lot of my friends didn’t and they mention having issues with kata pronunciation for words, sometimes it’s not always as straight forward as you would think
Almost never. I usually "get" them once I see the meaning.
No, I don't, and have never had trouble producing them. It's a very minor thing to remember "oh, they use this one" and esp. for random technologies it's kinda obvious they will know a loan.