Hey guys. I'm doing Kaishi and Tae Kim's on Anki. Do you guys have any necessary add ons and tips to learn faster? I have some trouble with the Kanij as I am only level one of Wanikani... lol
The kanji will come automatically by doing the kaishi deck. It just takes time and repetition. Forgeting the kanji in a word multiple times over days or weeks is not struggleing, that's just normal. If you used to know it a couple months back and now you forgot that's also normal. It should not happen with each one, but the fact that it happens is normal.
That's why it's called spaced repetition, not spaced remembering.
The best way to stop yourself from forgetting is by using it. I.e. reading and writing.
However, the N5 kanji is managable to learn in isolation. It helps with the vocab, but it is not necessary to get through kaishi. And it is generally not adviced.
"It should not happen with each one, and the fact..."
Man, that makes plenty sense. My absolute rubbish, abysmal memory quite cannot keep up, and mostly forgets each and every Kanji the next day once learnt, and even after repetition, I still quite cannot remember them in a proper memory no matter how hard I try.
This might not be applicable to you at all, but I just think at can't be said enough.
Tells me how much awful my memory is
Could be, but it also could be that you're just overwhelmed.
Sometimes learning fewer new cards a day make them stick better and actually makes your deck mature faster. How close you are to thrre being no new cards left says very little about progress. If you struggle with remembering the cards you might actually progress faster by doing less.
Forgive me for the late response! Though, thankye kindly in return!
While I sometimes feel overwhelmed, I wouldn't say it is exactly the issue; I've reduced the amount of new words from 10, to 5, due to it being a wee bit too much- even then, I still cannot recount much, due to my horrendous memory.
You see, my memory is genuinely horrible. I quite cannot even recall what I ate, and sometimes, the activities I did for the day. These are few examples, but it is quite frustrating living with a gold fish memory, such as mine.
But again, I thankee heartily for the answer. I may reckon reducing the amount of words for the day; but I also don't want to lose efficiency, so I may dwell with the 5 new words a day, for now. Again, thankye kindly!
I still feel like it isn't good enough for me. At the moment, I feel like I'm doing horrid with what I'm doing. I've yet to delve into Grammar, and actually start forming sentences.
I think I may need further input and output. Especially in terms of reading.
Though, forgive me to ask this of you: do ye have any such suggestions upon any Manga that is easy enough for N5? As well as any resources that could be good enough within such a level, such as Tadoku? I would love to improve! Especially the reading part, as that could be the part where I could make the words I'm memorising stick firmly.
There are some good lists online for easy manga. NHK easy news is also nice. You can use yomitan for an inline dictionary.
I personally also quite like "Learn japanese with manga" by marc bernabé is a pretty good study book that includes manga. It is published by tuttle.
However, it is not maga that helps with japanese. It rather is a textbook that includes manga panels for examples. A couple short segments of a story are also in there.
I'm going to be frank and say that learning grammar is overrated. To a certain extend it is wise, but grammar is also subconsiously learned through immersion. I know particles and verb conjugations that I never studied. Native kids in any language become conversational before ever learning grammar.
English isn't my native language, and I have yet to study my first grammar point. I am already beyond the C2 level... I do look at grammar for Japanese, but that's just because I want to speed things up. Just really read the example sentences in kaishi with the intent to understand the whole phrase, and try to see the meaning and cross-relation of every word there.
Have you tried using mnemonics? My memory is horrible as well but stuff like Wanikani or Remembering the Kanji really helped me. It made learning vocabulary way easier for me.
I also bought some memory learning / mnemmonic books that had tips for remembering a variety of things and that also helped with remembering the readings of kanji-spelled words.
I've only just started my JP journey but I learnt Danish to okayish fluency before this. I live in the country and I find myself forgetting words all the time.
For every word I've acquired, it's usually after hearing it multiple times, then often one particular real life conversation where the word is used just kinda sticks more than the other times. This has made it so that I acquired the most common words relatively quickly and I'm at the point where acquisition by osmosis has become much slower, since the new words I am hearing are way less frequent.
I will sometimes hear words that I know for sure I have heard before but cannot quite recall the meaning. I will then look them up, commit them to memory, then not hear them again for another 6 months and forget once more. Without Anki, some words can take years like this. If I was using Anki for them, I'd acquire them way faster just because of the repeated exposure to them.
All this said, I am at the point where I am proficient enough with Danish to pick out unfamiliar words from native speaker sentences. I think when you reach this point with a language and start listening directly to it being spoken, your language acquisition rate gets a big boost.
I think Anki can standalone as a learning tool but it's definitely best used in conjunction with time spent listening to the language spoken natively. Reading comprehension probably also helps a lot, especially where those words in your deck pop up.
Pretty much yeah. The cards are super high quality, and the phrases actually have some synergy to them. They build on each other. The audio examples are great, the furigana works well.
And hopefully, but I can't attest to this yet, by the end of it you'll be ready for sentence mining.
Since kaishi is so good at kanji and vocab I think tae kim would suffice too.
Lock in on Kaishi and apply that knowledge by trying to understand some kind of storytelling. Could be anime or graded readers or manga or visual novels, those are all popular and effective.
Tae Kim is useful as a reference. Skim it, get an idea of what information is inside it, and then when you see something in your reading practice that seems familiar you can refer back to it.
I never found grammar decks especially helpful, but I sometimes mine sentence cards if the grammar or word choices are interesting enough.
I would recommend two add-ons and two external tools. Anki itself already handles the review-management part well and doesn't need to be modified.
I'll let someone else talk about how to enable and use FSRS scheduling algorithm instead of the old and still default SM-2-anki. It becomes significantly better once you start to develop your language-learning skills
My opinion is that if you're still getting used to Anki and developing a review habit and FSRS intimidates you don't bother with it yet. Once you have a thousand or so mature cards and consistently review almost every other day, or if you're a nerd who doesn't mind reading documentation and remembering to click a button every few weeks, enable FSRS.
Hello! Fellow newbie here who got really really freaked out trying to use Anki too intensely. I'm finally starting to get used to it so here's what I've learned.
Adjust a couple settings. Specifically the daily limits. For premade decks like Kaishi that have no structure and you know none of the words in, I would suggest having the new cards/per day extremely low. Like 2 or 5. For decks you create yourself, go ahead and have it a little higher, mine is currently at 20.
I do like having (at least) two decks. My first deck is the genki deck but I originally started with the Kaishi since that's what was so highly recommended. If you use Kaishi, what I did was adjust the card layout so that it would show the furigana for the kanji. I plan on going back to the Kaishi deck when I finish the first genki volume.
My second deck I create via takoboto, a dictionary app that can auto send whatever you look up to Anki. Super duper handy, but you have to be immersing yourself in the language. I have a Japanese tutor that I get some of the words from. I also bought some Japanese manga and switched my videogames to Japanese. There are some people who add words from videos with some computer add ons but I never watch stuff on my computer so I can't speak to how that works. Does sound cool though!
Download Anki heatmap add on. I would suggest doing 7 new words a day of kaishi 1.5k to begin with and dropping wanikani. After the months of you want you can increase new cards per day by 1. Try to finish kaishi 1.5k before doing any wanikani. Time not doing kaishi 1.5k should be spent on immersing (watching subed japanese shows) or life.
General question to other people reading this post: Is the Kashi deck generally the same as NukeMarine’s Tango N5 Vocab deck? Is one better than the other?
The kanji will come automatically by doing the kaishi deck. It just takes time and repetition. Forgeting the kanji in a word multiple times over days or weeks is not struggleing, that's just normal. If you used to know it a couple months back and now you forgot that's also normal. It should not happen with each one, but the fact that it happens is normal.
That's why it's called spaced repetition, not spaced remembering.
The best way to stop yourself from forgetting is by using it. I.e. reading and writing.
However, the N5 kanji is managable to learn in isolation. It helps with the vocab, but it is not necessary to get through kaishi. And it is generally not adviced.
"It should not happen with each one, and the fact..." Man, that makes plenty sense. My absolute rubbish, abysmal memory quite cannot keep up, and mostly forgets each and every Kanji the next day once learnt, and even after repetition, I still quite cannot remember them in a proper memory no matter how hard I try.
Tells me how much awful my memory is, haha
This might not be applicable to you at all, but I just think at can't be said enough.
Could be, but it also could be that you're just overwhelmed.
Sometimes learning fewer new cards a day make them stick better and actually makes your deck mature faster. How close you are to thrre being no new cards left says very little about progress. If you struggle with remembering the cards you might actually progress faster by doing less.
Forgive me for the late response! Though, thankye kindly in return!
While I sometimes feel overwhelmed, I wouldn't say it is exactly the issue; I've reduced the amount of new words from 10, to 5, due to it being a wee bit too much- even then, I still cannot recount much, due to my horrendous memory.
You see, my memory is genuinely horrible. I quite cannot even recall what I ate, and sometimes, the activities I did for the day. These are few examples, but it is quite frustrating living with a gold fish memory, such as mine.
But again, I thankee heartily for the answer. I may reckon reducing the amount of words for the day; but I also don't want to lose efficiency, so I may dwell with the 5 new words a day, for now. Again, thankye kindly!
5 words a day is 1825 words a year. That is honestly quite good for a self-learned pace.
However, because you already have a big backlog due to having had 10 a day for a while, the effect of doing 5 a day won't be noticable immediately.
I still feel like it isn't good enough for me. At the moment, I feel like I'm doing horrid with what I'm doing. I've yet to delve into Grammar, and actually start forming sentences. I think I may need further input and output. Especially in terms of reading.
Though, forgive me to ask this of you: do ye have any such suggestions upon any Manga that is easy enough for N5? As well as any resources that could be good enough within such a level, such as Tadoku? I would love to improve! Especially the reading part, as that could be the part where I could make the words I'm memorising stick firmly.
There are some good lists online for easy manga. NHK easy news is also nice. You can use yomitan for an inline dictionary.
I personally also quite like "Learn japanese with manga" by marc bernabé is a pretty good study book that includes manga. It is published by tuttle.
However, it is not maga that helps with japanese. It rather is a textbook that includes manga panels for examples. A couple short segments of a story are also in there.
I'm going to be frank and say that learning grammar is overrated. To a certain extend it is wise, but grammar is also subconsiously learned through immersion. I know particles and verb conjugations that I never studied. Native kids in any language become conversational before ever learning grammar.
English isn't my native language, and I have yet to study my first grammar point. I am already beyond the C2 level... I do look at grammar for Japanese, but that's just because I want to speed things up. Just really read the example sentences in kaishi with the intent to understand the whole phrase, and try to see the meaning and cross-relation of every word there.
And most of all, give it time.
Alrighty, thankee dearly for the answer! Apologies for having ye to write plenty! Thankye kindly!
I'm happy to help. No need to apologise for anything.
Have you tried using mnemonics? My memory is horrible as well but stuff like Wanikani or Remembering the Kanji really helped me. It made learning vocabulary way easier for me.
I also bought some memory learning / mnemmonic books that had tips for remembering a variety of things and that also helped with remembering the readings of kanji-spelled words.
I actually didn't! I only have recently downloaded, Remembering The Kanji on my Android, and I've yet to have the chance to try it.
But though, thank you dearly for the suggestion! I will most certainly reckon it!
This.
I've only just started my JP journey but I learnt Danish to okayish fluency before this. I live in the country and I find myself forgetting words all the time.
For every word I've acquired, it's usually after hearing it multiple times, then often one particular real life conversation where the word is used just kinda sticks more than the other times. This has made it so that I acquired the most common words relatively quickly and I'm at the point where acquisition by osmosis has become much slower, since the new words I am hearing are way less frequent.
I will sometimes hear words that I know for sure I have heard before but cannot quite recall the meaning. I will then look them up, commit them to memory, then not hear them again for another 6 months and forget once more. Without Anki, some words can take years like this. If I was using Anki for them, I'd acquire them way faster just because of the repeated exposure to them.
All this said, I am at the point where I am proficient enough with Danish to pick out unfamiliar words from native speaker sentences. I think when you reach this point with a language and start listening directly to it being spoken, your language acquisition rate gets a big boost.
I think Anki can standalone as a learning tool but it's definitely best used in conjunction with time spent listening to the language spoken natively. Reading comprehension probably also helps a lot, especially where those words in your deck pop up.
Is Kaishi the new hotness for beginners?
Like: Genki 1 textbook and workbook + Anki and Kaishi deck, and you’re good to go?
Pretty much yeah. The cards are super high quality, and the phrases actually have some synergy to them. They build on each other. The audio examples are great, the furigana works well.
And hopefully, but I can't attest to this yet, by the end of it you'll be ready for sentence mining.
Since kaishi is so good at kanji and vocab I think tae kim would suffice too.
Lock in on Kaishi and apply that knowledge by trying to understand some kind of storytelling. Could be anime or graded readers or manga or visual novels, those are all popular and effective.
Tae Kim is useful as a reference. Skim it, get an idea of what information is inside it, and then when you see something in your reading practice that seems familiar you can refer back to it.
I never found grammar decks especially helpful, but I sometimes mine sentence cards if the grammar or word choices are interesting enough.
I would recommend two add-ons and two external tools. Anki itself already handles the review-management part well and doesn't need to be modified.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2018406030 - if I fat-finger and hold down space it stops instead of accidentally grading a card
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159 - allows external tools to create cards, specifically:
https://github.com/killergerbah/asbplayer from streaming video
https://yomitan.wiki/ from text
I'll let someone else talk about how to enable and use FSRS scheduling algorithm instead of the old and still default SM-2-anki. It becomes significantly better once you start to develop your language-learning skills
My opinion is that if you're still getting used to Anki and developing a review habit and FSRS intimidates you don't bother with it yet. Once you have a thousand or so mature cards and consistently review almost every other day, or if you're a nerd who doesn't mind reading documentation and remembering to click a button every few weeks, enable FSRS.
Imo yokubi is nicer than tae Kim for skimming some grammar; though the author of it is pretty abrasive.
How is one abrasive in a grammar book?
Hello! Fellow newbie here who got really really freaked out trying to use Anki too intensely. I'm finally starting to get used to it so here's what I've learned.
Adjust a couple settings. Specifically the daily limits. For premade decks like Kaishi that have no structure and you know none of the words in, I would suggest having the new cards/per day extremely low. Like 2 or 5. For decks you create yourself, go ahead and have it a little higher, mine is currently at 20.
I do like having (at least) two decks. My first deck is the genki deck but I originally started with the Kaishi since that's what was so highly recommended. If you use Kaishi, what I did was adjust the card layout so that it would show the furigana for the kanji. I plan on going back to the Kaishi deck when I finish the first genki volume.
My second deck I create via takoboto, a dictionary app that can auto send whatever you look up to Anki. Super duper handy, but you have to be immersing yourself in the language. I have a Japanese tutor that I get some of the words from. I also bought some Japanese manga and switched my videogames to Japanese. There are some people who add words from videos with some computer add ons but I never watch stuff on my computer so I can't speak to how that works. Does sound cool though!
Hope all that makes sense and good luck!
Oh, I only use Anki on my phone, so my system is probably a little different than most.
Download Anki heatmap add on. I would suggest doing 7 new words a day of kaishi 1.5k to begin with and dropping wanikani. After the months of you want you can increase new cards per day by 1. Try to finish kaishi 1.5k before doing any wanikani. Time not doing kaishi 1.5k should be spent on immersing (watching subed japanese shows) or life.
General question to other people reading this post: Is the Kashi deck generally the same as NukeMarine’s Tango N5 Vocab deck? Is one better than the other?
I mean at least one resource described kaishi as a replacement for the N5 tango deck.
Also kaishi definitely has higher level words, frequency and jlpt levels don't always correlate