Comment by Danieru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Danieru | Hacker News Reader

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I recommend creating your own cards, they just feel more weighty. I did jump start my sentence deck with the 500 card starter deck from AllJapaneseAllTheTime (http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/my-first-sentence-...). Yet those cards feel different. If I were to redo things I would start from zero and build cards as you go.

My process is to add 4 cards everyday. These sentences come from posts in my RSS feed. Over the years I found websites that interest me. Take for instance http://blog.esuteru.com/ which has a very 2ch style of news, not safe for work but often interesting. Or I'll stumble upon people's blogs. For example "KEN's": http://qoqpop.blog123.fc2.com/ He is a phone "otaku" who often travels to china and Mexico for business trips. I found his blog in a N900 related search. The open source community also has plenty of japanese bloggers. For instance http://d.hatena.ne.jp/naruoga/ is the blog of a Debian translator and a journalist who I found through the OpenPrinting working group.

Oh I forgot to mention another benefit of self deck creation: it grows with you.

Some words are so well known that new cards do not contain their pronunciation. A new card may have 7 kanji words but only the hiragana for only 2 of those words. Likewise a card may only contain translation for one or two words. As time goes on I also select more difficult sentences. In both cases a premade deck cannot match your learning curve like self-made decks can.

I must also give credit for AllJapaneseAllTheTime for getting me excited about learning and for how to use SRS.

A typical card of mine might be: Front: エナメル質は歯の歯冠の最表層にある、 Back: 質＝しつ//quality 歯＝は//tooth 歯冠＝しかん//tooth crown 最＝さい//most 表層＝ひょうそう//surface

That example has every pronunciation and translation. A real card would not have 歯 at all since I know it by heart. 質 and 最 would not have translations. Also notice how this is not a full sentence. Japanese often features many run-on sentences so I split them. Also notice there is no sentence scope translation.

AllJapaneseAllTheTime now suggests a newer format which features partial-ization of compound words which should work better for new decks: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/10000-sentences-is...

Can you comment on how are you translating the sentences at esuteru to add to your deck? Ie, if you can adequately translate those sentences already, seems like you don't even need to study them in the first place?

I've been using a standalone SRS app on my iPhone (StickyStudy) and about a year ago learned all N4/N5 vocab (ie, not just the kanji). But I'm having trouble making the jump to full-on sentences/text like that since there are too many unknown kanji or grammatical structures. StickyStudy does have a bunch of sample sentences for any one kanji or vocab word, which is great, but the learning focuses on the kanji or vocab words themselves, not sentences. So the ability to use the kanji in context of sentences is much harder.

I'd love to get to the point of being able to read webpages like that.

You're right, what I am getting out of the sentences is most often the vocab.

Earlier on I could not understand most sentences. At that time I would select the sentences I thought I knew. My understanding has expanded over time I think with great credit to anime and drama. I'm at ~330 series of anime/drama completed. Even before I started studying I had maybe 100 series completed.

Still a big thing for me is to card a sentence even if I do not understand it. The critical attribute I am looking for is "Is this a sentence I would like to learn?". Once it is in the deck I should understand it at some point in time. It may take a year but at least by then I will be able to pronounce every word in said sentence.

Even still there are some sentences I do not understand but those are often found in subjects I haven’t explored. Computer interfaces are 100% ok. Tech news likewise.

Start small and just never stop. Some of my first sentences were from children’s comics. I even have a few from pokemon games.

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