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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

One of the hardest things for spacedrrepetition software is finding/creating decks of words to learn. Does anyone have any recommendations for how to go about that?

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I took words from my reading. When I was at a bit lower-level I worked through a newspaper, highlighting words I didn't know making flash cards of them and then practicing the flash cards during free time and then reading the newspaper selection later. Here's an entry I wrote about that process: http://toshuo.com/2007/learn-a-language-by-taking-advantage-...

Every single word encountered this way should make its way into your SRS after learning it.

As far as deck strategies, I was an Anki user and didn't like getting too many decks going at once. I tried doing separate decks for each book, video game, etc I was working my way through but it turned out to be huge pain. Now I favor only one deck per language for recognition, one for writing and one for ear training.

Anki have shared decks[1], but the general advice is that you always create your own deck. I personally hand create every single card I learn and couldn't be happier with the results so far.

[1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/

I've always found this advice to be a little overrated. Card creation takes a lot of time and I've found it be only slightly helpful in the memorization process and try to avoid creating a card from scratch when I can. I use an extremely modified version of the Japanese corePlus deck and have found it invaluable that it already came with 6000+ vocab words with example sentences all already tagged with the most popular textbooks and online learning materials. I've been using it for about 3 years now and it has expanded to include pictures and example text for many more words as well. However it would have been a huge time sink to even attempt such a deck on my own.

The problem with shared decks is that Anki is not a very good way of learning information for the very first time. Seeing the material from another source, like a textbook or encountering it in the wild and then studying by tags is the process I find to be the best flow for me. I have a cram deck for all the vocabulary I have ever studied, one for the current chapter I'm studying, and if I'm taking a class one for all the vocabulary I've studied in the class that semester or year. With textbooks, I read over the vocabulary and tag words or add an example sentence if I need to but I often don't have to. Using this method I can learn somewhere between 50-100 new words in a week if I need to with pretty good recall.

However I have another cram deck that is tagged with words that are the top 2000 and 6000 most common. Unless I have seen the word previously I find even going through 10 words to be a painful process and it takes me much longer to memorize. I have that cram deck setup to only show me 5 new words a day and mostly use it as a review deck.

Edit: Grammar

You could try Memrise or Duolingo, of which the first has large numbers of user made stacks, but which I usually find have enough errors or other problems as to become rather irritating to work with. Duolingo is awesome, so long as what you want to learn is on their fairly small list of languages, as it has some understanding of grammatical issues, and far fewer outright errors than Memrise. My main issue with Duolingo is that its courses are somewhat limited - even if you finish one, you won't have much more than very basic literacy and vocabulary in the language.

Personally, now, I am concentrating on Anki, and I build my stacks by adding words and short phrases as I come across them during the day. It is an excellent, if clunky, tool: it allows you to add TeX for learning equations, etc; its model lets you define different types of data structure ('Note'), from which you can define different question-responses to learn ('Cards'). The main problem is the limitations of the iOS app, which doesn't let you add new Notes or process your TeX for you.

I love memrise. I've found it most useful for learning geography so far, not language. http://www.memrise.com/course/42769/country-mapping/

I've mostly used Anki for learning Japanese, so I'm biased towards that specific language. There are however some awesome free tools floating around that take the pain out of creating flashcards:

-[1] EPWING2Anki creates flashcards from a wordlist and a dictionary in EPWING format

-[2] Sub2srs creates flashcards based on a movie and subtitle files

It's also possible to use e.g. spreadsheets to mass-create cards. Further tools analyze e.g. a selection of ebooks and create word frequency lists of unknown words, Combined those tools have greatly assisted my progress.

[1]: http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/

[2]: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=181475

I'm still pretty noob at Japanese, but I have lived there for 6 months and took 3 semesters of introductory classes. I've never had the motivation to study, but I thought I'd plug a really cool flash card type app called Wanikani [1], from the guys behind Tofugu. I maxed out the free level but I didn't want to dedicate my time to learning yet, so I haven't moved on to higher levels. I'm hoping this can be a way to develop my vocab, but I also like the idea from elsewhere in this post of finding some sort of radio broadcasts in Japanese, it would be super helpful if they had a text-based script of the dialogue too.

Also, in my comprehension of Japanese on the internet, a firefox extension rikai-chan or the chrome version rikai-kun (which I use) is invaluable. With computers even Japanese people don't need to know how to write kanji, they just type the hiragana and hit space til they see it. This extension allows you to highlight the kanji, going in the other direction (kanji -> pronunciation/meaning, use your japanese keyboard to go from pronunciation/hiragana -> kanji with spacebar).

Also, for a dictionary I use Alc [2] which I found is very commonly used by Japanese people that need to find English words. The main benefit to using this is that there are many examples of the words used in context, and showing other kanji used for those same meanings. This allows you to make sure the kanji you found for the meaning you want is actually used in, or find the correct kanji for, the context you are trying to use it in. It is important to have a database maintained by people that know proper Japanese for sure, it's much easier to understand broken English than to try to use broken Japanese.

[1] http://www.tofugu.com/resources/wanikani/ [2] http://www.alc.co.jp

User hermanschaaf and I live in Japan and set out to build a fast Japanese dictionary: http://nihongo.io

Source is here: http://github.com/gojp

Take a look if you have time, feature requests are very welcome :)

Once you study Japanese for any amount of time romaji becomes more of a liability than anything else. The thing I dislike most about most these one search bar dictionaries is there is no way to ignore romaji input. Its one of the main reasons I still use jisho.org so often and I'm very unexcited about their new beta. Adding the ability to turn it off would be a great start

I understand what you mean; I've been studying Japanese for five years now and learned hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks of class. I have always told new learners to do that first as you rarely see romaji used in Japan.

Do you mean that on jisho you always use the Japanese search box?

When I'm searching Japanese yes. Jisho splits up English and Japanese so that I don't have to filter through completely unrelated results if an English word just happens to be made up letters that could be romaji. I also usually type into both boxes if I have an idea of the word or I want a sentence example of the word used in a specific way

Ah, I think I get it. When searching for the term "shin" for example, it would ignore any English definition matches such as shin guard, and only match Japanese terms containing it, like 心配.

https://github.com/CraigJPerry/shortcuts

Some of these are copies of other's decks. The vim one is good, even as someone who's normally the vim expert in a given group of Unix bods I still find myself learning.

The git one is crap, I will redo that myself when I get a chance.

The idea / pycharm ones are just a dump of the keybindings. Same for the GitHub one. Its pretty easy to make simple decks.

There's an excellent multimedia deck called "knots" which predictably enough teaches knot tying. Worth a look to see what's possible with Anki.

Skritter has a whole bunch of curated lists out of the box including those for popular text books and academic levels. You are paying a premium for its use though (£10 a month).

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