(tldr available below)
I did say it was simple, but yeah, avoid studying vocab by themselves (without any example sentences). I did that before, I brute-forced my way into 2k vocab using anki, it was not fun. I stopped studying for years, a couple of months ago I decided to start studying again but I lost all my previous deck so I just downloaded what was available.
Now I’m using 2k (iirc) and it has sentences attached to the words, and I find myself easily remembering multiple vocab (since it’s a sentence, then there are other words apart from the one you’re reviewing).
Might be something inherent to humans or adult language learners, but yeah, just download the appropriate deck (just checked, it’s called Core 2000) with sample sentences and your vocab study should be less tedious. (don’t know how significant this is but I’m using anki settings from Refold, you can just google/youtube it)
I still study a “dictionary type” deck called “Japanese N5 (MLT)”, this one I brute force, but the thing is I only use it for review. Basically there’s no stress since I literally don’t care if I forget since it’s just there for reinforcement and takes me about 1/4 of the time I spend on the core 2k deck. I mention this to also tell you that you can still use these types of decks, but they are inefficient for learning but great for reinforcement.
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**TL;DR**: Learning vocabulary without sample sentences seems to be VERY inefficient and should be avoided. Using “dictionary type” decks that have no sample sentences are good for reinforcement but not for learning imo.
24 comments
This is highly subjective and should not be touted as fact. For me, and many others, vocab works just fine without sentences and is much more efficient time-wise, so your ‘tip’ could potentially slow down people by quite a bit if they trust it blindly.
I can’t help but think that the vocab is coming to you a lot easier because you’ve learned them before.
Just don’t overcomplicate it, use a beginner textbook and supplement with other stuff. There are no shortcuts at the beginner stage. I agree you need context but you guys always try to reinvent the wheel and then don’t get anywhere
Great that you found something that works better for you! For me it’s not really the case because I then learn the sentences rather than the word. So if I stumble upon the word on its own I have no clue what it means, I just recognize it in the context of the very sentence I learned.
I noticed this in a little grammar deck I have which works with sentences. For example I never knew what べきだ is, but when seeing that word in the context of my Anki deck I immediately know. So I end up passing a word that I don’t really know.
I think it’s best to work towards spending less time on Anki. You’re right that dictionary cards are only great for reinforcement, but does that really mean we should use Anki for something more than that? I’ve seen people who spend up to hours in Anki everyday, because they have hundreds of cards and each card takes 5-20 seconds. At the end of the day, flashcards are flashcards-a quick memorization tool. Just like how you can’t use them for math practice, you shouldn’t use them for language practice. If you want to learn words for real, then you should make an effort to interact with the language by reading or listening. Although, you could argue that reading the sentences on the cards is exactly that, but it lacks variety, subcontext, and imo isn’t fun at all.
edit: sorry, I realize my post might have been a bit abrasive, but I was having a discussion with my friend about this lol. If sentence cards work for you then keep on 👍, but I don’t want people to force themselves to spend more time on cards if they don’t like it.
I agree with you! I’ve also been working my way through the Core 2000 deck and it’s been immensely helpful. I find the combination of example sentences and audio to be more engaging and memorable for sure.
Just got to this subreddit, what is this “deck” you’re talking about?
The only problem I have with some decks is that definitions can be too vague. For example, if you see something like 移す with “to transfer” meaning. It’s just confusing with 移る and many other transfer words like 乗り換える、渡す、引っ越す and so on. Literally all can be used with “to transfer” translation. I would do SRS much more if it was more precisely described. It’s not much harder to describe 引っ越す as changing of residence, 乗り換える as changing of transport and 移る/移す as a changing of place or content from one to another, but with a clear transitive/intransitive difference, without a need to check verb ending or what type it is. Like why not to describe that as “to move” (which is usually intransitive) and “to shift” (which is usually transitive). Basically the approach monolingual dictionaries use, but translated and adapted. It wouldn’t significantly affect amount of time we spend to learn such cards, but it would significantly improve our understanding of where to use it and how.
It’s not about all decks, some are much clearer, but it’s also not so rare that the same meaning can be used for 2-3 or even more different words without any distinction.
This would never work for me in the beginning.
I needed to learn some words in isolation (both hiragana and kanji) in order to start comprehending sentences. Doing it the other way round would just make me feel overwhelmed and probably just lead to me memorising the whole sentences.
As others have said this is preference. How I did it was ‘do tango N5–> do Core 2k—> start mining’
There is no universal approach and sentence cards are too easy because you will recognize the context rather than the kanji if you don’t also do kanji study 🙂
It’s great that you are excited and that you’ve found a method that works for you. Fantastic!
But I’d caution about claiming “my study method is the best!”. No it’s not, no matter how good it is. It may be the best for you, but almost certainly isn’t best for everyone. In this specific case, a lot of people have had tremendous success only memorizing vocab.
Vocab cards are much faster to make, much faster to review. There is a group of polyglots who claim that in the beginning they learn 100 vocab words per day. You may think that’s insane (a lot of people may think that’s insane), but if it works for them, more power to them. For people who learn that way, having sample sentences may be at best a waste of time and at worst a distraction. For this group, the goal is gain enough of a base layer so they they can quickly move away from flashcards and into actually using the language.
Many polyglots fall into this group. They often criticize the Anki crowd as wasting far too much time in a flashcard app instead of actually using the language. Dr Arguelles, an amazing polyglot, goes further and says all flashcards are a waste of time and that the best way to study is jump into shadowing immediately. Everyone has their own way.
That’s them, not you. We all have different strengths and weaknesses; our brains all work in slightly different ways.
The best study is the one you will use every single day.
Anyway, sorry, I kind of rambled in there. Point is, there are many many different study methodologies out there and some will work for some people and others will work for other people.
Verbs are different because some have a ton of meanings, and some expressions are best memorised as themselves, but most adjectives and nouns can easily be memorised alone.
Of course, if you somehow have topic specific content feel free to use that to internalize the words instead. Categorize your vocab into topics, make your own lists and it’ll stick better in your memory. Made about 10k vocab total lists on my own – never used anki, sounds like a waste of time, but if it works for you…
That’s a great tip!
I have been doing something similar and found a flashcard app that has example sentences and translations: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/bunkado/id1546470961#?platform=iphone
I’m sharing this if anyone is interested or if it can help to decide:
– [https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/discussing-various-card-templates.html](https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/discussing-various-card-templates.html)
– [https://animecards.site/ankicards/](https://animecards.site/ankicards/)
hard disagree. In fact I think learning words with sentences is a waste of time and slows you down, you can learn 3x the words if you dont use sentence cards ( since you are much faster ) and reinforce them with actual reading instead of wasting 3x more time on Anki with artificial sentences.
I’m not going to say sentence cards are better than dictionary cards. To some extent that depends on both the individual as well as their goals.
Anyway, here are the pros and cons of sentence cards as I see them. First the pros
1. Sentence cards more closely adhere to the test one thing principle specifically in the sense that they narrow the question to did you understand the word as it was used in this specific context, rather than could you recall up to around three common meanings of the word. Of course if you grade yourself on pronunciation of the word/sentence then once again, this is no longer one thing, but presumably you’d be doing that with the vocab too.
2. Sentence cards are easier (imo) to grade than dictionary cards. Of course this depends on how you grade both types of cards, but I personally have zero interest in memorizing the English (or Japanese) definition of a particular Japanese word. I’m a lot more interested in acquiring the word than learning it. So I find it tricky to grade dictionary cards, because I find it hard to evaluate whether my understanding of the word adequately measures up to the definition on the back (not to mention that even when reading a dictionary, some definitions are confusing or unclear). Sentence cards on the other hand I can grade easily by asking myself if I understood what the sentence said.
3. Sentence cards give you the word in a sentence, in particular you get at least one grammatical usage of the word in a sentence. For example if this word usually collocates with another word, then it’ll probably be in the example sentence.
4. (If you have native sentence audio like the Core6k deck) if you care about your accent/speaking Japanese to Japanese people, audio sentence decks give you a great opportunity to practice your pronunciation from a beginner level before building bad habits from subvocalizing incorrectly (idk how hard it is to correct these habits for everyone, but in my experience correcting pronunciation habits has been extremely challenging). Of course this depends on your goals, but if you do want to speak to Japanese people, many beginners find Japanese pronunciation to be extremely challenging. Even putting aside pitch accent, native English speakers (myself included) seem to struggle with getting vowel length correct.
Cons
1. Time. This is obviously the big con with sentence cards. They take far, far, far longer to review than dictionary cards, particularly if you’re also practicing your pronunciation by reading the sentence out loud and imitating the audio.
2. Too much context. I’m going to include this as a con, although I’ve never personally found this to be an issue, because I know some people do have an issue with this. My understanding of this issue is that some people find that they understand the word in the example sentence and then run across it in the wild and don’t understand it. Of course that’s to be expected to a certain extent for any kind of flashcards, since aiming for 100% retention is another good way of wasting your time, but my impression is that these people say that they end up memorizing the sentence and what the sentence means instead of acquiring the word itself, so this happens much more frequently with sentence cards compared to dictionary cards for them.
Anyway, I’ve listed 4 pros and 2 cons, but in no way does that mean that sentence cards are just better overall. For one thing, both of the cons are massive, and if the second con applies to you then it’s probably a fatal flaw with sentence cards, and I’d just avoid them. And flaw 1 applies to basically everyone. There’s just no realistic way it’s taking you less time to read a sentence in Japanese than a single word (on average).
Personally for me, the pros outweigh the time flaw, particularly because I can do Anki on my commute, but I can’t read on my commute, so I generally have quite a bit of time that’s available to do Anki in a day. However, that’s definitely not the case for everyone.
Anyway, I hope I was able to be fairly objective about sentence cards vs dictionary cards, and if anyone has any thoughts or feedback, I’d be interested in hearing it.
I agree with OP that trying to brute force thousands of vocab without context (examples) is madness, but I think it’s more a multi-step process:
* Learn the vocab via flashcards until it’s ‘mature’. At that point the flashcards aren’t giving you value and you’re just overwhelming yourself with sheer numbers.
* Then learn with example sentences, which are basically dumbed down reading focusing specifically on your vocab.
* I really like Kanshudo for this, as you can jump to dozens of examples for each flashcard
* Then you have to start reading them in context, over and over.
Learning is like building a spider web: you have to have multiple threads (or paths) in your head to each nugget of knowledge. That’s what a lot of people here seem to be saying: if you only study via flashcards, or via a single example sentence, you only have one path in your brain to that piece of knowledge, and you just can’t find it any other way. But as you start to encounter what you’ve learned in different contexts, you start to build all those little connections, and eventually, no matter what you’re doing, you can find the word quickly.
So TLDR: there’s no one best way to learn vocab. You have to relearn it over and over, to build multiple ‘paths’ in your head to the knowledge.
Remembering a single word is easier than an entire sentence in a foreign language. What’s the point of a sample sentence when I don’t understand anything ?????
What do you think about studying using anki, but taking time to write your own sentences. I usually do anki when I have some free time but when I take the time to study I write my own sentences and will go back to old ones to try and read them. I feel like it works well but I don’t know if it’s actually helping.
Anki decks with example sentences be like:
Word: 案内所
Sentence: 案内所はあそこです
Pretty useless tbh
same with grammar!! i remember grammar patterns a lot better if i memorize a simple phrase that incorporates that grammar
This is something that’s different for everybody. For me, I learned vocab best by studying flash cards. Obviously you want to see if the first time in some context, but Sometimes it’s best to just drill a bunch of words without having to go over a whole sentence
I’m the opposite. I know how to create sentences (been studying for 5,5 years) but Japanese vocabulary is too specific. So I’m focusing on anki now, the 10000 vocab… should be done in a year and a half maybe, still 96% to go but I feel my listening improved a lot cuz I had no idea about certain words (even studying more than 5 years).
Guys you don’t need to make a sample sentence for every vocab. It’s a waste of time. Take tabemasu (eat) for example. It is simple and surely you will be able to remember and use it. But for some vocab needs a sentence because it only makes sense in a specific context. Just like when learning grammar you need a sentence to understand it better.