TLDR : Need some guidance on how to characterise my recall of the card. What should I have recalled to hit ‘good’? Also, any recommended settings?
Hi all,
I have been using the Tango N5 MIA deck for about 2 weeks. These past few days however, I ended up getting extremely frustrated at how inept I seemed to be at recalling each card… nothing seemed to be sticking (tbh, I had not been as focussed lately, which led to an exponential increase in ‘agains’ and reviews).
I myself am quite a perfectionist, so any minor mistake led to me hitting again. The more difficult cards I encountered seemed to have two target words, e.g office and taiwan, which made it even more challenging and dramatically increased my frustration.
This led me to question what is actually the correct methodology for using the deck; is it to recall the entire sentence meaning and pronunciation, or should some leniency be given as long as the target word is correct in both? Or are there any settings changes that I may have missed out on?. If i recall, there may have been some guidance on the the ankiweb deck download page, however the original got taken down.
So, what is the most long term effective method for using the deck? In my mind, now reflecting on the situation, complete perfection on each card seems to be very hard to achieve in the longe term, and that will inevitably will cause reviews to skyrocket. Although that may just be my naivety with the deck.
Either way, I have decided to reset the deck, so am seeking some advice on how to properly utilise on the deck on a new clean run.
What settings should I use? And how should I categorise my recall of the card? Also, how many cards a day is a good number? I have done around 750 ish kanji, so wish to do vocab at a somewhat decent pace to ‘catch up’
Many thanks!
2 comments
The thing with Tango is not to *learn/memorize* all the sentence, but the *word/vocabulary*. The is no little to no use to learn and recall perfectly the sentence, you want to know the vocabulary and the audio and sentence is just a reinforcement on how to use the word.
For me, I usually just use Hard is I can’t recall the word and meaning, Good if can recall the meaning and Easy if I can recall the word and meaninig as soon as I see the card.
If you want to follow the original suggestion on how to rate the deck, [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMBXwo9SJbQ) was released around the time when MIA made the original Tango decks.
When i did the Tango decks back then, I basically followed that advice.
So basically the main goal is to be able to read the word, and recall its general meaning.
You don’t memorize the sentence.
The sentence is there to provide content on how the word is used, which is very important as you don’t really learn a language by just memorizing a word’s dictionary definition, but by understanding its usage.
Having a sense of a word’s usage will also help to disambiguate words that have similar meanings, and you’ll encounter a lot of them in Japanese. (Later, when you can read Japanese monolingual dictionaries, you’ll be able to read more in-depth definitions.)
When recalling the meaning of the word, you don’t have to be too exact, like trying to remember the definition verbatim. Just have a general idea of the meaning can be good enough.
Repetition during your reviews, and exposure to the word during immersion should help hone in a more refined meaning of the word over time.
As you immerse, you’ll encounter new unexpected uses of the words you already know, so you’ll keep accumulating new shades of meaning for the word.
Sometimes you’ll also discover additional entirely different meanings for an already-learned word, which are so widely different from the previous meanings of the word, so in those cases, you can make another for that card to learn the new meaning. I sometimes did.
Like 惜しい means “regrettable” but it can sometimes mean “too precious” and in other cases as “almost”. So for that word, I eventually had three different cards, each with a different example sentence, but I learned the additional meaning organically, as I came across them in my immersion material.
>What should I have recalled to hit ‘good’? Also, any recommended settings?
There used to be a mod from MIA called “low key Anki” that altered some interval settings which tweaked the review frequency of already-learned cards when they were later failed. This resulted in less reviews over time instead an accumulation of more reviews, so hence the name “low key Anki”.
This mod also removed some of the grading buttons and left you with only “fail” and “pass” buttons, so there’s less decision-making during your review — you only have two visible choices as opposed to four leading to quicker reviews.
But without the mod, you can just simply ignore the other buttons and just press spacebar for “pass” or 1 for “fail”, or you can use this [newer mod](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/876946123) that also removes the “easy” and “hard” buttons.
As for the interval setting changes, you simulate the same thing without the original mod now as a certain bug in Anki that required the mod was fixed in later updates. The Refold site (which morphed from MIA) has the suggested interval settings for Anki.
The whole MIA/AJATT scene splintered into divergent groups so they have their own methodology and suggested interval settings now, so honestly I wouldn’t get too picky about this, and just use whatever interval settings you like.
As for rating the cards, my personal experience is that you can become more strict on how you grade the cards as you become more proficient in Japanese. Don’t fuss too much over the details for now as there is sooo much to learn initially.
Like later on, when I started to sentence mine and use much harder example sentences taken from books and TV shows, I didn’t always fully understand each element in the sentence even though I knew every word except for the target word. I understood the gist of the whole sentence which was good enough.
Later, when I was at the point where I was reading regularly and gaining more fluency, I started failing cards if I didn’t fully understand the sentence near a 100 percent. I’d really tried to understand each element in the sentence, sometimes looking things up or asking questions here. Some sentences I didn’t care that much about, so I would skip those, but the majority of sentences, I tried to really understand.
This eventually deepened my comprehension ability as I was trying to gain a more nuanced meaning in Japanese.
Then way way way later, I starting focusing more on pitch accent. My cards display pitch accent on mouse overs in the front of the card, and fully displays them on the back. I’d fail the card if I got the the pitch wrong. Initially I just concentrated on the most common words, and then later less common ones which I felt I might actually use in conversation. So again I gradually became stricter with pitch accent over time.
My reviews were really fast at this point, so I didn’t mind failing cards this way. I was starting to output a lot more and I wanted to work more on my pronunciation, but like others have said in this sub, understanding pitch accent is a personal preference so it’s not a must for everyone.
I do think getting the readings correct is important early on, as some beginners play loose with that, but I always made sure I had the knew them, especially with knowing the right moras, like ゆう vs ゆ in a word like ゆうそう【郵送】mailing vs ゆそう【輸送】transportation.
It may be hard to break some habits later on if you pronounced both words the same way.
Sometimes even then I’d still mess up. For some reason I kept pronouncing 戸籍 as こうせき in my reviews instead of こせき. Later, while conversing in Japanese, I’d get blank looks from other people until I figured out I was pronouncing it wrong, but that was a hard habit to break.