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Lately Khatzumoto has been freaking out in a cryptic, buy-and-I-’ll-tell-you fashion about what he is calling MCDs, or Massive Cloze Deletions. The idea, and it’s definitely not a new idea, is to make cards which supply a lot of context, but something is left out, and then you fill in what is missing.
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/10000-sentences-is-dead-long-live-mcds
Coincidentally I have been thinking about this myself lately as well. I have been thinking about a good way to isolate individual kanji and practice writing them without relying on English keywords. Ideally the front of the card should contain some Japanese that tells you unambiguously which kanji you are supposed to write, and also the front of the card should be something you already understand.
In my case, I have a few thousand sentences which I know by ear, and I have written versions of those sentences, and I want to combine those pieces somehow to practice kanji writing. Here is one possible way to do this, for each kanji that appears in the deck.
Choosing a sentence that contains the kanji, make a card like this:
Front:
-play audio
-show the text of the sentence, replacing the kanji with _Back:
-the kanjiThen you listen to the audio, and read the written version to see which kanji is missing.
If you don’t have audio, you can just write furigana over the word with the missing kanji, and that should be enough to tell you what the missing kanji is. You can use the Japanese plugin to make furigana-ized cards look pretty.
If the plugin isn’t working for you, or if you can’t figure out how it works, you can just put the furigana in a different field of the card, and display that field on the line above or below the sentence. That will get the job done also.
Haha, I just started changing my deck into this layout few days ago. Great minds think alike and all (or read the same site) :P I managed to change 350 cards so far (luckily I have only 1k, so I’ll be done by Sunday). My previous deck was hiragana/audio -> kanji, but I would forget the meanings of isolated words all the time. This was pretty frustrating since the goal of that deck was to practice kanji, not meanings, and I would often have to fail a card because I didn’t know what the words mean.
I am very stubborn about not having English words on front of my cards, so cloze deletion sounded like a great idea. Works great so far. I breezed through my kanji reviews.I will also start MCD on my main sentence deck next week. Not sure what to delete, though. Starting with particles sounds safe enough :)
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This reply was modified 12 years, 9 months ago by
Hatt0ri.
Remember the good old days when cloze-deletion went under the much more humble name, fill-in-the-blank? The problem for me with CD decks (or even sentence decks) is there is too much context. I see some word in the sentence that reminds me of the answer even if I don’t understand what’s going on. Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t use them; I just always feel like I’m cheating. For example, if a sentence is testing a particular particle usage and starts with something that I recognize (maybe ３月の１日に。。。), then I see the beginning and relate the correct answer without even having to understand or even to read the whole sentence. I can just think “Oh, its the March 3rd card. The answer is には.” I’m still trying to think of a way around this that doesn’t involve starting with a deck of ten billion cards just so I can’t memorize the answers. That’s been the problem for me trying to use anki to study things other than kanji and vocab.
Already have a 600+ card deck of this. Been doing this for like around 2 months already lol
“I see some word in the sentence that reminds me of the answer even if I don’t understand what’s going on”
I have the same problem, but also with audio. Sometimes I can just recognize some of the words and I know the sentence’s meaning without having to analyze anything. I am figuring that if you can actually remember sentences and then just keep adding then it won’t be a bad thing because you constantly recall(even if it is with pretty much no effort).
As for CD I have done so much of it while learning English and German, and even though I can see the benefit I just hate the layout. You often end up with a word that could be used in the sentence, but it is not the same as the one the answer provides – and often there are more than 1 right choice.
So even though it is getting praised I won’t switch over, I have plenty of sentences in my Core decks ^^> I just started changing my deck into this layout few days ago
I think I am going to keep working with my existing sentence deck the way it is, and use this new deck instead of what I had been doing for writing practice, which was copying out the vocabulary lists in the back of Mangajin.
> often there are more than 1 right choice.
Initially I thought I had solved this problem by showing both the audio and the written version, minus the one kanji. But I just remembered that there are words that can be written in more than one way (e.g. きく). So far I don’t know how much of a problem this is actually going to be in practice.
my most hated is
かえる
That is such a damn pain!On topic, Having audio in the card makes a lot of sense, and actually removes one of my complaints about CD. Good idea!
It would just take very long to make cards that way :/ I have decided to try to make an entire TV-show or drama at around 1h~ to audio cards so I can have some audio I fully understand. Maybe I will consider doing it for that :)Well it turns out that writing even just one kanji is a bit too difficult for me, so I modified the cards even further. Now in addition you see an image of the kanji you are supposed to write, with one part missing.
The idea is to write the whole kanji, but the only thing you actually have to remember is the one part of the kanji that is missing. I hesitate to call the parts “radicals” because I think that has a precise technical meaning. I just break up the kanji in whatever way I think makes sense.
Doing it this way gives you multiple cards per kanji to work with, and the extra repetition helps. And it also helps isolate which part of the kanji you are having trouble remembering. All the cards for a given kanji are proper sibling cards, so you can use the Anki sibling settings to space out reps of the same kanji.
I tried doing that, but instead of radicals, learning each kanji separately. Didn’t work for me :D
Are you using MCD support plugin to create cards? I need at least four fields for every card, but plugin allows only two. I would have to input other two fields manually. So in the end I gave up on creating MCD cards. The point of MCD’s is to make learning easier, but all the time I spent creating new cards doesn’t make up for it. I still use kanji practice deck with clozed kanji, though. It’s awesome :D
@JKL
My recommendations is that you do RTK if you want to write kanji. Yes it takes time, but you can easily remember how to write all the 2200 常用漢字, and it comes with other benefits as well ^^.> Are you using MCD support plugin to create cards?
I wrote a Python script to choose a representative sentence for each kanji, trying to avoid using the same sentence twice if possible. I’ll post the script if you are interested. The most time-consuming part is creating the new “missing piece” kanji images. I have a set of images for the kanji, but I have to edit them by hand to remove the part I want to focus on for each card.
> My recommendations is that you do RTK if you want to write kanji.
It seems like everyone who did RTK recommends it. If this new “missing piece kanji” approach doesn’t work out, maybe RTK will be the thing to do after all.
Thanks for the offer, but I’ll stick to my decks for now. When I’m done with Core, I’ll probably start sentence mining on my own and then I’ll create MCD cards (probably). Until then… :D
I recommend RTK too. You could even benefit from just rearranging your current sentence/kanji deck to fit the Heisig order, because it would be easier to remember radicals that way.
i’m a little new, but could tell me what RTK stands for? and if its books, does anyone have used ones they are done with they might be willing to sell?
it’s been answered a little over 9000 times, but here:
Remembering the Kanji, a book that helps in remembering the kanji. Do mother nature a favor and just google a pdf of it, no direct links since it’s apparently not permitted on here. In the end you’ll end up using the website “Reviewing the Kanji” a lot more.
AnonymousI Lol’d at Armandos post because that’s legitimately 100% how most people naturally end up going about it.
And it’s not even like he suggested it, but told him how he will do it.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 9 months ago by
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