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In addition to Textfugu I’m paying for lessons which is quite expensive, but despite all my efforts I’m still the worst in my class. I put enough hours in, I study every evening and don’t do much else with my time. It’s all down to not knowing the words. I can’t learn them fast enough, even with Anki and mnemonics I’m averaging 2 a day (of what I actually remember). It’s really slow going.
Yet across the internet comments like “I only learn 100 words a day. I want to increase that to 300″ or “I got fluent in 3 months because I immersed myself in the language and just read lots of books” That’s nice, but after half an hour of reading I can get through a couple of paragraphs and learn nothing.
Right now, Kanji is far easier to learn than vocabulary. That’s so backwards, it’s insane. I’m at a loss what to do and really demotivated. Anyone have a silver bullet? Or any sort of bullet?
Kanji can be easier, since you’re basically remembering a picture and associating it with a word. Vocab IS difficult, your learning an entirely new word and trying to remember it at the same time as other words.
Next time you hear someone say “i got fluent in 3 months” PUNCH THEM IN THE NUTS. Maybe they did, but they are an exceptional case if it’s true.
Maybe it is just your memory not being on par? You will get better at learning eventually, so just keep at it.
Also the shortest I think you can reach fluency in is 18 months, and that is only because I believe that the founder of AJAAT’s story is true :)I can do 20 words a day when I push my self, but I think 10-15 is more realistic, but sadly I can’t tell you how I do it, because all I do is to associate them with kanji, and then learn them through context and repetition… :/
I think amount of vocab one is being able to retain differs from person to person, so don’t let it get you down.I was doing 30 words a day and the way I did it was 10 words every few hours, 3 times a day. I’d go through them (in blocks of 10) until I got them into my short term memory, then I would stop for a few hours, and get another batch of 10 words in, repeat once more later then call it quits for the day.
It feels like it isn’t helping at all, but after a few days it just started clicking for me. I got through ultimate adjectives and nouns within like a week and a half. It’s quite daunting at first because I had to do around 600 cards a day and that number didn’t really go down for a while. The reason it was so high is because it was a combination of reviewing every ultimate deck (before they got combined into one)
So that’s what works for me, force things into your short term memory, keep up with reviews, after a few days you should be retaining words much better. Maybe anyway!
People that say they learn 100+ a day are liars, that simple. They will be retaining very few of them, that’s not learning, that’s just glancing over a dictionary.
Thanks for the reality check on the liars.
I’m going to try dividing the study sessions on Anki. Actually I have a question about Anki too. When you start a new word you don’t know, and you see it for the first time: Are you expected to rate ‘good’ or ‘again’? My method right now is:
1. see new word
2. try to come up with mnemonic
3. hit ‘again’
4. repeat like, 10 times, until finally I can answer good
5. forget every word I just learnedJust googled AJAAT and the articles there are really interesting!
Depends. Usually i just mark ‘em right or wrong. If i get it wrong, hit again, get it right, hit good.
> I study every evening
This is the only thing that matters. Spend as much time with the language as you can, and enjoy the time you spend. Don’t worry about your progress, and don’t compare yourself to others.
Try creating physical flash cards, and take them everywhere you go. Whip ‘em out when you’re on the bus, while you’re walking, or whenever you’re idle – or should I say, ひま（な）.
@huw
How do you learn your words? Do you add things to your decks? Are you doing it while jogging?You know, there was once this woman in a class I attended who told me, that she was learning the easiest way by dancing. I needed quite some time to understand her, since just the idea, to learn by dancing, seemed to be so unthinkable to me. I’m a very analytic learning person and there is no definition for learning by dancing in my learning concept.
I tend to add similar words or sentences to learning cards, sometimes even sound or pictures. Or I produce sentences decks using word to word translation. That consumes time, lot’s of time, but it’s helpful for me and less frustrating than stupid repetition.
I remember learning すいようび (wednesday, just like this). That was ok, I hand no problems. But when I was trying to learn water = 水 [すい] the Anki card became a leech first. Until I found out by chance, that the すい of wednesday and water were actually the same Kanji. Suddenly I could remember.The trick of “easy” learning is, that your brain can connect the new stuff somehow to the things you already know. Japanese is really hard for the brain, because the words are so different from everything else you’ve ever learnt, thus, those connections necessary for the brain to remember have to be built up first. You can reach that usually through repeating words until you’re sick and tired of it. Or you have the mnemonics way making up those stories, to connect the Kanjis and the sound of the Kanji to something, you already know.
You probably have to experiment with your words by adding stuff (other words, pictures, sound, writing it on cards, looking it up in a dictionary, etc.), to find your way of learning them more easily. Maybe you even need some movement to speed up the studying process?
You also might look at some other word decks like Japanese corePlus, to get an idea, what I’m talking about.
Some other ideas about Anki decks you might find by reading http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/anki-deck-treasure-exchange/Believe me, I have a hard time too, learning those words. English was way easier ;-)
Good luck!
P.S.
I know how to learn a 100 words a day:
I write down the numbers from 1 to 100 the first day, the second, I write down the words from 101 to 200, on the third day, my day off, I can write down the words for 201-500 – yeah, I made those 300 words a day! ;->>>The more time you spend making words seem meaningful and important when you first see them, the less time you’ll spend forgetting them later on.
The brilliant thing about the brain is its ability to only process and remember what it deems important and disregard the rest(for your survival, if you can believe it). Now, the downside is that in a modern society there’s loads of information that your sub-conscious might not find terribly important, even if you want to remember it. Why must you learn these words? How would learning new words benefit your future in a positive way?
All I’m really saying here is to get involved emotionally in one way or another when you learn words. It tends to trigger your brain into believing it’s important, particularly strongly happy emotions are good. Avoid frustration and anger. Try to think of a situation: you’re in Japan, it’s a sunny day and you’re using this new word in a fitting situation which helps you/others. You can get emotionally involved in other ways, tho.
Another thing entirely, try not to get caught in the bad spiral. You’ve had bad experiences with retaining words, now you’re beginning to think something’s wrong with you, and every new bad experience just seems to confirm it further. Try to step back from it all, and then get back into it with renewed energy, if you can (you can).
/rant
One more thing about studying:
Have you ever dipped candles? Lots of people are doing it over here during November.
There is candlewick, a pipe containing hot wax, a water buket and some drying cloth.
The way you do it is dip the wick in the hot wax and then in the water bucket (at some places you go outside) to cool the heat down and dry off the water before you dip it again in the wax, then in the water, etc. The candle grows very slowly this way. Maybe, if you want to dip a really thick candle you let it cool off some longer and start to dip another candle in the meantime.
But, some people tend to dip the wick again and again in the hot wax, without cooling it down properly. The candle grows quite fast up to some point, seems to be very flexible, but suddenly, the candle is slipping off the wick very slowly. Inside at the wick it was just too hot to be able to hold the weight of the wax.What is the correlation between dipping candles and studying?
Well, the candle needs to cool off in the cold water to grow without slipping off the wick. Our brain needs some rest too, to “cool off” or to “digest” the studied subject and to make those connections to be able to grow.
Thus, if you study one particular thing only for 20-30 minutes at a time, it gives your brain the needed rest. Change the subject of your studies or do something else for the next 30 minutes. Thus, after studying Japanese words, study your math formulas, do some grammar stuff, add some words or sentences to your decks, do some housework, watch TV, go out and get those groceries, practice some yoga, read the newspaper, etc.When you change the subject of your studies after 20-30 minutes, the brain has the chance to “digest” the studied subject. Even if you watch TV the brain continues to work on the subject studied previously. It prepares the newly aquired connections to be able to grow better and apply reinforcements for the future, when you study the same subject again. If you don’t allow the brain to “digest” the studied subject, the connections stays hot and slippery, as the hot wax at the wick of dipped candles. In this state the harder you study the less you’ll remember, the studies just slip off like the hot candle wax from the wick when it’s not cooled properly.
Give it a try for at least two weeks. Use a timer to stop studying Japanese words after 20 minutes or half an hour and do something else in between.
If you’re paying for expensive classes and they aren’t working for you, why bother going back? You can probably get a lot more done on your own in that time.
Instead of 2 new words a day, try 5 every 2 days. Sometimes learning things as a set helps you learn them better because you make associations between the words in the set. Write them down as you review them as well.
@OP You seem to think that forgetting is a bad thing but it’s really not and you shouldn’t be stressed out by it =O
“Reviewing information in ways that involve active retrieval seems to slow the rate of forgetting”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting) basically the whole idea behind all spaced repetition programs (Anki etc). Also the more time that passes, the slower the rate of forgetting. So don’t freak out about the fact that you forget so much initially, it’s completely natural. (see forgetting curve)
If you are interested there are more theories(ways) of how improve learning, Google should do the trick so I won’t get into unless you want to… to get you started:
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_learning
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_learning
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