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> handmade decks are better
For me what puts the Core collection over the top is the collection of professionally-recorded audio clips, one for almost every sentence in the collection. Listening comprehension is a central part of what I do with the sentences, and in my view the added value you get from a custom deck isn’t worth the amount of time or money it would take to build.
Based on what I have heard, the latest tool for people who want a custom deck with text, audio, and even video extracted from TV shows is something called subs2srs. The idea is to use the time cues embedded in subtitle files to cut up the audio and video into chunks you can practice. When I tried it, it didn’t work well enough for me to switch, but perhaps it has improved since then.
http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/
> MCDs are better
I’m doing something like that with Kanji practice, where a single kanji is removed from a sentence, and you have to write it down by hand. The Kanji practice cards are ordered just before the particular Kanji+reading combination comes up in the sentences, so they help ease into the new material. I also put some etymology information from kanjinetworks.com on the cards, and that sometimes helps. But later there will be a card for writing the entire sentence by hand, and to avoid having too much overlap I usuallly shelve the kanji practice cards farily quickly.
Overall I think MCDs do a good job of isolating one individual thing you want to learn, at the expense of introducing a whole lot of duplication. If there are 4 things you want to isolate in a given sentence, that means you need separate 4 cards for that sentence, and you may end up over-repeating it if your review schedule isn’t carefully planned.
> Wonder how Sheepy, Mark, Armando, jkl, and winterpromise31 are getting on these days.
I’m still studying every day, and I still believe in the sentence method. Having spent more time with it I would say that the order in which you study the sentences is vitally important, and a key part of the method. You really need to find some way of sorting them so that you don’t introduce too much new stuff at once, especially when it comes to introducing new kanji. In particular, the sentences in the Core collection aren’t ordered very well for study using the sentence method.
I tried a few different approaches, end ended up ordering the sentences so that sentences which use words with the most common kanji readings appear first. To do that you need to know the reading of each kanji in each sentence, and that is going to require either some programming ability or a whole lot of manual effort. A simpler approach that doesn’t involve programming would be to use something like the below Anki plugin, which is designed to reorder your deck based on word frequencies.
http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/Morph_Man
I haven’t used it, so I can’t really say much about it. But if you do decide to try it, you should definitely make a backup of your deck first just in case something goes wrong.
> 人並み以下のクセに人並みに暮らしてる
> Even though they’re lower then scum, they live as if they were ordinary peopleIndeed contrary to what I had thought initially it seems like 人並み doesn’t refer to economic status so much as it does social status. So perhaps 人並み以下 means something like “outcast.” I don’t know much about it, it is my understanding that there is a long history of social-class-based oppression in Japan, and this line and the next may only be clear within that context. There was an article about it over on Tofugu a while ago.
http://www.tofugu.com/2011/11/18/the-burakumin-japans-invisible-race/
In American English we have derogatory terms for specific groups, of which your interpretation contains salient examples, but I can’t think of anything that generally refers to people of low social status the way 人並み以下 appears to, but “scum” seems to work fairly well. It may be that concept doesn’t exist as clearly for English speakers as it does for Japanese speakers.
> What does the scanlation for that line say, anyway? Does it references classes or just “ordinary people” or similar?
The one I found said, “Being under average, yet still living at the average level.” After reading that and thinking about it, I came up with “Lower class people living like they were middle class.”
I did some more research and found other, more specific words for “middle-class”– 中流階級の and 中産階級の. So maybe it’s more like “living beyond their means” in a general sense. The idea is the same though. I think he is saying these people buy stuff they can’t afford, end up owing money all over town, and then have to resort to borrowing money from black-market lenders to pay their other debts.
Your take on it is interesting as well though. It sounds like you are reading it as, “Living comfortably in spite of being poor,” and the loan shark’s role is facilitating that, even when other lenders won’t help. While trying to find evidence to help clear up this line, I found yet a third possible interpretation.
It turns out 人並みに暮らす is an idiom that means “make a decent living.” If it means that here, then the line might mean something like “Making a decent living despite being below-average [in ability/intelligence/etc.].” In other words, he is talking about fools with money they don’t deserve.
> To me it feels something like: “As for banks, well naturally these are blacklisted guys that have been abandoned by big name consumer finance (and therefore they can’t turn to the banks, the banks aren’t an option for them)”
I like that, but there is something odd about switching the subject / topic from the banks to the customers in the middle of the sentence. I looked at some examples of はもちろん over on Eijiro and found some useful examples.
It looks like there is an idiomatic usage along the lines of “let alone” or “never mind”. The best examples I found were these:
ここで十分寒いのだから、北海道はもちろんのことです。
It’s cold enough here, let alone in Hokkaido.アラビア語を話すことはもちろん読むこともできない
can’t read Arabic let alone speak itThat leads to a reading of something like, “Never mind the banks, these people have been abandoned by consumer finance.” So it’s sort of like, “These people couldn’t even get a retail line of credit at a department store, let alone anything from a bank.” So in that reading banks are at a higher level than consumer finance in general.
Another example I found is along the lines of my original theory, and it gives an “as well as” reading of はもちろん.
テニスはもちろん卓球もやる
play tennis as well as table tennisSo that makes it “This lot was shut out by banks as well as big-name consumer finance [companies].” That particular example seems to fit fairly well, but it does have も in there, which our sentence doesn’t have. Also I have to put the “companies” part in brackets because I’m not totally sure it’s really there in the original.
Finally, there is an example of a “not only/not just” construction involving はもちろん.
当社への貢献はもちろんのこと、彼の誠実さや、家族思いの人柄、そして素晴らしいユーモアのセンスは高く評価されていました。
He was highly valued not only for his contribution to the company but for his integrity, his commitment to his family and his wonderful sense of humorThat one has the list of “but also” conditions set off by commas just like our sentence, but there is a や in there also. Overall I haven’t found an example exactly like what we have here, but in any case it looks like はもちろん has a bunch of idiomatic usages that are good to know.
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This reply was modified 10 years, 10 months ago by
jkl.
Both of you got the meaning of のクセに as “despite” or “though”, which is a big part of what had stumped me. I also didn’t quite get the whole middle-class / lower-class aspect of that sentence either. It’s interesting how different people get stuck on different things.
> Is the answer to this “mini-lesson” our interpretation of just the * line, or the dialogue as a whole?
I guess I didn’t really think that far ahead. I just started reading this comic, and thought this page was interesting, and I thought I would share it and maybe discuss a few of the lines. By the way, if anyone is thinking about reading it, you should be aware there is very little furigana, so looking things up takes quite a bit of time. I have been using jisho.org’s “kanji by radicals” interface, which seems to work OK.
> I’m a little confused as to why they’ve ended the first line with はよ, and not just one or the other. Can they be used together like that?
I double checked the original, and that is indeed how it is written. I don’t have a good sense of the stylistic shading of that line, but it is entirely possible the grammar is nonstandard. I looked in my sentence deck and on Eijiro and couldn’t find any other examples of “はよ、” (with the comma). If you search without the comma you get too many results and all the ones I looked at were really はよく or something else.
> I actually had more trouble with the third line for some reason
That third line is interesting as well. I wonder what is going on with the katakana for モチロン. I double-checked that also, and indeed it is written using katakana. Anyway my take on the overall structure of that line is there is an implicit “and” in there at the beginning, so it’s like “shut out by the banks, and of course the big-name consumer financing [companies].”
The scan I found had “abandoned by consumer credit big-shots such as banks.” I’m not sure where “such as” is coming from in their version. Could that kind of meaning come from the pattern AはB? I would be interested to know if anyone knows of any other examples of usages like that. That pattern is so basic, it’s difficult to research.
「はかなげな」
What does this mean (good luck looking it up)It looks like weblio has it, and tells you げ is a suffix. I think the な part makes it an adjective.
Also, stackexchange has information about the げ suffix, and also examples that have げな, e.g. 言いたげな猫.
I don’t speak from experience though, and those are just links I found from doing some research. But it seems reasonable that はかなげな is related to the はかなさ at the end.
> Young section is at 98%
Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, a retention rate that high might actually be a bad sign. For example, if you are trying to learn as much as you can, as quickly as you can, then a retention rate of 98% means you are spending too much time reviewing cards you already know. That time could be better spent on new cards, so it would be a good idea to either tweak the interval settings, or hit 4 more, or both.
If you trust simple mathematical models of learning, you can compute an optimal rate that balances the cost of forgetting against the cost of extra reviews. The optimal number turns out to be 70-80% according to the theory, with supermemo recommending 86-94% in practice. They don’t explain why the “in practice” number is different than what the theory indicates, so that’s anyone’s guess.
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/theory.htm
If on the other hand you are trying to learn some specific facts with a high degree of certainty in a limited amount of time, perhaps because you are studying for an exam, then you would ideally want a retention rate of 100% for those facts at the time of the exam. So again, it depends what you are trying to do.
> What manga is at a good, beginner-ish level? That is, it may certainly contain words that I don’t know, but the language is fairly non-slangy, and the grammar is not terribly complex on the whole.
You *want* slangy. You want dialogue that represents how people actually talk. Look at what you just wrote. Is “beginner-ish” a real word? Well, maybe. But it’s definitely not the kind of thing you would find in a textbook. If you were learning English, you would want to find out what it means when you append “-ish” to a word, because people do things like that when they speak and write English.
I suggest you ignore how slangy the language is and focus on how realistic the setting is. If the setting is mostly realistic, you will see what Japanese people eat for breakfast, and what their houses look like, and what they say when they arrive home, and what people say to them when they arrive. You get all of that knowledge for free, because it’s happening on each page as you are reading.
I am reading Bakuman and Hikaru no Go. The first is about some kids who become manga artists. The second is about a kid who plays the game Go with help from, well, a ghost from ancient Japan. Except for the ghost thing, the settings are more or less realistic. There are furigana on all the kanji in the dialogue. Both are available in English.
> How do I best use manga to practice and learn Japanese? Are there techniques that you use or have used that you found to be effective?
Buy a translation. Looking up words takes too long, and there are too many little words that mean too many things that you can’t really look up. And besides that, there is slang, and contractions, and all sorts of other things you can’t look up either. Since it is a physically separate book, you can look at the translation as little or as much as you like.
And besides all that, looking things up, or stopping to make flash cards, or doing other types of “studious” things absolutely ruins the fun of reading. To my way of thinking, reading comics (and also watching TV shows) is the fun part of language learning. It’s the part where you just enjoy what you are doing and don’t worry about all the words you don’t know.
There is some interesting Japanese at the beginning of the Space Brothers opening song.
いつもと違う — different from usual
I don’t remember seeing that sort of usage of と before. Eijiro says you can also do “the same as usual” with いつもと同じ. Also compare the use of より with いつも, as in the phrase “quicker than usual” いつもより早く.
空気が読めない — can’t read the air
There is a Tofugu article about this concept, and apparently there is an abbreviation for it since it’s a common phrase.
http://www.tofugu.com/2012/11/19/ky-and-ambiguity-in-japan-its-difficult/
読む空気がない — there is no air to read
There is a play on words here, because the show is about space exploration, or at the very least, the dream of space exploration. Grammatically though the phrase 読む空気 is quite interesting. Eijiro says you can make similar expressions like “book to read” by doing 読む本. But compare the expression 空飛ぶ車, which means “flying car,” not “car to fly.”
I watched the Galaxy Express 999 series, and then Natsume Yuujinchou, and now I’m watching Space Brothers. It’s about two brothers who dream of becoming astronauts. I have only seen one episode so far, but from what I have seen everything is really well done.
By the way, crunchyroll.com is doing a holiday special right now where you can get a 360-day all-access membership for $50. Buying DVDs gives you a larger selection of course, but it’s far more expensive.
I upgraded to 2.0 recently and I ran into a bunch of different problems. A bunch of features I used got removed, and I’m not using any of the new features that got added. So the software has gotten worse from my point of view. Unfortunately I don’t have any suggestions for solving any of these problems.
1. The timeboxing feature no longer works for me. You used to be able to set a timebox that said “I only want to do 50 reps from this deck in a session.” Now you can only set a timebox for reviews, and that timebox excludes new cards and learning / relearning cards. You can’t timebox learning cards at all for some reason, and you can no longer just have Anki fill out your session with new cards at the end.
2. Upgrading my old decks didn’t work correctly. I had to go through and fix all the card templates, because the upgrade broke all the embedded media. The first day of reviews after upgrading was all re-learning cards for some reason, so the schedule wasn’t preserved correctly.
3. Spacing for sibling cards no longer works for new cards. You used to be able to space both new cards and reviews. Now you can only space reviews, and you can’t space new cards. So you might end up seeing two new sibling cards in the same session, which just isn’t very useful.
4. The per-session statistics have disappeared. You used to be able to see session-specific statistics, such as how many cards you answered correctly at the end of a given session. Now that information isn’t available anywhere I can find.
5. You can no longer delete selected sibling cards. If you try to do that, it deletes the entire note (formerly called a fact) and all the cards that go with it, and it doesn’t even warn you. If you want to get rid of individual sibling cards you have to go erase the “y” in the field named for the card template, then quit out of the deck and run the Empty Cards action in the Maintenance menu. It’s a very strange design.
6. Interval customization has lost features. You used to be able to put a range for the initial interval of each button, and the software would pick a random time in that range. Now you can only choose one value instead of a range, and for Easy it must be 99 days or less.
It is good news that one part of the card displays correctly and another part does not. That probably means you have a proper font for Japanese, and the problem is just that one part of your card isn’t using it. Try using the font that works for the back of the card for the stuff on the front.
I believe the two fonts for Japanese on Windows are called MS Mincho (serif) and MS Gothic (sans). Whatever you do, make sure you use a proper Japanese font, or you may end up seeing Chinese variants of certain kanji.
I’m doing self-study exclusively, and here are some bits of advice. Do with it whatever you feel is right.
First, you can’t speak above your listening level, and you can’t write above your reading level. Teachers are always making you write, because they need some kind of assignment to grade. But if you can’t open a children’s book and read it without any help, you won’t be able to write even at the level of a child. You are not ready yet. If you don’t have a teacher giving you assignments, don’t try to write until you can at least think basic thoughts in Japanese. Writing and speaking is mostly imitation of what you have heard and read, and you have to build up your comprehension level first.
Second, when buying learning materials, the Japanese content is where the value is. After you have a basic understanding of how sentences fit together (which I’m guessing you have, because you took a year of classes), it doesn’t make sense to buy anything that has less than 50% Japanese content. You can always just go buy comics and then buy a translation, and that will get you more Japanese for your money than some textbook that has several paragraphs of English for every sentence of Japanese. Similarly, audio programs, podcasts, etc. that have mostly English aren’t the best use of time. You would do better to watch Japanese TV with English subtitles and carefully listen to what people are saying, using the subtitles for reference if you want to quickly “look up” what a word or phrase means.
Third, it doesn’t matter which words you learn, it matters how many words you learn. Classes have you focus on word lists, because they need something to test you on. So the words on this week’s list are judged to be more important for you to learn than the rest of the language. But when you are learning on your own, that doesn’t matter any more. You want to build as much vocabulary as you can, as quickly as possible. So if you are having trouble remembering a word or phrase, don’t spend a bunch of extra time on it. Keep moving. There is no value in drilling a given word to death. It is not more important than all the other words which you can learn by seeing them just a few times.
Finally, learning words in context is more effective than learning them in isolation, because in addition to learning their basic meaning, you get an idea of how they are used. Classes focus on individual words because it’s easier to grade quizzes that way. They give you the word, and you write down the pre-assigned corresponding word. But if you don’t have to worry about that, focus on sentences instead of individual words. In other words, if you are going to do flash cards, I suggest making a sentence deck rather than using a traditional one-word-at-a-time vocabulary deck.
If you want to read a bit more about language self-study, I suggest starting with antimoon.com. It focuses on learning English instead of Japanese, but I think all the ideas are the right ideas. Khatzumoto’s alljapaneseallthetime.com is also good, but I think some of the things he talks about (sleep learning, learning without understanding) are completely bogus. But you can decide that for yourself I guess.
> Whether or not you understand any of what you are listening to is irrelevant.
“We acquire language in one way, and only one way — when we understand messages.” — SDK
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This reply was modified 10 years, 10 months ago by
