Tag: SRS

So many reps to do…

For the past couple of days I’ve had 100 reps to do every single day. It’s mostly my fault because I don’t do reps on the weekends, but it’s so not fun to do so many every day. Especially since I add at least 20 sentences every day, usually more, on top of my old sentences, it becomes quite a chore.

I’m rapidly approaching the 2000 sentence point, yay! And it’s all sentences I found and entered by myself. I don’t believe in “sentence databases” or “pooling sentences” or anything like that. The way I see it, all the sentences in your SRS should be a by-product of your reading Japanese, watching Japanese, listening to Japanese, speaking Japanese, etc., and not a goal in and of itself. You get what I’m driving at? The context is important, not just the sentences themselves. It’s not enough to know the words, it’s also important to know where and when and why to use them, you see? Plus other people’s sentences would probably be incredibly boring to me. These are sentences you’re going to be reading over and over and over again for years, might as well make sure they have some special significance for you to begin with, right?

Now back to planning how to celebrate when I hit the magical 2-0-0-0 number!

Anki

It’s Saturday! And a very important day in my life. Which is why I’m sitting behind my computer blogging about Japanese. …Okay, now I feel silly. Back to the Wii to finish some games.

About Anki though, it’s an SRS system that, unlike Khatzumemo, allows you to upload pictures, sound and other files, not just text. Based on the experiments in this AJATT post, I managed to obtain (ahem) a text-to-speech program called NeoSpeech, and I’ve been using it to convert some of my sentences to spoken Japanese. The results, as might be expected, are extremely wooden in all but a few cases. That doesn’t matter though, because I’m not using the sentences for listening practice. I’m using them for writing practice. I put the sentence – picked out of my usual reps – in Neospeech, put the result in the question portion of Anki, and put the written sentence in the answer portion. My task is to accurately reproduce all the kanji and other portions of the sentence correctly just by listening to the spoken word. It’s pretty challenging, though. I’ll have to try it for a few more days before giving a better verdict, but it has potential as a drilling method.

And that’s all for today.

Changes to SRS

Previously I used to add sentences after  I’d done all my reps. Going through the articles one by one, whenever I came across an interesting sentence I would stop, copy it into the SRS, look up any unknown words, add them as the answer, press Add. And then and only then would I get back to the article. As you can see, this frequently hampered my speed of reading and my enjoyment of the articles. Plus I felt some sort of pressure, looking at the number of sentences added and thinking “I need to add 23 more to make up my quota for the day!” which further lessened my enjoyment.

So for the past couple of days I’ve switched up my way of doing things. I created a new Word document that I leave open all day. When I find a good sentence, I copy and paste it into the document and then just keep moving. No need to analyze, no need to look things up. If there’s a kanji I don’t understand I leave it for the next day, unless it gets in the way of my understanding. When all that’s done, when I open up my SRS the next day, before I do my reps – not after, because sometimes reps take forever and then I tend to get lazy – I add all the sentences one by one, looking up the words as I go. This has the added advantage of giving me an “extra” repetition since I’m seeing the sentence again after the previous day. It’s been working pretty great so far.

The hunt for good radio programs continues! And I haven’t been able to make myself watch any of the j-dramas I downloaded, because I really don’t like j-dramas! But I can watch them alright when I’m super-duper bored. I just haven’t had any of those days in quite a while, so I just keep stockpiling and stockpiling. And that’s all for today.

 

Video games

If you have to cheat, at least make it enjoyable cheating, right? I’d play Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn in Japanese if I could, but since all I have is the English version and an English Wii, no way am I going to deny myself my right to delicious rock-paper-scissors disguised as a strategy game. Part 1 is the most annoying part of any FE I’ve ever played to date but thankfully I’m almost done with. So long as I get to kill that stupid cheating Black Knight again in the end, I’m cool.

Still this doesn’t change the fact that I’m devoting a considerable amount of time to a game that is not furthering my studies of Japanese in any way, shape or form. So to counterbalance that, I’m also playing Rune Factory 2 on my DS. Actually I’ve been playing it fitfully for a while, but the restrictive nature of the Kyle parts has got me rather down. The second generation is better in terms of things to do, but the main character just isn’t a patch on cute little Kyle so it’s a bit of a dilemma. Why they couldn’t just skip the whole second generation thing and keep Kyle throughout I will never figure out.

So I’m enjoying the game, but am I learning anything? Quite a lot, actually. In the beginning I thought I’d take my DS over to the computer and enter sentences into the SRS as I played, but it’s a very tedious and slow process, not recommended in the least. So now I just play the game like I would any other. Occasionally a rather tricky kanji comes up and I note it down for future checking, but other than that I’m breezing through. It’s important to me to get my Japanese to the point where it feels just like English to me, and playing through games without constantly running to the dictionary is part of that for me. What I am thinking of doing, though, is seeing if I can find a script of the game, or at least a comprehensive FAQ in Japanese, and then ripping the sentences from there. I’ll get round to that…some day. And that’s all for today.

A further word on SRS

I just read one of the newer AJATT posts about sentence-entering in the SRS. I have to say, I don’t agree at all with his suggestion. And it’s fine not to agree. It’s the AJATT “approach” not a school of martial arts or anything, so I feel free to take what works and disregard the rest. The point made in the article is that excessively long sentences are not good for SRS entry and should thus be edited into shorter, more consumable forms. Come on, that’s just ridiculous. Is he trolling or something?

Long sentences are part and parcel of Japanese writing anywhere. If you choose to run away from them in your SRS you will only meet them again elsewhere, in real writing where they don’t pull any punches. Furthermore, if you come across a sentence you feel is too unwieldy for your current stage of learning, just don’t include it in your collection. Why emasculate it, thereby destroying its authenticity and power? If the writer meant to write「現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」then that’s exactly what he would have written, not「中村によると、我々の現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」, right? In short, this is one piece of advice I will be merrily ignoring as I go on my way towards Japanese fluency. Perhaps for easily-intimidated beginners it might be a good way to get started, but it just doesn’t work for me.