Learn Japanese Today

So I’ve been watching a lot of Eyeshield 21 lately, an anime about American football, and I’ve been using it to find new sentences to put in my SRS to study. I struggled with the process at first, but now I have a pretty good system for getting them down, and I’d like to share that with you.

First of all though, why use anime? Why not sample sentences from textbooks or dictionaries where they’re already translated?

Well, and I’m sorry for getting all neuroscience-y on you, but listening and translating builds neural pathways, while copying from another source does not. By the time you’re studying a sentence from an anime in your SRS, you already have a neural pathway for how it sounds and what the individual pieces mean. This provides a stronger background for the next time you hear the word, whereas with a sentence from a textbook, you’ve still yet to hear it in context and that neural pathway has yet to be established. It is still worth it to learn sentences from textbooks, in fact you can input sentences much faster, but taking in sentences from a contextual, audio source is the fastest way to incorporate them into your memory.

Now AJATT likes to recommend watching shows without subtitles, but I’m inclined to disagree, at least for the purpose of mining sentences. The key is to use the subtitle as a guide, not a translation. I’m a subtitler myself, and rather than a literal translation, the subtitle is usually an English phrase that means roughly the same thing, and fits in context. Idioms and colloquialisms are usually converted to English counterparts in the subtitle, which can be very useful for contextualizing Japanese phrases. As my high school Japanese Sensei used to say, “In America, you have ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease.’ In Japan, we have ‘the crying bird gets shot.’

Basically what I’m saying is that you should listen, and keep listening until the words you hear come out to make a sentence that means roughly the same thing as the subtitle. You do this by listening for a word, spelling it out in hiragana, and then looking it up in a dictionary. If the meaning fits as part of the subtitle, move on. Then you plug the subtitle into your SRS. This forces you to remember the whole context, the listening, and the meaning of the individual parts to remember the sentence correctly.

More on listening though, sometimes figuring out what people are saying is hard. So first of all, choose a show you know something about, so the words aren’t that strange. I chose Eyeshield 21 because, being an American, I know lots about football, so the content itself is rarely confusing and I can focus on the language. If most of the sentences are about Proton Mass Accelerators and such, you may have a hard time translating with most dictionaries.

You should also try to get a sense of what characters you can understand and which ones speak either quickly, weirdly, or with heavy dialect. I’ve found that female characters are usually the easiest to understand, but that doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to them. Try figuring out what a bike gang member is saying sometime, it’s very much fun.

I’ve only been doing this for a couple of days and I’m already seeing huge improvements, so I hope you can say the same.

So I’m a reporter at a newspaper, and every now and then my brain gets fried from thinking about a story too hard. I won’t know who to call for a good quote or how to put together the information I have, or sometimes I just don’t want to get started. I think these are common problems with any job. Sometimes your brain just doesn’t want to work at the same thing all day.

Well, it doesn’t have to. If you haven’t already, you should install your SRS at work and whenever your mind doesn’t want to do the task at hand, do 5 minutes of SRSing and then try again. This is not only good for helping you clear your head and actually get your work done, it also gets your daily SRS reps in. Two birds with one stone.

Don’t think of SRSing as a chore. I like to think of it as “unwasting” my time. Whenever I catch myself checking my blog stats for the fifth time in a day, or browsing through facebook photos of high school acquaintances, a little switch flips in the back of my head to tell me I’m wasting time. Before I started doing daily SRS reps, I would just ignore this feeling, but now whenever I feel like I’m wasting time, I do some SRS and “unwaste” it. Giving yourself a pat on the back for not wasting your life makes SRS reps that much more fun.

To try out Khatzumemo, click here.

I know, I know, another SRS. I’m sorry. But this is the kind of thing where you need to see all the options to find what works best for you. That’s just how it goes.

Ok, so, Khatzumemo was designed by Khatzumoto over at AJATT , and the premise is that it’s a web-based SRS that you can use from your phone, assuming your phone has internet access.

That’s about it.

I mean, if you want to use an SRS on your cell phone, then this is the one you use, but if the load times are as long as (or probably longer than) they are on a regular computer, you might be better off making flashcards the old fashioned way. I’m just going to treat it like any other SRS you’d use on your computer though,because it wins the cell phone market with a landslide victory.

Ease of Use: 3.5

I found this to be a real pain to use. From the load times in between every added card, to the ad that takes up the space where the ‘Show Answer’ button should be, using this SRS is an exercise in stress management. Once I finally loaded my deck, I started the studying process which was possibly even worse. Rating the difficulty of a certain card proceeds to bring up a page of esoteric stats that lasts just short enough for you to not understand any of the stats, and just long enough to fill you with rage at having to wait so long for your next card. Sub-ideal.

Authenticity: N/A

That’s just how it goes.

Quantity of Knowledge: 4

I think there were some stats. I don’t know, I couldn’t tell in the 1.5 second window I had to look at them.

Price: 10

I grudgingly admit that it’s free

Fun: 2 (Anger: 9)

A lot of what I find rewarding in an SRS is the ability to zip from card to card instantly and feel like your mind is always the case. Khatsumemo makes that impossible. The load times are just too long.

Overall: 4/This time it actually matters

Now don’t get me wrong, I love AJATT and everything that it stands for, but this SRS is far too awful to justify any use outside a high-powered cell phone. It doesn’t even remotely stack-up to Anki or Mnemosyne. Just choose between one of those two. I know I’ve said that whatever SRS you use doesn’t matter, but that was before Khatzumemo.It will make you not want to study.

You can get Mnemosyne here.

If you don’t know what an SRS is by now…then you must be new to the blog. Welcome! I’ve noticed a big increase in traffic over the past couple of days and I just wanted to thank my fellow Japan bloggers Billy from 7:10 to Tokyo , Tom from Hello Mother, Hello Father , and Lina from Urutora no Hi for giving my site so much support. You guys rock!

Anyways, Mnemosyne seems like its a more cut-and-dry version of Anki, just focusing on getting the only part that matters right. The SRS. This review is sort of a comparison, so you should probably take a look at my review of Anki .

Here’s the review:

Ease of Use: 7

Mnemosyne doesn’t have all the screencasts and explanations that Anki’s website does, but frankly, it doesn’t need them. There really isn’t any room for doubt on any features. Adding cards adds cards to a deck. Import imports a deck file. New opens up a new deck. That’s about it. The essential functional part of the SRS is basically the same as Anki, you are shown a card and then you rate how difficult it was to answer, then the program spaces that card for an appropriate amount of time. The problem was, although the settings for Mnemosyne are completely flexible, I found myself changing all of them to be more like Anki. Out of the download, Mnemosyne has you only practice on 5 cards you’ve failed at a time. This is just too few to go from short-term to long-term memory. You have to change it to 7-10, or else you’ll just memorize something from seeing it a bunch of times in a row and then forget it later, which defies the point of SRS. I like the Anki model better in this regard, I think it has it ready to go as soon as you download.

Authenticity: N/A

You should know this by now.

Quantity of Knowledge: 4

You don’t get this product for the bells and whistles, cause there really aren’t any. If you want stats, get Anki.

Price: 10

This one’s free too, way to go internet.

Fun: 6

I don’t quite know why, but this feels more like a tool, like a dictionary, than a fun program like Anki. Maybe it’s the sharp angles or the bland color scheme, but using Mnemosyne feels like you’re using regular old flash cards.

Overall: 7/Doesn’t Matter

I just really didn’t like it that much. I realize it’s fully customizable which is why I didn’t give it a lower score, but I just don’t see anything it has over Anki. I feel like I’ve said this a thousand times though, but make a really good deck. That’s all that matters. You can find a bunch of good sample decks to try out here, and they can be imported into either Mnemosyne or Anki. But don’t only use them. Make your own. You can do it.

But I admit, the true test of an SRS is over months, not days and I’ve only been going for days. To see another review of Mnemosyne, click here .

You can find the Anki website here .

In case you missed my previous article, here’s a link to an explanation of what an SRS actually is.

I also want to preface this review by invalidating it. It really does not matter that much which SRS you use, especially compared to the importance of what you put in it and how often you use it. Just use this review, and the other ones I’ll be doing later this week to find the right one for you, and just don’t stress about the decision after that. They’re not that different.

Ease of Use: 9

As the name Anki, meaning memorize in Japanese, might suggest, this SRS was designed with Japanese in mind. It comes all prepared with a preset for setting up Japanese-style flashcards with three separate fields for kanji, reading, and meaning. It even comes with some pre-made JLPT decks so you can try it out right away, but for the most effective use, you should make your own cards. Also, the website has a bunch of extremely helpful videos on how to use the product. I was able to start learning stuff within minutes of downloading it, never having used an SRS before. It’s so user friendly, you’ll pick it up in no time. One more neat feature is that you can sync the flashcards you’ve been working on with the sites web server and access them anywhere, which is perfect for while you’re at work. I know I’ll be doing some Anki tomorrow.

Authenticity: N/A

This really depends on what you put into it. The program can’t help but teach you what you tell it to, so make sure you put in authentic Japanese. For some guidelines on what to put in, go here .

Quality of Knowledge: 9

You would think this would be N/A, but Anki actually provides a lot of neat statistical data to help you out.

It’s really need to track your progress and your retention rate, and this data can really teach you a lot about the way you learn Japanese. You can find the ideal amount of spacing between showings of a card, and see what kind of cards you learn fastest. Really interesting stuff.

There’s also a neat table that can show you how many kanji you’ve learned, and at what level.

This is a good way to keep track of you’re ability to read kanji, especially if you follow the Jouyou kanji percentage, which is the government list for fluency. Really simple, yet with tons of depth.

Price: 10

Oh yeah. It’s free.

Fun: 8

Using an SRS is actually decently fun. They have little bars in the corner so you can see how you’re doing, green means good, yellow means ok, and red means bad, I mean, it’s just like Guitar Hero. It’s really easy to plow through a bunch of cards really fast when you need to, and the ones that make you think you can take your time on. I know I’m kind of a nerd, but it is very fun for me, and the graphs make you feel like you’re making progress, which is encouraging because it’s hard to tell if you’re getting better without hard evidence staring you in the face.

Overall: 9/Doesn’t Matter

Anki is a really solid SRS with a lot of cool features, and I really like it. But I really do want to reiterate that the SRS you use doesn’t really matter too much. If, for some reason, you have trouble getting Anki to work, don’t sweat it. Just get a different one. They’re basically the same. But if you want to keep track of your progress and use your SRS both on and offline, Anki might be a good choice for you.

Well, I have to get up for work at 5 AM and go to work, but happy memorizing to you guys!

I found myself asking that question the other night as I was perusing some other Japanese learning blogs. The term SRS just kept popping up and I couldn’t quite get what it was. I knew it was some piece of language learning equipment, but it took me forever to find out what it actually was.

SRS stands for “spaced repitition system,” and it’s essentially a flashcard program with a complex algorithm attached to decide when you should see the next card. You just plug in your cards and then study them. Seeing the same card again with some space gives you time to remember your mistakes and not make them again.

I’m new to the SRS game, so I don’t feel comfortable putting up a review yet, but right now I’m tooling around with an SRS called Anki that seems to be pretty cool. It’s kind of geared towards Japanese in that you can enter in the kanji, kana, and meaning for any card. It seems pretty useful for retention so far, but only time will tell. I’ll try to put up a review tomorrow.

Some other SRS’s include Mnemosyne , which is a very simple, bare-bones SRS, and KhatsuMemo which you can use on cell phones.

Special Thanks to Khatsumoto over at AJATT for pointing this out to me.

Also, sorry about the short posts lately. I have a Japanese friend staying with me, so I’ve been busy doing fun stuff with him. I’ll have a review tomorrow for sure.