しあわせ　〜　 日本語のノット

In no particular order really

• - Beware crowd~sourced material. You need to be sure of the validity of any information you get from the web. crowd sourcing is great but there are few quality checks. Anyone with a connection can post anything. I say this from experience as i got a set of minna no nihongo vocabulary with english to save me the time of entering hundreds of english entries. However i’m finding annoying transcription errors in the hiragana. So I'm not sure what time i’ve saved in the end. Can you see the mistake in 秋分の日　しゅんぶんのひ　？ I just kept wondering why it was the same as 春分の日　for a while. Don”t get me started on tatoeba.org.

• - Have a look at the idea of spaced repetition. https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual20.html#active-recall-testing

• - I recommend needing to type answers in. Or some other active answer checking. Its too easy to gloss over a mistake without realising it if just reading and saying to yourself. Japanese is not very tolerant of small mistakes because it has so few sounds. Unlike english which copes with many accents and pronunciations.

• - This has good points about memorising information. https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules

tl;dr read the summary at the end first!

• - I’m beginning to think about using cloze (fill in the gap) sentences for vocabulary flashcards. Having context makes recall easier.

• - If you use a site and add information to it, I’d think about the ability to get the information out again to take somewhere else.

• - I like Flashcards Deluxe. Anki is another flashcard system but I wasn’t prepared to put in the time to learn how to get the best from it.

• - There’s something to be said for trying to decouple english from the Japanese by using pictures, or just Japanese. A picture so you respond to the concept not the english word. Cloze might be a way to completely eliminate english in a process.

• - A problem is it all takes time to build these resources. And they need curation. So pick a couple and stick with them. nothing is perfect.

• - Associate kanji with words from the beginning. If only to try to recognise the shape.

• - When learning verbs, I conjugate them. I find it best to know Dictionary form, Masu form Te form and Nai form. From there you can quickly get to most constructions. With about 10 basic verbs you can go from the dictionary form to the others quite quickly. 1 for each of the godan, one for ichidan and the 3 irregulars for good measure. (Sorry type one two and three is pretty meaningless for me. Godan carries intrinsic info. 5 things, Group 1 has no meaning of itself.)

• Reading is one of the best ways to learn vocabulary. Unfortunately kanji makes this a bit of a Catch 22 situation.

• - What works for me may not work for you.

Verb flashcards I made long ago using drawings (with permission) from a previous class I took.
http://www.shiawase.co.uk/100verbs/index2.html

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January 2021

holding area for now, thinking about topic areas

折りたたみ　　おりたたみ　　folding
無口　　　　　むくち　　　　taciturn