ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん 🌳 Week 2 (The Wolf of the Small Forest Book Club)

These pages weren’t too bad, I’m up to the half-way point for this week. I got the gist of it, but when looking up vocab and grammar there was - once again - more nuance than I got from it. Here’s my stab at some translations.

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ママは弟が生まれてから弟のことばかり - I think 生まれる here is the intransitive verb, and ママは is used as the topic only. “After my little brother was born, he has been mother’s only concern.”

ねえママってば - There seems to be grammar point here. I don’t quite understand it yet, but てば seems to be a contraction of a quote and an if-clause that’s not completed. “What? If you say so, (but I don’t agree…)”

わがまま言わないの - When looking this up on jisho, I found わがままを言う as a fixed expession that translates as to be unreasonable; to whine; to act like a baby. I’d translate this as “Don’t be unreasonable.”

みあはもうお姉ちゃんなんだからわかるでしょ - “Mia, (because) you’re an older sister now, you should understand.”

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p12

It’s an N1 grammar pattern: https://japanesetest4you.com/flashcard/learn-jlpt-n1-grammar-ってば-tteba/

Tl;dr, it signifies annoyance mostly used by women

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Aaah, I hadn’t noticed this thread is already online! Now I have to catch up reading what everybody said. :joy: :see_no_evil:

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@MrGeneric @ChristopherFritz P 13 makes much more sense now, thanks so much both of you! and everyone else writing comments and explanations, this has been really helpful to understand more of the nuance.

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Ah, thanks for the “fixed expression” note! Neat how the literal “selfish talking” means “to be unreasonable”

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How does everyone feel about drilling vocab/common phrases (outside of WK)?

It was mentioned that またあとで is a common phrase, for example. Worth creating an Anki card for these, or do they appear often enough that just reading regularly will stick them in your brain?

I ask in part because I stopped using Anki. WK+Bunpro+immersion was taking up enough of my time at the moment…

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I’ll be honest, post-WK, I stopped all SRS and started just learning from immersion and look-ups. It’s hardly the most efficient route, and others learn far faster than I do, I’m sure, but it’s the route that has worked best for me, and I don’t think I’m doing too bad 3 or so years in. I’m able to pick up and read most things I want to without too much effort.

I think phrases like またあとで、またあした、またね、etc. would definitely be unnecessary to add to a deck, though. Assuming you start to read more and more, you’ll definitely come across those phrases plenty enough for them to sink in on their own, imo.

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After many suboptimal ways of going about learning vocabulary words, what worked best for me (after I knew most of the common vocabulary) was tracking my known words and using frequency lists for what I planned to read to see the most frequent words I didn’t know yet.

Doing SRS for the highest frequency words I didn’t know yet for things I was going to read meant that when I started encountering the words, I already had a familiarity with them, and it became easier to learn them. Learning words in context makes them stick more for me than just a Japanese-to-English flashcard alone.

Eventually, I went into SRS hiatus, as I mostly pick up new words as I go if I see them enough. But I may start it back up again later this year, as there are plenty of common words in what I’m reading that just aren’t sticking (even if I’ve looked the word up probably over 100 times across several volumes).

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I feel like that‘s a very dumb question, but… how exactly do you get/know the most frequent words for „book x that you want to read“?

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See, @ChristopherFritz basically built an entire ecosystem around the tool called Mokuro, which takes manga, puts it through an algorithm to find and read out the text and makes it easily usable in other projects. One such project of his is this word frequency analyzer I believe.

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I finished chapter 1 as soon as I started, and now it’s taking all of my self-control not to just finish the whole thing

I went from “I’ll catch up later” straight to “I’ve already read this part” and something tells me I’m gonna stay there :joy:

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I can’t speak for Japanese learning as I am just a beginner, but I did learn English at some point, didn’t I?

In my opinion, and what I expect will be the case for my learning process eventually, is that SRS will work most efficiently in the beginning for building a basic foundation of vocabulary with which to comprehend and learn grammar. Which is why I start reading Japanese in ABBC and Satori Reader now, as my next level.

I expect this phase to take at least a year, but at some point within this time I will start writing a diary/journal. Back in the day when learning English I used live-journal, but mostly stuck to real paper and writing by hand. Nowadays I’d consider starting a thread in the campfire and just type, as to invite people to correct my writing where necessary and perhaps start a conversation with me - all in Japanese.

The thing is that learning a language through reading alone will only get you so far. There is a lot of neurology going on only triggered when you take the step towards expressing yourself. Daily conversation would be even better than a journal for that stage of your learning. For English, I immersed into English speaking forums, or at some point found internet friends to chat with. I can’t tell you where to find this for Japanese, but maybe let’s consider this stage 4 of our learning, even after expressing yourself in logs and learning environments such as this forum?

IMO, the best approach to learning expressions and vocabs at some point is to write a private Japanese journal with real sentences, where you report what you read/learned about, what stuck the most to your memory, what you enjoyed the most; or go ahead and write a plain diary, what did you do today, what’s on your mind? Just write what you will, once the habit formed you’ll begin to use the new words you’ve just learned, and that will work ton times better than SRS.

But writing is my kind of drug, and I know it isn’t comfortable for everyone. Still I believe it is a powerful tool to get you on the level of writing/speaking Japanese, and unless you got fluent speakers at hand I’m afraid we’re all stuck to the screen, and that means typing skills. :wink:

Point of note: Don’t be afraid of making mistakes during that time. It’s important to familiarize yourself with your current understanding of Japanese and “solidify” what you think is the way of Japanese speaking. It takes courage, but there is no other way to identify and eradicate misconceptions of the language - which might be the invisible cause for some expressions and vocabs refusing to stick, btw.

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Yeah, WK takes up so much time that adding another SRS would make my study sessions nothing but flash cards. If you have the time, though, I’m sure they would help a lot.

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I know there are Anki decks with the “top 1000” words and similar, but don’t know which ones are recommended. Maybe someone else can recommend one?

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I’m personally using the 2k/6k deck that’s pretty popular for this. It’s not the best, because it was originally designed based on a newspaper corpus. Also I don’t think I can directly share it, because it has a bunch of copyright issues and stuff going on. But at the very least it’s a decent enough starting point to get you most of the way through, after which you can decide what to go for.

You also have the option of using stuff like koohi.cafe or jpdb, they both can generate anki decks based on a book/manga/anime/whatever you want

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The ones I generally see recommended are the Core 2k, Core 6k and Core 10k decks. As far as I’m aware you can do any you like, the first 2k items of the Core 6k items are just the Core 2k, and the first 6k items of the Core 10k are just the Core 6k. They’re ordered by frequency if I’m not mistaken.

Alternatively you can get Torii fpr a bit more of a polished experience and answer checking.

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I personally wouldn’t recommend core 10k, even after the 2k you start to notice weird words popping up, especially if you’ve been reading for a while and you didn’t ever encounter those words before. After 6k I would either recommend full immersion, or at least going for a personalized deck.

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Honestly I just went for the first 2k words in the core 10k and called it a day :smile: Seems to work well enough for me so far

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Honestly, I sometimes get the feeling, that certain words just can’t stick unless I see them in actual manga or books. There were several cases where a leech suddenly became perfectly easy after seeing them used a single time. SRS is weird.

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Jpdb has already been mentioned here, but I will add a bit info on how I use it!
So basically JPDB became my go-to to study vocab. It keeps me motivated because I am studying words from the book I am reading (or even a game I’m playing!). At first, I learned words in their chronological order from the the book but then realized it was a not so great of an idea. Now JPDB allows you to set your queue as “All Decks, Frequency Across The Whole Corpus”. So I added a bunch of decks from books and games and chose this option. Now, I still know around 1500 words on there, so nothing too crazy, but I study new words on JPDB every day with this method now and I also read daily and… I keep encounter the new words I just learned! It’s such a pleasant feeling:).

If you do end up using it, be wary that it’s an algorithm that goes through the text and mines the words automatically, so sometimes you can meet something that I would classify as grammar or just “weird” words. You can blacklist them.

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