šŸ‘» Autumn's High Tech Study Log ✨ Learning Japanese at the speed of light with tech 🫨

Pimsleur

Great question! I think Pimsleur is probably one of the absolute best apps to use to get started in a language, yet alone speak it.

Trouble is, I do not use it anymore. I found it was so hard for me to listen. I would relisten 4+ times and still not get more than 50% of it right.

I have a learning disability and I think it’s important for me to find things which work for me

What worked with Pimsleur was stopping in 10 min increments and resuming a few mins later, like Pomodoro

Trouble is that as you know Pimsleur is a bit split up, You have the recap, then the new words, and then sentences from those words and a bit of grammar

But you can’t say ā€œat min 10 they will start the new partā€, so I’d get to min 12, 13 and then I would lose focus and just can’t listen.

With Anki, Wanikani etc I can literally just stop the work at any card / review and go back to it later.

I also tried putting Pimsleur into Anki, and that worked well but took too much work to grab the sentence + audio :frowning:

I think when I know more vocab it’d be good, but I do think for me personally I just can’t do it. Major props to anyone else that can :partying_face:

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Wanikani

Anki

Pitch
image

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If you use Migaku, you want to read this!

A few weeks ago I got sick of Bunpro not being as advanced as Anki is with its SRS algorithm, and spending significant time on Bunpro when I could be doing anything else :sweat_smile:

So I switched methods to one favoured by the greats. Livakiv et all.

They said ā€œread a basic grammar book but after that learn grammar as it comes up in immersion, and if it doesn’t stick make an Anki card for itā€.

This has worked very well for me. I am having so much more fun spending 1 hour a day reading manga instead of Bunpro! And the grammar points I want to learn I mine into an Anki card. These are much easier to remember tham Bunpro because:

  1. I created them. The memories assiocated with the card help me learn
  2. Anki with FSRS is just too good :kissing:

But… The default note type for Anki from Migaku sucked. And I mean really sucked.

You could display a sentence, but it’s more of a case of remembering the whole sentence. The kanji. The vocab. Hiragana / Katakana perfection. Blah blah blah.

Good flashcards teach one thing and only one thing.

So, I coded up my own Anki card type specifically for grammar.:

This adds a bunch of crutches. You get full audio, you get furigana, you even get pitch accent which can help denote the words.

But, you do not get understanding of the sentence. You may know the words and the feel of it, but the exact grammar point is not given to you.

I was considering doing it Bunpro style with ā€œtype the grammar point inā€, but there’s so many things you need to know to be able to type it. Like someones rank to you, or the formality of the sentence. You can make it so when you type something incorrect in Anki you decide whether you pass or not, buit for me… Nah.

I also don’t want to spend another hour doing my cards just to type them. I get that pratice from Wanikani!

Ffront*

Back

Combine this with a Yomitan grammar dictionary (also works with Migaku) GitHub - MarvNC/yomichan-dictionaries: A comprehensive collection of Japanese and Chinese dictionaries for Yomichan/Yomitan, including terms, kanji/hanzi info, frequency, and variants.

And you have a mean combo!

This is just what I think a good Anki card looks like, but if you have suggestions let me know :slight_smile:

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Ran my cities half marathont today! :partying_face:

Not much Japanese so far due to all the running. I plan to relax for a bit and then I’ll probably grind Anki.

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Hey another runner :wave:
I like following your log as enjoy programming too (and it’s my job incidentally), nice to see one more thing in common :slight_smile:
Congrats on the half! Are you happy with your run? Was it a nice experience? I have one coming up in 7 weeks!

job incidentally

What do you do? I am technically an SRE but I spend a lot of time doing IAM related things :slight_smile: Sadly this does not cross over into Japanese very well… I can run a website, just can’t build it :joy:

Congrats on the half! Are you happy with your run? Was it a nice experience? I have one coming up in 7 weeks!

Funny story! I couldn’t get entry to this one (it’s very popular), so I didn’t train for it. 4 days ago my friend told me she couldn’t run so transferred her entry to me.

I hadn’t ran since January, and I did a quick warmup 8k yesterday. I also went out for St Paddys here so I had to run hungover :grimacing:

I felt very sick and wanted to quit many times, but thankfully I didn’t! My time wasn’t very good, but I did complete it so that’s all that really matters :smiley:

Is your race also a half?

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Oh wow, very brave to go for it without training and after a night out :sweat_smile: even more impressive that you completed it then!
Yes mine is also a half :slight_smile: training is going okay, whenever I’m not sick that is, which unfortunately was often this winter. Crossing fingers that now with the spring coming it won’t be as bad!

I write software so a bit of everything, back-end (Java, C#) or front end, (Angular) or devops or other things when need be!

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Anki

I went through 432 cards today :cold_sweat:

image

I am not really absorbing the Kanji like I thought I would be, my retention rate sucks. I think maybe the font randomiser addon is harming me a lot in this regard? :thinking:

The issue is I do not want to be spending almost 2 hours / day reviewing flashcards when I could be reading. Ideally 40 mins max!

I think some things are in order:

  1. Try without font randomiser for a week to seek a higher retention
  2. Introduce font randomiser with more stable fonts if I want to
  3. Reduce leech threshold from 8 to 6 to reduce the amount of leeches in my daily reviews. Looking at my rention it’s like the majority of cards will be leeches
  4. Maybe find a way to do 2 review sessions of Anki / day? 1 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon? :thinking:

I am thinking because I haven’t seen the Kanji before I am effectively learning it in N fonts to pass the card, since I have maybe 50+ fonts it makes it harder to read. Some of the fonts make the Kanji completely different.

Which is why I think disabling it would be better for me. So, I’ll try it for a week and report back :slight_smile:

My desired retention is 85% and I am just about achieving 50%, so something has to change!

I am not sure what to do. I’d rather spend way less time in SRS land and more time actually living the language.

I don’t think the number of cards is affecting me, but also I mine cards and don’t sort them into frequencies so I tend to get some esoteric ones out of the gate.I am hoping if they become leeches they will be suspended so I am not too worried about that…

I would ignore month here because I changed the card format last month.

Wanikani
Didn’t do my evening review yesterday and no morning reviw today due to race day :frowning:

Defintely can’t do those 10 lessons, I am basically in bed already haha. One for tomorrow!

Ok that’s it for today. Maybe some anime or reading, but after my half I am dead :skull:

2 Likes

I write software so a bit of everything, back-end (Java, C#) or front end, (Angular) or devops or other things when need be!

Exciting! I cannot do front end at all :joy:

training is going okay, whenever I’m not sick that is, which unfortunately was often this winter. Crossing fingers that now with the spring coming it won’t be as bad!

Good luck in your training!!! I should train to actually do a half in a good time :partying_face:

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:partying_face: Signed up to take N5! I think I could push myself to go higher for sure but the exam isn’t neccesary for me, and my work will only expense certs if I pass them so I needed to know for sure I’d pass it :joy:

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Ok Migaku card updates. I really like targeted sentence cards of jp-mining-note, but they’re not a thing in Migaku.

Here’s how I’d like to use a card:

  1. Vocab on front
  2. Sentence below with the vocab in it (to do: only mine i+1 sentences now :partying_face: )
  3. If I still don’t understand it, I hover over to see the furigana

(2) is possible, but the text is not obvious. If the sentence is like 10+ words it was hard for me to see where in the sentence it was, I kinda wanted a targeted sentence card like this:

I worked with some other coders over the last 2 weeks and we came up with this…

Code for anki card front

Insert this as the first script in a Migaku card in Anki

<script>
(function () {
  function parseSyntax(text) {
    let ret = [];

    // without workarounds for missing spaces: /{([^]*?)}|((\S*)\[(.*?)\](\S*))|([^ {]+)/gm
    const syntax_re = /{([^]*?)}|(([^\[\]\s\{\} ]*)\[(.*?)\]([^\[\]\s\{\} ]*))|([^ \u00A0{ ]+)/gm;

    const ja_text_re = new RegExp(
      /[\u3041-\u3096\u30A0-\u30FF\u3400-\u4DB5\u4E00-\u9FCB\uF900-\uFA6A\u2E80-\u2FD5\uFF65-\uFF9F\怅]/m
    );

    var match;
    do {
      match = syntax_re.exec(text);
      if (match) {
        // raw segment in curly braces
        if (match[1]) {
          ret.push({
            type: 'raw',
            text: match[1]
          });
        }
        // syntax segment
        if (match[2]) {
          const braket_parts = match[4].split(';');

          const first_parts = braket_parts[0].split(',');

          const reading = first_parts[0] || '';
          const dict_form = first_parts[1] || '';

          const pitch_accent_parts = braket_parts[1] || '';
          const pitch_accents = pitch_accent_parts.split(',');

          const pre_text_match = match[3];

          let i = pre_text_match.length;
          while (i > 0) {
            if (!ja_text_re.test(pre_text_match[i - 1])) {
              break;
            }
            i--;
          }

          if (i > 0) {
            ret.push({
              type: 'plain',
              text: pre_text_match.substring(0, i)
            });
          }

          const pre_text = pre_text_match.substring(i);

          ret.push({
            type: 'syntax',
            word_pre: pre_text,
            word_post: match[5],
            reading: reading,
            dict_form: dict_form,
            pitch_accents: pitch_accents
          });
        }
        // plain segment
        else if (match[6]) {
          ret.push({
            type: 'plain',
            text: match[6]
          });
        }
      }
    } while (match);

    return ret;
  }

  const TW = '{{Target Word}}';
  const sentence = document.querySelector('.migaku-card-sentence > div');
  const sentenceWithSyntax = '{{Sentence}}';

  const targetWordParsedList = parseSyntax(TW);
  const sentenceParsedList = parseSyntax(sentenceWithSyntax);

  const getReading = w => (w.reading ? w.reading : w.word_pre) + w.word_post;

  const wordsToBold = [];

const comma = /(,|&nbsp;)/g

for (const word of sentenceParsedList){
    if (word.type !== 'syntax') continue;

    const reading = (word.dict_form ? word.dict_form : word.reading).replace(comma, '');
    
    for (const w of targetWordParsedList) {
        const wReading = getReading(w).replace(comma, '');
        
        const cases = [reading, reading + word.word_post, word.word_pre + reading, 
            word.word_pre + word.reading + word.word_post,
            word.word_pre + word.word_post]

        if (cases.includes(wReading)) wordsToBold.push(word);

    }
}

  for (const word of wordsToBold) {
    const regEx = new RegExp(`(${word.word_pre}\\[.*?]${word.word_post})`, 'gi');
  sentence.innerHTML = sentence.innerHTML.replace(regEx, '<b>$1</b>');
  }
})();
</script>

This results in

No colour because that’s reserved for pitch accent, but now I have targeted sentence cards too!

Not sure what else I’d want on my card, I think it’s perfect now? Maybe a pitch graph but the colours are ok :person_shrugging:

2 Likes

Yes! I am a huge advocate for creating anki cards for two reasons: making them yourself helps put them into memory (in the same way teaching something helps you internalise it), and you can (with enough knowledge) completely customise the card to give you the hints to help you learn your way, to make them easy to make, etc. Huge props!

Yes, I agree, I limit flashcard time to about 30 min or so a day and don’t add new cards if my intial review is over that. It’s just too damn boring otherwise.

Other strats:

  1. Deleting whole-ass decks of words I got from boring sources (textbooks mostly)
  2. Letting stuff I forget be forgotten - if they’re not coming up in reading anyway, who gives a shit until I see it next time
  3. Similarly adding stuff in order of mostly-seen frequency [first words that come up multiple times in a piece, then words I’ve seen multiple times across different readings, then finally words sorted according to a frequency list) seems more efficient, since naturally encountering a word again is a natural form of SRS
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Just went insane over cow and noon kanji. Took me FOREVER to realise one of them has a lil horn
image
image

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Similarly adding stuff in order of mostly-seen frequency [first words that come up multiple times in a piece, then words I’ve seen multiple times across different readings, then finally words sorted according to a frequency list) seems more efficient, since naturally encountering a word again is a natural form of SRS

Think this is where I went wrong :thinking:

And I think I can solve it with:

  • Letting stuff I forget be forgotten - if they’re not coming up in reading anyway, who gives a shit until I see it next time

Perhaps reducing my leech threshold…

Not sure! Needs a lot of experimentation. I am also experimenting with using the Pomodoro method for Anki

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You can look at this horn as the cow’s head, perhaps that helps :slight_smile:

Yes thanks! Now onto the next problem… Bulls have horns, unless it’s a Scottish highland cow :joy:

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lvpk6tullyoc1

Wanikani

Promise this was 0 reviews earlier…

Anki
image

Pitch

I kinda rushed this and it showed…
image

Ideas
This is for Anki

  • Write code to show the example sentence generated by ChatGPT if it’s shorter. Long sentences are the bane of my life!
  • switch to light mode my eyes can barely see this text lol
  • Grab all the vocab I know from WK / Anki with a lil script
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Finished this book! https://learnnatively.com/book/553197e8db/

It was rather sad but a great story. It’s my first full manga where I understood everything, and I actually felt some sort of emotional connection to it.

It’s about Schmoe House Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum | About Us | Schmoe House

Which is now a musuem for the Hiroshima tragedy.

I might look at Satori reader but I oepend it and there’s SO many things I can read… Does anyone have any suggestions? :woozy_face:

Anyway, my next Tadoku is also not on Natively :slight_smile:

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Oh so I just read a level 11, I think that means the next step up could be this cute kitty cat manga that’s been on my TBR for a few weeks!

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Code update: Added 2 new fields to Anki card, sentence_clean and targetword_clean.

image

Migaku adds in pitch accent and furigana in and { } like above.

This is a bit annoying to parse in code, so I added 2 new fields to not deal with it…

It’s a bit late, but better late than never!

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