[2022] 多読/extensive reading challenge

Japanese Language Reading
#1923

I’ve been using anki for many a year, and I’ve tweaked my settings, yes. I don’t remember what they started as and I just tweaked based on reading things online about it combined with trial and error, so I have no real suggestions to offer, but I have definitely found that with my tweaks anki works far better for me. One that I did within the last six months was adding in one more step for new cards, so my steps are now 5 20 1440 8640, with my graduating interval at 14 days. I have found that extremely helpful in terms of new cards sticking. I also made my new interval 75%. When I miss cards, it’s often because I’m going through them too quickly, so this works for me.

I have thousands of new cards waiting in the queue and only learn four per day, so we are coming at that part from different angles (which makes sense, considering different learning circumstances and goals). I also wouldn’t ever do the Retirement add-on (I didn’t know it existed but now that I do, lol). However, being able to customize anki is part of its charm, and if that ends up working for you, hooray.

6 Likes
#1924

I’ve never thought about that. On Kitsun I lowered the default starting intervals from 4/8 hours to 3/7 hours just to work into my schedule better, but I never considered the option of just combining them into one review before. I wouldn’t get rid of the < 24 hour review entirely, but having one instead of two might help me out a lot.

Of course, unlike the rest of you I’m really bad at both reading books consistently and adding words to my SRS program of choice. I don’t have an easy way to auto-create the card with context sentence and audio included, and the extra time it takes to add all that discourages me from doing it. But I don’t like having cards without any context so I don’t want to skip that either.

5 Likes
#1925

Thank you all for sharing your Anki settings and strategies. I’m new to Anki and just setting up a deck now for all the words that keep slipping out of my poor old brain (adverbs are my mortal enemy - for some reason they never seem to stick).

7 Likes
#1926

Lucky you! Only one direction gives me nothing at all, I see that daily in my WK vocab. While I can usually come up with their reading when looking at them, and can usually think up what they might mean, I don’t “know” them. (“Knowing” for me means, I can understand and produce the word in conversation).
My 3 directions are (1) from Kanji (for reading), (2) from Kana (for listening), (3) from English (for speaking). Of course (3) tends to get more difficult as my vocab increases, but so far my strategy is to try to come up with as many matching words as possible, and if the expected word was among them, I accept the answer as correct. I know I can’t keep this up forever, though, and of course my passive vocab will always be larger than my active one, but for now it still seems to work (and I still want to increase my active vocab).
Theoretically I also have a fourth card, that is from English and Kana to Kanji (i.e. write the word down with the correct Kanji). But so far I hide these cards in a separate deck and don’t use them; I am practicing writing Kanji but I have not started practicing writing words yet.

That’s a good way of looking at it. For 2.5 years straight I’ve been studying JLPT decks (N5 - N3) and I always had the feeling I “needed” to learn each word because it was somehow considered relevant for the tests. So I didn’t allow myself to skip words from these decks. (I didn’t mind and I think in general it was relevant vocab that I learned.) In the past 6 months I took a break from JLPT studies and switched to learning from reading books, picked the words and kanji that I liked to remember and had good results with that. Now I feel much more ok with dropping my leeches.

Yes, same with me in Anki. I have two reviews initially (the second one after 10 minutes) and then on the next day. The downside of this is that sometimes I have a word I cannot remember for the life of me, and it takes me 10 or more days before I get it right even once. :woman_shrugging:
The upside is, like you said, it’s Anki once a day and that’s it.

I know there are scripts I could use to create Anki cards from Jisho automatically, but I deliberately don’t do that because for me entering the data is already the first review, so to speak. But yes, it’s time-consuming, and I don’t manage to enter as many words as I would like. But then again, I would never be able to learn them all, so that’s already a kind of input filter built into that process…

6 Likes
#1927

Those look like the SuperMemo2 intervals ^^. I actually have been going between having that one longer interval in the learning step and then graduating interval as 14 days, and my current setup. My reasoning for not having my 7 day interval in the learning queue was, that the card goes to the review queue faster and thus gets marked as a leech quicker. In the learning queue lapses aren’t tallied. What can then happen is, that some cards bounce in the learning queue forever, but don’t get marked as leeches… But I have no idea what’s better :man_shrugging: I’m kinda still unclear if the only difference with graduated cards is, that the ease gets lowered when I press “again”.

That sounds like something worth testing. I’m curious how the levels work in Kitsun, as it uses fixed “grades” instead of times, like Anki. Can you remove that 3 hour review and still be able to get the card to the same level with one review of say, 12 hours?

Yeah, you definitely will know the words better than me. I don’t worry about production for reading, because there’s so many words that don’t get used in conversation. It’s hard to tell which words are worth to pick for multi-directional review. I also don’t really like going through a process of English -> Japanese, as it kind of prevents my brain of going “full Japanese”, so to speak. I start associating words and phrases with certain English words, where the nuance isn’t necessarily correct. So I just absorb the content in Japanese and let it slowly churn in there, until I can produce it, maybe :smiley: But I have no idea what is “optimal”. For me, at least, this way I can progress to harder native content faster. Personally, I think getting to “know” a word is not something you can learn from SRS, so I’m pretty lax with them.

Speaking is definitely one area of improvement for me, but I’ve noticed huge progress just by listening a lot and picking up words organically. That’s why I kind of keep it a bit separate from the reading practice.

4 Likes
#1928

I did end up getting them.
:sweat_smile:

The anki discussion is super interesting and useful. I love seeing all these different approaches. :slight_smile:
I tweaked my settings at one point - but I believe my graduating intervall are the default or at least close to it. I see a card a second time after 10 minutes, and then it graduates and comes back the next day. It’s worked well enough for me that I don’t really plan on changing it. If it doesn’t come back for the 10 minute review before I’m done with Anki for the day, I’ll see it the next day anyway.

I did change the ‘again’ percentage thing to 80%, which is much more useful and much less punishing. I’m using an add-on that adjusts the intervalls based on a couple factors but requires you to have the Anki intervall factor at 100%. For that I changed settings so choosing ‘again’ doesn’t actually affect the ease of a card, and only choose between again and good during reviews. (This had the added side benefit of making reviews faster, too!)
At least I think that’s what I did - it’s both been a while and I did it following a tutorial or three, not studying anki theory.

I’ve only recently re-committed to Anki and am still crawling out from under the ankilanche I let happen since New Years. Since I am also in the too-low-vocab camp :raised_hand:, I’m planning to choose one book and actually learn high-frequency and/or high-interest (to me) words from it when I finish that. (800-ish reviews to go!) Choosing from across all the books I’m reading sounds awesome and like a lot of work that I’m unlikely to actually do long term.

7 Likes
#1929

Kitsun has a fixed number of levels unfortunately. We can change the review intervals, but there are always exactly 9 levels (8 intervals). The reason I said removing one shorter review would help is because it would allow me to shorten a gap somewhere else.

Previously I had: 3h, 7h, 1d, 2d, 5d, 10d, 30d, 90d. Going from 10 to 30 to 90 days was too quick for me.

Now I have: 8h, 1d, 2d, 5d, 10d, 20d, 45d, 90d. It’ll take some time to see how well this works for me. I think 8 hours for the first interval will work fine (since I encountered the words when reading and am somewhat familiar with them), but we’ll see.

7 Likes
#1930

Just finished the last volume of 甘々と稲妻, which is a series I’ve been reading since the very beginning (after よつばと, it was one of the first manga I tried). I realized last week that it had actually concluded so I decided to binge and catch up. Kind of bittersweet to be done, but I do prefer when a series will actually wrap up rather than going on and on forever.

10 Likes
#1931

I just finished reading the manga series ぼくらのへんたい, and it turns out posting about things I’ve read is surprisingly good for motivation, so… here’s a short post :slight_smile:

First of all, the stuff it was about was handled pretty decently, so no major complaints there. The only thing I could complain about is that Marika winning the crossdressing contest, or even wanting to enter it in the first place in the second to last chapter felt kind of odd… it just didn’t really make sense at that point in the story. (Just as a random side note, my current ranking of manga that are about similar-ish things, in terms of how well it’s handled, is 不可解な僕のすべてを ->放浪息子 ->ぼくらのへんたい, but all three handle stuff at least decently and they’re all about slightly different things anyway)

As for whether it was good or not… overall I liked the series, even if the quality varied a bit. I don’t know why, but I especially found volume 8 less interesting. I read the first seven volumes in three days, so that’s probably a good sign it was decently entertaining, and I also started volume 8, but then it ended up taking quite a while before I actually read the rest of it. I think the main negative for me is how the series uses sexual things for drama a few times too much, especially earlier in it.

It also seems like the bookmeter stats agree with me on volume 8 not being as good as the rest(since I guess it must have made some people skip straight to the last volume based on the stats? :thinking:)

bild

9 Likes
#1932

Caught up on book clubs! Not exactly sure what I want to do with that freedom. If I think about it long enough, Friday will come and I’ll have book clubs again.

14 Likes
#1933

Start a new book club. :stuck_out_tongue:

15 Likes
#1934

多読 club

6 Likes
#1935

Great idea!

(marks Belthazar’s name down next to Naphthalene’s in the column labeled ‘bad influences’)

15 Likes
#1936

Rolling right from one finished series into the next – after about a year urging from a friend of mine I’m finally prioritizing 少女終末旅行. It’s going pretty well so I can probably handle one per day for the rest of the week and finish it up (only six volumes total and I read the first one ages ago).

10 Likes
#1937

Well, thanks to Re:Zero, I have now read more books so far this year (31) than during the whole of last year (30), and thanks to 夜市, I will have read 32 by the end of the week. Since we are on week 32 of this year, that means I have been reading exactly one book per week on average!

The quality is a lot lower than last year though… hard to compare reading technical books and 夏目漱石 to reading the like of ダンまち and 乙女ゲーム (that’s 18/31 between the two of them). But I guess that, in a sense, I am thus getting much closer to the true meaning of 多読 :stuck_out_tongue:

11 Likes
#1938

Are you properly appreciating the artwork at that speed, though? :slightly_smiling_face:

4 Likes
#1939

I started reading 岩田さん: 岩田聡はこんなことを話していた。, a collection of interviews with former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, coupled with memoirs from his close friends and colleagues, including Shigeru Miyamoto. The book was compiled by Iwata’s close friend Shigesato Itoi.

I’ve only read 1/5th so far, but it is very inspirational already. Iwata describes how when he became the company president of HAL Laboratory, the company who made games like Kirby, and inherited a huge debt from his predecessor, he decided to interview every single of the 80-90 employees. He would always start with the question “Are you happy right now?” and these interviews would take up to 3 hours each, and Iwata repeated the process every 6 months as long as he was at HAL.

I can’t wait to read more.

14 Likes
#1940

As a quick side note, for those interested in this book but not sure their Japanese is up to snuff, Viz is localizing it and releasing it next year.

5 Likes
#1941

Using my day off to read ハイキュー for hours on end was an excellent choice, and I also finished my book club readings for the week, huzzah. With two new book clubs starting this week (I decided I’d at least try 聖☆おにいさん–one volume of a manga is not a huge commitment) I am glad to be in a good reading place.

Other than book clubs, I am not doing much novel reading lately, but I do get in some each day. (aka at least one section of こころ [which has very short sections]) For now I’ll assume this slow period will pass and not force it. I did have a moment the other day where I was thinking I should pick a new book (to read alongside こころ) just on whatever whim struck me, and then the specter of the advanced book club rose up and reminded me it wouldn’t hurt to wait until I get my feet under me with 本好きの下剋上. :sweat_smile:

7 Likes
#1942

By the way, did you also think that 私 was a woman at first? I’m not the only one, right? :joy:

2 Likes