ChristopherFritz's Study Log

[fallynleaf]

@ChristopherFritz

Maybe a kind Japanese author will write a 20 volume light novel series titled, “ Every time I go to sleep, I wake up in the body of a different pro-wrestler, and it’s messing with my love life ”, which can then be used to develop a pro-wrestling frequency list from =D

This made me smile, haha, thank you!

@Daisoujou

I know I have a lot of not useful things in my deck because often they just interest me. I love the 4 kanji compounds and proverbs and stuff. They’re often not really “worth the time,” but they keep me excited about the language, so I’m gonna mine them anyway. If nothing else, I figure since Japanese have kanji readings, I can reinforce useful info even in “useless” items, so that’s nice.

Yeah, same here. And that’s part of why I’m mainly focusing on adding words that contain kanji I already know. It helps reinforce and build on knowledge I already have, so it feels like each card is helping me learn more than just the surface level reading/meaning of one single word, and I conveniently don’t have to do quite as much work trying to come up with mnemonics, unlike trying to memorize kana-only words, which thus far I’ve had to resort to pretty much brute-forcing, haha

[ChristopherFritz]

Almost-mid-month update.

Book Reading

@ChristopherFritz

I’m planning to try reworking my reading schedule as such:

1. Do not read comics until after doing book reading for the day.
2. Aim to complete one page of the かがみ per day. (At this pace, I would finish by mid-2023!)

Well, at least I did finish the first chapter of 夜カフェ. I plan to re-read the chapter with the book club and follow along.

Extra Study

At the very least, I can spare a few minutes to go through my Recent Mistakes in Extra Study. That shouldn’t add too much time to my daily review routine, right?

On second thought, I’ll pass.

Manga OCR

The OCR process is going well so far, although I still need to run a lot more manga through.

Still, there should be enough that I can go through a few Extra Study items and check for occurrences of those vocabulary words in the manga I’ve read. If it’s used in a +1 sentence, I can attach a scene I’ve read before to the word to help with remembering it. (Especially when a year or two of reviewing it hasn’t helped.)

I feel like I’ve never seen this one before. I have no idea what it is.

Now to check for a manga match:

(The “zero checked” refers to how many matches I have checked, not how many files were checked.)

Well, maybe the next one will give me a result.

Okay, this one I think I figured this one out after pondering on it a bit. But just to help out, let’s see about finding it in a manga:

How about one more…

Maybe I’ve seen this one before, but unsure… Hopefully it shows up in a manga I’ve read. Let’s see…

Leeches

I’m currently at 502 leeches, of which 309 are Apprentice.

I wondered today, if I wanted to drop some levels in WaniKani to get my Apprentice leeches below 50 and overall leeches below 100, what level would I have to drop to (from 32)? The answer: level 17.

If it means less time spent reviewing the same things every day for months and years on end, I’m getting closer to deciding to drop my WaniKani level and to go all-in on Anki for a bit. The number one reason I barely add anything to Anki is that I never have as much time for Anki reviews after doing my WaniKani reviews each day.

I think the main thing that keeps me from dropping levels is that I finally reached levels where I’m seeing vocabulary I learn in my reading. But if I’m spending over 100 days per level and hardly doing any lessons, then I may as well be using my time learning new vocabulary with Anki.

Video Games

I haven’t touched Chrono Trigger much lately. The issue for me there is that there’s a lot of words that I’d recognize with kanji that don’t use kanji, and it’s making it a bit exhausting to read. I just need to build up stamina through practice, but a couple of other games have been taking up my (minimal) gaming time lately:

I bought the Final Fantasy 1 through 6 pixel remaster pack (now that there was enough evidence I’d be able to run them on Linux).

I’ve never played Final Fantasy 1 before, so I can’t rely on already knowing the context of conversations and where to go next. So far I do seem to be managing to find my way around and seem to understand where to go and what to do.

I was planning to play the Final Fantasy titles in order, but since I’ve played Final Fantasy VI so many times in English I decided to jump into playing it as well.

Manga

So long as I don’t pay attention to the fact that I’ve been ignoring most of what I’m reading to keep reading more Detective Conan, manga reading is going well. By the end of the month, I should be at at least 18 volumes completed overall, which is a very good pace.

I’m getting to the point where a lot of what I’m reading I’m waiting for the next volume to release:

• ふらいんぐうぃっち
• それでも歩は寄せてくる
• 好きな子がめがねを忘れた

Or else I’ve almost completed the final volume:

• 恋に恋するユカリちゃん
• 現代魔女の就職事情

But I shouldn’t look for new series to start just yet, as I’m already putting a lot of focus on Detective Conan as it is (currently on volume 5).

[Elizabella]

@ChristopherFritz

what level would I have to drop to (from 32)? The answer: level 17.

For myself, whenever I get back at it, I was thinking about restarting before level 20 as well. I don’t have any data to support this except that I felt as though I limped through the 20s. I haven’t delved into Anki.

Oh, and I recently took advantage of our interlibrary loan system to finally look at Japanese the Manga Way. And I am going to pass on adding this to the collection! I came across a grammar point that I wanted to see in action and finding resources is a bit tricky, as you know, so I finally scooped it up. (It has been sitting in my ‘Save for Later’ on Amazon since you sent me those shots but I am trying to save money). Anyway, I found the manga too distracting!! I wanted to read what happened next in all of the points I looked at, which I think defeats the purpose of the grammar review. Alas. I put a hold on that popular Japanese grammar dictionary to see if that works as a resource.

I feel as though I am doing a no/low tech version of what you’re doing, except it’s for grammar, and it’s hard to find a lot of examples of what you’re specifically looking for as you learn something. So, as usual, I salute you and your efforts.

[Rowena]

@Elizabella

I wanted to read what happened next in all of the points I looked at, which I think defeats the purpose of the grammar review.

It certainly sounds great for promoting reading!

[Elizabella]

It does, and I’m not a big manga reader. If there were such a thing as a manga library, I think it would be really popular.

[DIO-Berry]

There are manga libraries though. Shonen Jump’s whole catalog is available on an app. If you live near a major city, there may be a manga library, although it probably has mostly/all volumes in the local language. I know there are a couple in NYC and DC because they bring some of their catalogs to anime conventions.

[ChristopherFritz]

@Elizabella

Anyway, I found the manga too distracting!! I wanted to read what happened next in all of the points I looked at, which I think defeats the purpose of the grammar review.

Ah, yes, this is a downside. Lucky for me, none of the manga in it are of any interest to me, but there’s still a bit of wondering what events transpire next. (Sometimes they’re covered in later grammar points, though!)

[ChristopherFritz]

Word of the day: Inversion

Prioritizing Anki

I’ve long had this issue where my WaniKani reviews were taking up so much time that I didn’t have time to do many Anki reviews. Thus I haven’t been making many Anki cards.

Last week, I asked myself, what if I invert my order and do Anki reviews first?

I still start with one WaniKani review session (which I think I have at 12 items), because my daily review streak is 1,177 days, and breaking that would be too freeing devastating.

Then, I switch over to Anki for as long as I have available to review.

Recent Anki card creation stats:

• 3/12: added 3 cards
• 3/13: added 30 cards
• 3/14: added 0 cards
• 3/15: added 36 cards
• 3/16: added 33 cards
• 3/17: added 1 card
• 3/18: added 0 cards
• 3/19: added 38 cards (and counting)

Selcting Kanji

So far, it’s mostly still creating cards for kanji that I already learned in WaniKani, whether I feel I have a strong recognition of them or not. If I find I really do know the kanji well, I can always retire the kanji and vocabulary cards later.

Now that I’ve done OCR on a lot of manga series (well, seven series), I’ve loaded their kanji into a spreadsheet and sorted them by most used kanji. The majority of the most used kanji is kanji in the first 30 or so levels of WaniKani. (No wonder I seem to do well with reading and minimal vocabulary lookups these days! At least, for these specific series.)

As an example, here’s Flying Witch’s kanji list, with items I already have cards for in Anki hidden, and anything that appears fewer than 20 times hidden:

Once I tackle much of this list, I’ll unhide kanji that show as few as ten items across the 10 manga volumes.

Selecting Vocabulary

From this list (or one of the other manga lists), I pick a kanji to look up words for.

My goal isn’t to learn kanji. It’s to learn vocabulary. But I want to be able to recognize the kanji if an unknown word as well. To help with this, I’m aiming to make cards for the more common vocabulary that use that kanji, to improve my recognition of it.

Flying Witch has the most results, but there are matches in other series as well.

I browse for a line that looks i+1 enough for me, then bring up the image and put it all into Migaku’s browser extension, and from there it goes into Anki (creating the kanji card for me).

Then I exclude this word from my search and look for another word to create a card for:

For 捕, the resulting cards cover the words:

• 捕まる
• 捕る

That list does fall a bit short of WaniKani’s list of six words, in part because I still need to OCR series such as Detective Conan (which uses 逮捕). But that’s all right.

The process is way longer than for people who can simply add a word they see in reading to Anki and learn from it, but this is something that is working for me so far. The real test will be when I get past these kanji I’ve had WaniKani exposure to.

Back to adding new cards.

[ChristopherFritz]

Lately, it’s been minimal reviews (over 100 waiting for me on Anki) and barely any reading, as I’ve finally made progress on how I want to organize my long-running website of manga examples of Japanese grammar.

The main issue has always been working out the categorization for everything.

Recently, I decided that rather than try to have a complex categorization, I’d have essentially no categorization. Tagging will handle everything.

So far it’s going well. I’m liking it very much.

I’m down to just 89 101 more items to convert into the new style (which I’m slacking off a bit by writing in this thread here).

The main advantage of this new layout is that it’ll be a lot easier for me to add content to the site, as I don’t have to worry about categorization or various other prior limitations.

The basic concept of the site is that I do a very simple write-up of grammar:

Then I can add examples as I happen upon them when reading manga (or if I go looking for examples):

From there, if I need a refresher on grammar, I can look at the various examples I’ve posted on the site.

Now, to get back to work on those last 89 items to convert over…

(For the curious, the site is linked to in my profile here.)

[Beyond_Sleepy]

This is a really cool project, I’ll take a look

[Rowena]

クリフリ？？ (looked up possible bits in jisho and am none the wiser)

[ChristopherFritz]

You know how in Japan, Family Computer becomes Famicon, and Pocket Monster becomes Pokemon, and so on?

クリストファー・フリッツ becomes クリフリ

[ChristopherFritz]

Things have been going smoothly as I continue to learn vocabulary based on my manga frequency lists.

In the past, I’ve tried adding cards for words as I’m reading, and those ones never seem to stick. Maybe I always ended up picking infrequent words made up of infrequent kanji, so I didn’t see them enough before they were suspended as leeches?

Working off of frequency lists based on what I’m reading (or have recently read) has been a much nicer experience.

Until now, I’ve been focusing on frequent kanji that also appear in WaniKani levels 1-20, because supposedly I’ve learned these ones already. (But in reality, I’d forgotten many of them after burning them.)

I’ve re-learned all level 1-20 kanji that appear frequently in the manga I read. (I’m not worried yet about the level 1-20 kanji that barely shows up.)

Next up: focusing on manga-frequent kanji from levels 21-30.

Here’s what my ARIA kanji frequency list currently looks like, based on the first five volumes of the re-release:

My method of learning these kanji is to add cards for the various vocabulary that they appear in within the manga I’ve OCR’d. Sometimes this includes less frequent vocabulary that the kanji appears in, but so far it’s been working out.

Recently, I’ve introduced another set of frequency lists: vocabulary frequency.

Here’s my ARIA vocabulary frequency list currently looks like:

(I actually do know a few of these, but haven’t added them to my known words list yet.)

This one’s nice because sometimes kanji I know make up a common vocabulary word I don’t know. This lets me find and learn those. It also lets me start learning frequently used non-kanji words.

I think my favorite part of this so far has been how easy it is to decide what to learn next. I can either pick from a frequency list for a specific series, or view the top items to learn across multiple series:

[shuly]

how do you actually figure out all this mess and make sense of things… kind of amazing

I tend to just add cards but it’s frustrating because I don’t really know how/which ones are more frequent or more important and it’s just a mess

[Shannon-8]

Right?
Christopher Fritz is super amazing!!!

This is SUCH a smart approach… the techniques should form the core of a language-learning company with Chris as CTO!

[ChristopherFritz]

@shuly

how do you actually figure out all this mess and make sense of things… kind of amazing

It’s a combination of talent stacking and standing on the shoulders of giants.

Talent stacking (things I’ve learned):

• Regular Expressions
• Excel / Spreadsheet Formulas
• Software Programming (the most complex one, but only needed to improve manga OCR results)

Giants (works of others I utilize):

• DRM-removal software (so I can work with the manga images from the e-books I bought)
• Aforementioned machine learning-backed text location recognition software
• Aforementioned machine learning-backed OCR software
• Morphological analyser (Juman++) for splitting OCR output into individual vocabulary words and particles

@Shannon-8

the techniques should form the core of a language-learning company

You’ll start seeing people with more time and skill than I have wrapping extremely good OCR into their products in the next few years. I imagine Migaku’s browser extension will have OCR built-in by a year from now, and there are already browser extensions such as Copyfish.

As for mass OCRing manga, I imagine if there’s a big enough demand for it, we’ll see sites that work like koohi.cafe adding manga word lists to their sites.

I’ve considered adding manga frequency lists to my zero-traffic site, but the number of people who’d get use out of them is probably very small (and those people would likely never know that they exist). Then again, if I had a page called “よつばと！ Vocabulary Frequency List”, maybe it would eventually show up in a web search or two.

[shuly]

it’s not just the many tools…it’s making sense of all that information in a useful and organized way…

even if I had a frequency list…how to sort/decide what to really choose to learn etc… that’s the challenging part of what you are doing.

[Anime_gasuki]

Not sure if you’re familiar with it but this site lists 150 phonetic components, and the book it refers to has example words that contain those kanji.

List of Phonetic Components

There’s also an anki deck.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/470563167

[ChristopherFritz]

Thanks for the link!

I don’t recall if I’ve seen that page, although I’ve seen mention of the book.

Thus far I’ve been finding that trying to learn the phonetics aspect hasn’t worked out for me. I don’t know why. It just doesn’t.

That said, I’m always willing to try a different approach to see how well it does (or does not) work out for me.

[Anime_gasuki]

Since you are obviously a very serious student of Japanese I’m sure the author would be happy to hear your feedback. There are 3 main sections, 1 focuses on phonetic components, another on the link between kana and kanji, and the third is about visual patterns.
If you get around to reading it please share your thoughts here.
I just realised you can read about the first 30 pages in the Amazon preview:
The ebook is pretty cheap: https://www.amazon.com/Kanji-Code-Phonetic-Components-Patterns/dp/0648488608/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=kanji+code&qid=1630807356&sr=8-1