Something strange happened while I lay in bed the other day, I realized that most of the Japanese words I know isn’t due to memorization. In fact the words I know really well seem to be ones that have shown up on SRS cards quite frequently. However even though these words or phrases were frequent in my SRS deck, they were not the words I had initially created the cards for, yet these were the words I was easily remembering, and not the actual words I was trying to memorize. In fact I can’t really think of any words I know just from memorization. Most of the words I’m familiar with, words that come naturally, are words I’ve been exposed to either from reading, watching, listening or seeing in SRS cards. The words that I’ve memorized alone don’t seem to come to mind unless I’m being tested via ANKI.
While I was laying there thinking about this, I realized that my Japanese ability wasn’t going to get any worse if I didn’t do my sentence reviews. There was no need to do them. In fact I didn’t enjoy doing them, and the realization that I didn’t need to do them was very liberating. Coming to this realization also meant I could never return to the deck. Not doing them wasn’t going to hurt me, the sentences I’d already reviewed hundreds of times had done their job and had become a burden. I had already deleted over 2000 sentences and regularly look for stuff to delete, so I’ve already established that deletion alone wasn’t the solution. Stopping sentences was the answer I was looking for. I kind of already knew this, but it wasn’t until I realized as I lay there in bed, trying to go to sleep, thinking in Japanese… that the words that come quickly and naturally weren’t words I’d worked to memorize. They were just words I used while trying to learn and memorize other words that I hadn’t had much success learning or memorizing.
So I removed my sentence deck, I don’t make sentence cards anymore. I don’t SRS words that I don’t know, because I think that it doesn’t really do what I want it to do. It works well for a method of exposure, easy digestible chunks of language up to a certain point, but to rely on sentences for learning alone is very limited in my opinion. I felt that it was holding me back, and after I realized that doing or not doing them wasn’t going to hurt me, there was no longer any point in doing them. Using that time to read an article in Japanese, or read a few pages of a Japanese book would be a lot better use of my time.
However there is one problem with this, how do I intend to learn new vocab? Of course just reading a lot would cause me to pick up a lot of new words, and there has to be a way to speed that up a little, beyond just reading lots every day. I’ve decided to give khatzumoto’s Massive Context method a try, and so far I’m liking it. It basically means that I have to read a new article every day, which I had already been trying to do anyway. It’s basically as if Just read a new article every day, but with SRS and cloze deletion thrown in for the words I don’t know. I’m still experimenting with it so I don’t even know if it’s going to work, but the idea is that the cloze deletions make you anticipate the correct word or kanji. It’s kind of like sentences 2.0, or the next step up from sentences. No English, all Japanese, monolingual if you will.
So my method has evolved to: Watching as much Japanese Drama and movies as I can, listening to Japanese audio all day long, reading articles and creating MCCs, reviewing some grammar occasionally, and reading Japanese books as much as I can. This is pretty much what I had wanted to get to, but I don’t know how well Massive Context will work, I may endup abandoning it eventually as well but for now I like where it’s going. What really matters is to just keep doing Japanese immersion in one form or another.
There are a few loose ends I don’t know how to tie up just yet. What do I do with words I look up when I’m reading? I write them down and put them in a text file and save them, but what do I do beyond that? What do I do with words I don’t know when I’m watching something? These are still answers that I’m looking for, but what I’ve learned so far is that eventually answers do come.
Kanjiguy
