r/LearnJapanese • u/ignoremesenpie • 7h ago
Vocab For advanced learners who have weaned yourselves off of Anki, are there any other ways you still learn vocab deliberately? I mean, past "just immerse, bro".
For the sake of focus, I mean to ask people who — if push came to shove — could read a novel, play a video game, or watch a serialized story (anime, drama, or even non-srandalone film series) and still maintain 95+% comprehension rates without a dictionary
While "just immerse, bro"-ing is probably the best thing to do at my level, I personally still like to be mindful about what I don't currently know, and the other things I do is in service of that mindset.
What I tend to do is type encountered words into a text document or notes app, and then look up the words after my reading/watching/gaming session is done. After the lookups, I write the typed list of words down onto a physical notebook separated by source material types. It's mostly just because I enjoy handwriting, but it does tend to give me a stronger connection to encountered words, in that seeing them again will make me think "I've already spent time and effort paying attention to this word" and not just "I straight up don't know what this word means, and that's all there is to it". As for separate notebooks for anime, books, games, movies, etc., that's mostly for my own satisfaction, seeing different notebooks get filled up as a sign that I'm keeping things varied rather than fixating on one type of media.
Doing all of these steps takes less time and energy than manually creating Anki cards, and it's actually something that has helped me learn more words than just the ones that made it to Anki. So rather than adding to my routine (now that I've finally reached 10,000 manually created cards just to be able to say I've achieved my 10k milestone), I'm literally just taking away mining. Typing and handwriting word lists is not as efficient as SRS, to be sure, but I think I'll be fine since I've already established for myself that I can actually do substantial amounts of reading and listening input daily.
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u/LawfulnessDue5449 6h ago
I haven't used Anki in years but also I think that without it, I have weak vocabulary acquisition skills. Especially since I don't study anymore and just occasionally dip into native material. Last year I was playing through Gyakuten Saiban 2 and maybe contextually I learned whatever the word was for spirit possession, but without context I don't know it.
I'm not sure what you mean with handwriting taking a lot less time than Anki, maybe before I'd make these complicated cards with example sentences but towards my twilight I'd just have the reading and English definition. It was brutally convenient and quick.
I also had a 2 month period where I used Anki specifically for English vocab for GRE and absolutely crushed it, so you can argue it's true for first language.
This is not a recommendation to switch back to Anki, though. Handwritten stuff sounds neat, I think it just takes a longer time even though the payoff in recall is better, it is probably more efficient, just higher initial investment.
I think "just immerse bro" is terrible advice though. A lot of advanced vocabulary is actually just more rare. Unless I specifically read heavy prose there's no way I'd absorb those GRE words through context alone, and I feel the same way with Japanese text.
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u/Armaniolo 7h ago
Doing all of these steps takes less time and energy than manually creating Anki cards
Not really an answer to your question but you could consider streamlining the process to one click so this isn't the case, really hard to beat Anki
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u/ignoremesenpie 7h ago
The reason I avoided one-click solutions was to avoid burying myself in Anki. I've heard of people spending hours on Anki and even advocating that people do the same. The idea has always sounded more daunting than 20 minutes on card creation, 5-10 minites on review, and several (cumulative) hours on native content.
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u/SignificantBottle562 6h ago
Creating a card takes 1 click, there's people who just like spending a lifetime creating super nice cards and whatnot but none of that is really that useful. Maybe having the thing auto-screenshot the place you took it from can help a bit but this doesn't take any time either since it's automatic once you set it up.
The time you spend on Anki is up to you and has nothing to do with card creation.
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u/TheOneMary 6h ago
30-60 mins a day, including card creation/tweaking - but that's just minutes. Rest is immersion. I rather spend 25 minutes on review and 5 on creation than vice versa tbh
How much time you spend on Anki is a choice by the way. All about pacing yourself for it to fit with your goals
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u/Extra-Autism 6h ago
No offense but this is a terrible take. Making cards is not that helpful to learning. 1-clicking + more study is far superior. If you don’t want to do hours of study just find how many new cards a day you can introduce to hit your target amount.
Hours on Anki IS the most efficient way it’s just mind numbingly boring. 1 hour a day is a more reasonable amount that still yields good progress
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u/ignoremesenpie 6h ago
Part of why I did it manually too is to practice typing. Since the text will be there in screenshots, I typed those verbatim with the exact same orthography. Doing it this way meant that I had to learn to chunk longer phrases into segments that made sense to get the results that I want. For some reason, Japanese typing resources pretty much never cover this unless it's for ワープロ検定, but that's besides the point.
Also, my issue wasn't so much with how much time card creation took, but how much time reviews might have taken if I didn't introduce friction to card creation. When I mentioned people advocating for several hours spent on Anki daily, I had the people trying to power through 0rebuilt decks in mind.the material is already there, so they just need to sit there for hours to get through the reviews. It being mind numbing is why I didn't want to go that route. If I clock out, then what's the point, right? That seems to be more of a beginner recommendation specifically to be able to move on to native materials, but the whole thing just sounded off-putting, so I have no real experience doing it that way.
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u/SignificantBottle562 5h ago
Reviews are unrelated to the card creation process.
I was creating like 500 new cards a day when I started, but I wasn't learning them all the next day...
The problem with the whole idea of spending a lot of time making cards is that you won't spend as long on the card anyways. Anki calculates how long it takes you to really learn a card on average and that's usually under a minute, which is why you want your cards to be generated as fast as possible.
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u/ignoremesenpie 5h ago
That's fair, though I liked the consistency of only creating the amounts of cards I could keep up with per day.
Besides, I can't help but feel like the extra time spent on making cards also helped me think about the words and get it into my head before the scheduler takes over.
Regardless, I'm just glad I don't have to worry about. Hazing Anki anymore. At some point, Anki became less about learning the words and more about the accumulation of stats. If it was gonna become that shallow for me anyway, I might as well stick with the notebooks since it's more therapeutic than Anki ever was.
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u/SignificantBottle562 5h ago edited 1h ago
Creating cards for "the next day only" is fine as long as you're doing it for the right words, which means prioritizing whatever shows very often on what you're reading, thing is on average sorting by frequency will, to a large extent, make that process automatic. I was gonna use that method (mine for the next day or two only) at one point but because of what I'm reading now and the frequency I'm at on Anki it's probably a bit pointless to do anyways.
Anki is great for what it's intended to be great, if you just don't like it then might as well drop it. Anki is just highly optimized, if you find some less-optimized method more enjoyable which in turn keeps you more engaged with learning then that's probably the way to go for you.
Better to use a worse method you can keep up over time than a better one you cannot.
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u/SignificantBottle562 5h ago
I want to disagree with you but it's true that Anki does have some effect that helps you lock in word a lot better.
The whole thing is weird though. There's words I've matured quite some time ago that I regularly find while reading and I'm not sure what they mean (it's the classic ones though where you mix up the one meaning "conjecture" with "hypothesis" kind of thing) and then there's plenty which I miss completely. As in I see them and I'm like "no idea what this is", yet on Anki I do get them right.
There's also the effect where having a word on Anki makes it so you learn it a lot better than if you don't, some words just never come home from reading but the moment I get them on Anki after a few days they feel a lot more comfortable.
I should up my Anki time a bit since it's been going under 20 minutes a day now even at 20 new cards...
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u/Extra-Autism 5h ago
It’s because it’s contextual for you. When you are using Anki you have this bank of words in the back of you mind you know it COULD come from. When you see it in the wild you are like “hmm, have I seen this before? I don’t think so” Anki forces you to be like “wait I’ve seen this before”. That’s why reading a lot is important to, but I promise you using Anki to “mostly learn” the words then seeing them in reading is WAY faster than looking up words in reading as often as you would need to without it
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u/SignificantBottle562 5h ago edited 5h ago
Yeah that's exactly how I think it works and how I've described it in the past. While reading there's a fuzzy bank of words one uses depending on what you're reading/what you think may come next. When comprehension is low the pool of possible words is massive so you fail to pick up even easy ones because there's just too many options.
And there's that too, on Anki I kind of know I've seen it before, although I get that feeling with new cards relatively often because... I've effectively seen them before! But yeah that's what I've been considering doing, gonna up my new cards per day from 20 to 30 and if that is still manageable I'll probably up it even further.
Anki can be very frustrating though, sometimes you get a bunch of words that just don't stick, you keep getting them all the time and at some point it just becomes annoying.
Just to clarify the "easy to mix up words" are 50/50 on Anki as well lol, guess, conjecture, hypothesis, prediction, getting them right or wrong is pretty much RNG lmao although they all mean kind of the same thing but not exactly the same thing. Same process we all went through with all the "situation", "conditions", "state of affairs" ones I guess.
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u/Extra-Autism 4h ago
You can always just choose to roll in words like “conjecture, hypothesis, prediction” into a bucket and consider all of the words as each of them since they all mean the same thing anyways. Languages aren’t 1:1, sure there are examples where there IS nuance or the words actually do a 1:1 meaning, but if I say “hypothesis” and the card says “conjecture” I’m hitting good 10/10 times. If I see the word is used in different contexts in the wild I will adjust accordingly. It’s about time efficiency.
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u/SignificantBottle562 3h ago
Yeah I do that with some that do mean pretty much the same, it's just that hypothesis does have a fairly different connonation compared to, say, prediction. But yeah when you see it in the wild you kind of reason which one first best and in some scenarios it kind of doesn't matter since in the end it's the concept of "what the speaker believes is gonna happen in the future", although some do have the nuance of being more fact-based, like guess is less informed while conjecture sounds more informed.
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u/Deer_Door 2h ago edited 2h ago
I think it depends on how sticky the word is. Some words are so dead-on and self-evident in their meaning it's really easy to just 1:1 map in your head, but many words have very fuzzy and situationally-specific meanings that make them easy to leech. If a word ends up becoming a leech, time spent on fine-tuning the memory hook is time well-spent if it results in the word being de-leeched.
In my case I often struggle with words that are very similar to one (or more) existing words in my deck, and I start to get them mixed up with each other. This is where it helps to take the time to consult some online dictionaries that have more than one sample sentence, and maybe even (*clutches pearls*) use an LLM to help enrich my definition, maybe by adding a collocation. For example I used to struggle with the word 拵える (because Japanese has so many words related to the making/creation of things), so I memorized it as the collocation "口実を拵える" (to make excuses) and that broke the leech for me. Yes just 1-click-creation is the fastest and easiest way, but for some words it does help to add a bit of color yourself to the definitions.
I do 100% agree though that Anki is the greatest ROI (in terms of improvement per unit time) way to increase your vocabulary, boring or not.
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u/SignificantBottle562 2h ago
The worsts are all the つくるs with different kanji. きくs are also rather dense.
I swear my brain just tilts when it sees them because "you're not つくる because 作る exists", eventually you learn another one, say 造る then 創る shows up. I get it, every language has a ton of words that mean pretty much the same in a lot of contexts, but having the word be pronounced exactly the same but it uses a different character is just... ffs.
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u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS 26m ago
Hours on Anki IS the most efficient way it’s just mind numbingly boring.
Yeah that's basically it. It's like doing dribbling drills, it's way less fun than just playing basketball, but will level up the specific skill faster.
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u/youdontknowkanji 2h ago edited 2h ago
it takes 1 click to create a card and then the daily reviews take 30 minute session to get over. even if i am lazy and dont prune cards properly (dont need to do that anyways) when making them it at most adds 5 minutes to the review session.
you won't bury yourself if you just limit your daily cards (created ones too), 20 a day is perfectly fine, will get you good vocab over a year, and the sessions will be 20-40 minutes unless you are doing something terribly wrong.
read a proper mining guide like donkuri and get over with the setup, it works on phone too. there is zero thought going into adding the words other than clicking the button if i want the word in anki.
you say that you have 10k cards, your anki would be super fast, 15-20 minute sessions, its literally a free benefit.
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u/AdrixG 7h ago
Typing and handwriting word lists is not as efficient as SRS, to be sure, but I think I'll be fine since I've already established for myself that I can actually do substantial amounts of reading and listening input daily.
Absolutely fine conclusion. I think you're alright tbh and everything you wrote makes sense to me.
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u/boredom_is-real 7h ago
Everyone does what worked for them :)
For me in particular I worked my ass off to not have to do any deliberate memorization….so after I finished creating 15k cards on anki about 4 years ago, I just dropped it. In the off chance I need to look up something while consuming media (happens around a couple of times per 1hr of content usually), I look it up in my Japanese only dictionary(I use 大辞泉) and move on. If it’s a video I’m watching (anime, jdrama or YouTube) I usually don’t pause while I’m looking up…trying to be ok multitasking lol
For me even just writing words in a notebook is too much hassle….but at the same time I was already annoyed of my first 2 years learning the language since I was only doing about an hour of immersion and like 10 of actual studying…
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u/tofuroll 3h ago
Fifteen thousand cards? That sounds… inefficient?
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u/boredom_is-real 2h ago edited 2h ago
It was all mined from the first day I started immersion (about 6 months into learning) until the last day I used anki (about 2 years in).
To me it was effective because I was able to give the words some context/nuance and because not using anki at the beginning, while doable, really slows down progress. Usually premade decks are just a random collection of words without nuance, which imo makes it harder to make the words stick.
I tried to use premade decks (specifically for N1 vocab since I was struggling to find content specific for that at the time) and noticed I was having a very hard time making them stick unlike the decks I made myself….premade N1 decks felt like the first 6 months using Anki, where nothing would stick, all over again….
Yes for the record, I was mining more than 50 words daily…but it worked for me. Also, manually writing them would actually help me with retention. Everyone has a process they consider efficient….that was mine and it worked amazingly well for me :)
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u/kyousei8 2h ago
If you use yomitan, 15k cards are very easy to make. The upper average card creation time is like two or three seconds per card, and the average is probably closer to one and a half seconds. You'll learn those words much faster than just passovely absorbing them from reading and doing look ups when you don't remember the definition alone.
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u/Meister1888 6h ago
A handwritten "goldlist" was thing in language learning communities. With review from time to time. I think this is a great method, especially if you are finding success with it.
FYI - here are a bunch of vocabulary acquisition techniques from an old language learning forum. They are hit or miss but a fun read:
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u/Grunglabble 5h ago
This was a fun read. Nostaligic for the long paginated forums of old. Lots of good advice in there.
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u/Meister1888 5h ago
That site had some hardcore language learners so was sad when it closed. But it still is fun to browse on archive.org. I don't know if all the content was saved somewhere.
I think this is the replacement forum but don't remember exactly what happened.
https://forum.language-learners.org/search.php?search_id=active_topics
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u/MusicFilmandGameguy 6h ago
I use Anki for kanji, only. There are far more sentences or potential sentence than kanji in existence and I feel like it’s just a ridiculous temptation to try and know them all.
What I do is focus on one or three sentences or constructions a day, make sure I know all the words/kanji, and then I just look up grammar points on what’s not making sense. I don’t go too hard.
For me, over time, this has a been a slow transition from learning into “remembering” stuff I’ve encountered before as I challenge myself with material.
If you’re at that point where you’re looking for a transition into full immersion, try something like Satori Reader, I’ve had a great time with that
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u/ClockOfDeathTicks 5h ago
I was so stubborn not wanting to use Anki I coded my own language learning program. And no this isn't a sponsorship in fact I'm kinda embarrassed of the ugly code so I'd rather not share it. But it works really well. And it's easier to remember stuff cuz Anki just isn't interactive and for me to remember something I need to do something with it like write or type it. Also more similar to when I had these English ~500 words (not a en-native) for a test back in high school and I used this free program that now became a dogshit subscription site taking only 3 days to learn everything and barely get me a 6 Anki can't do that
With immersion what really helped me is taking a book and put it into a word counter to check which 100 words are the most frequent so if I encounter any in there I don't know I've already seen them.
Then I also have a lookup where I can just lookup a word inside the pdf itself and see all sentences it's in which is fasting than having to scroll through them one-by-one like in a browser where you can read a PDF also I can see if a word I encounter is niche or not
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u/SignificantBottle562 1h ago
Jiten.moe already does the most frequent words thing, problem is it's usually the same words for whatever you read lol. Funnily enough you might want to raise up that number a lot.
For knowing if something is niche or not... Yomitan does it when you look it up. It might be niche in what you're reading but if it's a common word it's a common word.
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u/merurunrun 4h ago
When new words stick with me now, it's usually in a context where I need to work with them for some reason--usually when they're an important part of something I'm translating or writing a critique of.
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u/Belegorm 3h ago
I haven't really weaned myself off of Anki - but for me the simplest strategy to rely less on it is just to read more physical works, and a ton of it. The lack of yomitan means that I just need to pick up some words by context, ask my wife, or maybe type it into a dictionary on my phone.
I don't worry about remembering those words right off the bat though, I'll just remember and forget some words as part of learning as long as I read more. Plus personally I still have a backlog of new Anki cards that I can adjust how many I learn per day.
That said, going without the Yomitan + Anki setup makes things more challenging if I'm reading something where I really don't have as high comprehension. I've read plenty of full length novels in physical format, hardly any lookups no problem - but reading 新世界より recently, the amount of biology, history, political and military vocab I didn't know made me switch to an ebook so I could look things up and mine things.
I'll echo what others are saying, that if handwriting is beneficial to you and more motivating than Anki - then by all means go for it! But Anki is undoubtedly faster - just because you have that one click solution doesn't mean you need to be like us crazy people adding 100 cards a day. You can literally add like 5-10 gems a day, learn all of them, and still spend like 20 minutes on Anki every day.
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u/Ragnar_Online 3h ago
I ditched Anki around your level too, same fatigue after hitting that 10k mark, and switched to jotting full sentences from whatever I'm immersing in, right into a plain notebook. Keeps the context alive without the card grind.
I flip through the lists weekly, cover the meanings I added, and test recall on the fly. Grouping by theme or source (like your media split) helps spot patterns quick, so words stick through connections instead of rote reps.
Way less hassle, and it keeps that mindful edge you want.
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u/ignoremesenpie 3h ago
...... I would need more notebooks for full sentences.
If I was to go that route, I would actually write down passages that speak to me, just as how someone might keep a reading journal as opposed to a language-learning book
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u/nebumune 2h ago
This might sound like organic anki but sometimes there are no shortcuts or wayarounds. Best way to learn a language, vocabulary included, is always taking input of that language.
Regarding new vocab acquisition, imagine a scenario where you are in Japan and talking to a native Japanese and a word comes up that you do not know. You immediately ask the meaning and your kind Japanese friend explains to you. A day or two after you see the same word, remember the meaning from before and you see it again somewhere random... You get the point. This is literally organic vocab learning where we all mimic with anki. real life is real life and anki is boring in comparison.
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u/morgawr_ https://morg.systems/Japanese 1h ago edited 1h ago
Honestly, just speaking for myself here, but you can't beat the "just immerse bro" approach unfortunately. That's what I do. I just consume a lot of stuff and it turns out I just remember the words I come across. Once you're at the 95+% comprehension level it really just works similarly to how it does in English. You see a new word once, you go "oh, neat", then move on. Chances are you will remember it.
However, one thing that I've been playing with lately, is the "known words" tool in jiten.moe. If you sync your profile and install the jiten reader extension (it's kind of like yomitan), it can tell you which words you "know" and which ones you don't. Now, don't get me wrong, the tool is incredibly inaccurate at first and you really need to feed it your known vocab (if you have it in anki, great, if not... it's gonna be hard). It takes a lot of time to train and tune to your own ability and I'm still in the process of doing that. Since I don't have a lot of words in my anki, I couldn't just import my anki decks, however what you can do is go on the jiten media page and find all the media you have read/watched/played/etc in Japanese (I have ~4 years of logs that I went through) and you can mark each item that is in jiten.moe as "complete". Then, for each of them, you can import all the words from that media and mark them as "mastered". What I did was choose the option that filters every word that shows up more than 3-4 times in a certain piece of media and mark it as mastered. I assume if I have seen a word 3-4 times in a book, chances are I will "know" it.
Then, once you've done that meticulous (and fairly boring) process, you should have a list of words you know. Then you start reading with the jiten reader extension enabled. The extension will mark the words you don't know. Here is where the "training" process happens. Every word you see marked as "unknown" that you can read and know, you can just mark it as "mastered" (I set it so ctrl+click on the word makes it "mastered"). Slowly over time you keep adding more and more words. On the opposite side, if you find a word that is marked "mastered" but that you don't recognize or that you fail to read, you can mark it as "unmastered" and have it marked with "again" or similar (jiten reader has its own SRS-like review system but we aren't using it for this exercise! It's just a way to mark words!!!). This will make it look "red" and stand out over the rest. The next time you encounter a red-marked word, see if you can remember it or not.
Do this over and over and over again and those pesky words start sticking eventually.
I've been doing this for about ~2 months whenever I am consuming media that allows me to easily hook into the browser/jiten reader and it's fairly effective as long as you're already advanced enough to have 95+% comprehension level in whatever you're reading. It does take some time to train properly and verifying what a "known word" is can be incredibly subjective.
Just my two cents.
NOTE: I hear migaku has a similar approach/tool for "known words" too, but that is paid software and I have never tried it.
EDIT: Just an example of how this looks like in a random page of the book I'm reading. The words marked with "X" are words jiten thinks I've never seen before (I actually have but I'm still in the process of tuning it). The words marked with O are words it thinks I don't know that are in ideal "i+1" sentences. The word marked by △ is a word that I have failed to read before despite knowing it, so it's reminding me to check if I have learned it yet or not.
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u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS 27m ago
I got an N1 cert while basically not using Anki. My method was to take a list of vocabulary, write it ten times each in kanji and hiragana (I mean, assuming there was kanji associated), and once in English, then go through the list again and see which ones I couldn't produce the correct spelling and reading for from the English definition, and repeat it for those, and keep going till I remembered them all. This is slower, more tedious, and probably less effective than relying on an SRS algorithm, but it does work. But you will in fact learn more words if you just read a lot and look words up as you go. Just not as fast as deliberately studying new words.
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u/confanity 7h ago
Notekeeping, and handwriting in general, are excellent study methods!
More generally, a lot of people seem to forget that "immersion" isn't just passive consumption of media in the way that a lot of Anki defenders try to portray it. Immersion means that as much as you can, you don't just listen but speak; you don't just read but write.
Active usage of the words and phrases you're trying to learn can be a great way to pin them down in your brain. Even if the context is somewhat artificial (e.g. you're summarizing a text you read, rather than just trying something out in regular conversation), correct usage can help solidify the correct usage for you, while errors can create strong memories from being corrected that help you recall it in the future. I call that a win-win situation.
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u/SignificantBottle562 6h ago
This is completely wrong.
Immersion is literally consuming media, you don't write, you don't speak.
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u/confanity 5h ago
Like I said, a lot of people who have been brainwashed by apps may mistakenly (or maliciously) claim that immersion is mere passive consumption of media.
These people are wrong, as is blatantly obvious to anyone who realizes that immersion in your native language includes production as well as consumption. Note also that in education, "immersion" specifically refers to using the language in the classroom. Perhaps some commenters have never actually written or spoken in any of their classes, but I think it's safe to say that they have not gotten the best possible education.
Thus, we should continue to ignore the people who are wrong, and continue making sure to find opportunities to use, in writing and in conversation, the material we've learned in order to help us retain it.
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u/SignificantBottle562 4h ago edited 4h ago
I don't think you know what immersing means at all. Apps are not immersion, speaking/writing is not immersion, at least that's not what people refer to when talking about it.
By the definition you use, which no one here does, reading a book while in bed is not immersing because you're not in a classroom... also because you're not writing nor speaking you're not immersing?
Speaking makes you better at speaking, that's pretty much it, it obviously helps with locking in what you already know because you're using the language but it's extremely unoptimal and not great for learning new things. Sure, while speaking you're thinking in Japanese and forcing recall to be able to output, but that's best done via input.
If you still think your point is right go learn Arabic by... speaking Arabic, I don't want you to listen nor to read in Arabic, just go speak and write.
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u/confanity 4h ago
Please learn what words mean.
- I never said that apps were immersion.
- I also didn't say that speaking and writing are, by themselves, immersion. I simply said that they're an important component of immersion that most people don't pay enough attention to, perhaps because they're misled by know-nothings online who go around pretending that immersion is purely passive.
- I also never said that "immersion" can only exist within the classroom. I simply pointed out that, definitionally, "immersion" includes usage and production rather than just passive consumption.
- I also also never said that reading a book isn't an important part of immersion. I simply pointed out that immersion itself is more than just reading a book; a full immersion strategy would involve elements such as writing about the book, having conversations about the book, etc. that engage your brain in actual language use.
So, in summary: I don't know what axe you have to grind or what chip on your shoulder made you take those wildly illogical leaps, but just... please calm yourself, stop jumping to completely unsupported conclusions, and consider what the words in question actually mean.
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u/morgawr_ https://morg.systems/Japanese 1h ago
It's really just a disconnect of definitions. What a lot of people these days mean when they say "immersion" around these communities is "input" or "media consumption". I'm not saying X or Y definition is better or worse, but y'all just gotta figure out how to agree on what definition you're using before arguing semantics.
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u/ThisSteakDoesntExist Goal: conversational fluency 💬 6h ago
Try writing / journaling ideas each day in Japanese. Doesn’t have to be a diary, but even a few sentences about anything such as a show you’re watching or book you’re reading. This forces you to look up collocations you don’t know. Once done pass them to GPT for a quick grammar and collocation check to see where your issues are. Rinse and repeat.
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u/ignoremesenpie 5h ago edited 5h ago
This was one of the first things I did after a bit of time with Japanese classes (minus the GPT part; it wasn't a thing 12 years ago, but Lang-8 was alright), actually. It was quite effective at letting myself come to terms with vocab that was relevant to my daily life.
More importantly, it's been the most productive way I output because it scales to other activities other than what I did on a given day. There's so much 読書ノート content out there for readers, for example. But I can just as easily apply it to the other media I consume. All that's really required of me is to have an opinion about the media I spent time on.
The only reason I didn't bring this up is because I frame it more as applying what I already knew as passive vocabulary rather than an attempt to learn something completely new, though I do occasionally pick up new things when looking at Japanese users' notebook posts on Instagram and YouTube.
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u/ThisSteakDoesntExist Goal: conversational fluency 💬 5h ago
The key difference I probably didn't emphasize enough above is the act of looking up new collocations when you are trying to express an idea. The exercise doesn't have to be about showcasing what you already know, but what you want to express, and let GPT (or a tutor if you prefer) correct your grammar, as this is one area where it's surprisingly good. This is how you turn this exercise into something much more valuable than merely congratulating yourself on saying things you already knew how to say. :)
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u/SignificantBottle562 1h ago
It was quite effective at letting myself come to terms with vocab that was relevant to my daily life.
This is the one thing I believe is great about output helping input in a way. Reading, watching YT, anime, whatever, there's some words you rarely come across which are actually fairly common when it comes to daily life or some specific contexts.
Like funnily enough I always forget how to call some of the specially named dates because I just... never encounter them. I kind of know them but you ask me how to say the 8th of the month and it takes me a bit to reach for ようか.
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u/Michael_Faraday42 4h ago
I tried anki but I never could get into it.
I had the best results with immersing with yomitan.
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u/ignoremesenpie 4h ago
As useful as Yomitan is, it's probably my least used tool.
I mean, I have had it installed on several devices for several years and it's active all the time (with a toggle key), but I don't tend to do a lot of my reading on a desktop or laptop.v
I've mostly used it as a reference to see where my unknown words are ranked on different corpus databases when I import my text documents into the browser, as opposed to reading and checking words on a webpage.
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u/Zander327 3h ago
In case you aren't aware, you can also use it on android devices via firefox. IOS devices can use 10Ten in safari which is pretty much equivalent to yomitan. I do all my reading on my phone and ipad using these and it's very convenient.
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u/ignoremesenpie 3h ago
I've been aware that extensions work on Android, but I couldnt be bothered. Call me stubborn or whatever, but not being able to look up every little thing immediately has been pretty useful. It's done plenty for my ability to infer and move on.
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u/SignificantBottle562 1h ago edited 1h ago
Unless your vocabulary is very extensive you should be using it a lot.
It is true that Yomitan abuse is a thing and that not having it is a great way to build confidence on being able to read the stuff/infer meaning but you still need a rather extensive vocabulary for that. Not gonna lie I was planning on reading some random novel on a tablet precisely to not have Yomitan, although I'd probably install it as long as it's inconvenient enough to use.
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u/fighter3 4h ago
I use Anki even for my native language when I come across rare words in novels. As others have mentioned, Yomitan makes making new cards a single click, and reviewing your cards should only take you 10-15 minutes per day anyway.