Oh, that’s good to know! Thanks for the Anki tip ^^

I do have a sentence deck, because sometimes I just come across a sentence that is just so nicely written that I want to remember it. But to be honest I tend to think, after I’ve taken the book back to the library, “That was a great sentence, I should have written it down.” My actual sentence deck consists of one sentence. I’m open to adding to it ^^;;

There is a setting for anki that will allow you to choose how many New Cards a day to review, so you can still add a bunch at once but then set that setting to a low number. For instance, I really only actually go through the process of making new cards every few weeks when i am really motivated to do it. So i will make a couple hundred cards or something. But then I set that setting so that it only shows me a handful of new ones each day. Also, if I anticipate being unable to use anki for a couple days (like when my kids are coming for the weekend) I set it to 0. That way, at least its not making more new cards due while I am busy (althought the reviews DO continue to pile up). And yes, not having a pause button or rewind button is my single biggest problem with anki. But that’s why I keep my new cards per day so manageable now.

One way to speed up adding words that come from hardcopy books is , take the word you want from the book, but search for your example sentence on twitter. Twitter is just ripe with juicy sentences, about everything under the sun. Then you can just copy/paste the sentence. But i think you weren’t using sentences, so nvm. You could always limit what you draw on for flashcards to what can be copy/pasted. Pulling from stuff like those kids news sites and whatnot.

Also, kanji as cobwebs? lol. interesting.

That makes me so happy! ^^

I hope that you find extensive reading fun and that you learn a lot from it ^^ The problem with extensive reading and beginning students of Japanese, at the moment, is that there is not a lot of material to keep going with: those graded readers you have are the only ones currently available, authentic kids’ books, even the very easy ones (the level 1 and low level 2 books, by the system I use) are surprisingly hard, not to mention expensive, and there’s just a handful of online picture book sites. So I worry that those problems will be discouraging to people who want to give it a shot…

I don’t want to be too pessimistic, though, because I think these aren’t insurmountable problems. Also I’m very jealous of you ^^ I didn’t hear about extensive reading until I had already been studying off and on for some time. I think that if you’re able to read right from the beginning, and develop the skills of figuring out words from context and so on, that would be one of the best ways you could learn!

Keep me posted on your progress, and happy reading ^^

If you like the net metaphor, remind me to bore you with the kanji as cobweb metaphor sometime ;)

I guess that relatively speaking, flashcards don’t take too long, especially if you’re using online material; with books, I have to go back and find what I was confused about (a process I’ve sped up with small post-it notes, but then I would have these books with 20 post-it notes and no motivation to get back to them) and then enter them all in. The time adds up, enough to be well into another book, and I’m spoiled enough to have that next book on hand, so that’s probably why it feels like it takes too long to me ^^

The only thing that’s really annoyed me with Anki is that I’ll add a lot of words at once, do them for a couple of days and then let it slide for a few days, so when I come back it requires a lot more work than I’m willing to bother with ^^;; I’ve read other people wishing for a “pause” or “rewind” function, which would be nice! And it’s probably just a holdover from how I used my other flashcard program, iFlash; I added a bunch of words to a deck at once, but could review as few of them as I wanted at once. If I was to start using Anki again, I guess the key would be to add no more than I wanted to review? Also, I like your point about Anki theoretically keeping those more advanced words at the edges of your brain until they start to show up in your reading more often, too.

I’m glad that, at the end of that big long post, you picked up on my aside about trying to create readers ^^ I’m going to have more to say about that shortly — I think after the tadoku contest is over. I want to get to it soon, because I read comments like Wayne’s, and I feel like — darn it, I want everyone to have the fun I’m having, and even if the infrastructure hasn’t caught up yet then there’s no reason we as a community can’t make it happen on our own ^^

You have energized my Japanese language studies. Thank you !!

I bought all the Japanese Graded Reader books (13 vols). I could only read Level 0 comfortably. Level 1 is harder, but within the 2 or 3 unknown words per page. I am trying to follow the methods of Khatsumoto of AJATT website. He stresses that you should have fun in learning Japanese. So far it has not been fun especially Heisig kanji. Looks like extensive reading will change that.

First is that I hear people describing how long it takes them to make flashcards and I just think, “huh?” Because in my experience, copy/pasting a sentence into anki, clicking a couple things, and moving on is something you can learn to do pretty fast. Reviewing them can be fast too if you strictly limit how many new cards you add to your reviews each day to a very small, manageable number. In my experience, I can spend as little as 20 minutes a day on flashcards and see ample benefits in vocabulary acquisition, while spending the rest of my time immersed in Japanese/reading etc. In that case, 20 minutes is a pretty small trade-off and could be really complimentary to your tadoku process. I’m talking about adding no more than 10 new cards a day.

Ideally, your flashcards would come from your reading, or at least the words would, and in my experience I tend to pick the words I am seeing over and over but not remembering and/or words I have actually learned in hiragana and want to learn to read the kanji for.

As far as not getting repetition with the words you have made flash cards for, for instance, you pick a word, turns out that word is pretty rare in children’s book so after memorizing it, you don’t see it again in your reading for a long time. I think this is where the SRS software like anki shines, and another reason besides speed that it beats out paper flashcards. The SRS will keep showing you the word, at expanding intervals spaced out into the future to maximize efficiency. That way, you keep reviewing the word until it DOES come up again in your reading, but only as often as you NEED to review it, and not more.

Anyways, this doesnt get around the fact that for many people, flashcards are super boring. In fact, at one point I really burned myself out on them, so I can understand this to some extent. It’s one reason I limit my flashcards to such a small amount of time now. But, I think that’s why your idea for readers is a really awesome one. I would definitely be willing to get involved in helping make that a reality. Just let me know. The great thing is that these readers could be used along with flashcards, or instead of flashcards, and be of real benefit to future tadokoers, regardless.

With this post, the only question I wanted to answer is “can you learn vocabulary through tadoku, and if so, what does the process look like?” Because from time to time I come across comments, forum posts, etc. indicating that it’s impossible, and I can’t help but think, “Then what are these words I’ve been learning, chopped liver?” ^^;; But you’re right – that’s a totally different question from “How can I make tadoku into a reasonable method of study if I can’t get enough material?”

Don’t be hard on yourself and think of problems with tadoku as a method as excuses on your part. You can go find all the drama, manga, JLPT study tips and so on that you want because there’s pre-existing communities and distribution channels, but this is a pretty new, hard-to-implement tactic for those of us studying Japanese outside of Japan. (I’m just glad I’m learning a language like Japanese. I used to want to learn Ancient Egyptian.)

I don’t think flashcards are necessarily bad if you’re learning the right words through them — it’s just hard to know what those words might be (and then of course they’re boring to review, out of context if not in sentences and encourage a pretty shallow understanding of a word). I think that if you’re reading a book that’s at a low level and you can generally understand it, any word in that book should theoretically be at the right level for you to learn.

What words would be best to learn, overall, is something I’ve given a lot of thought to as well, because again, there are resources that are short cuts to taking the JLPT, navigating a homestay, getting along in an office job, reading a newspaper, but none (that I’ve found) that are specifically designed for preparing a reader for reading authentic picture books and kids’ books and being able to use the skills necessary to read without dictionaries. If there was a word frequency list based on just Japanese picture books that would be great – this list has some based on novels, newspapers and example sentences, none of which I want. http://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/00INDEX.html#oth_fil One bright spot: the frequency list based on novels (http://pomax.nihongoresources.com/index.php?entry=1222520260) used a tool that I think at least one of us should be able to figure out: http://chasen-legacy.sourceforge.jp/ That is, this person downloaded a bunch of novels then ran them through this tool to create a frequency analysis. I just found this, and I had taken down all the text from 心の絵本 just to prepare to do something like this — I’m crazy enough to try it by hand if it was the only way, but I was certainly hoping it wasn’t ^^;; What I’d like is to find the words that readers need in order to have enough background knowledge to pick up any picture book or low-level 3 book and read it comfortably, then present those words in a graded-reader style format. Doing that is going to take a while, of course, and I haven’t even really started. I keep a list of words that pop up often, but they tend to be words that amuse me, so that’s not too useful ^^;;

Do you think rereading would be a possible tactic for now? It’s something I’ve thought about since I read a study written by a beginning learner who reported that rereading helped her comprehension. I tend to want to go straight to the next book, because I’m lucky enough to have those books available – but when I do re-read things, I do notice that things I didn’t understand before become clear due to context, or that words I wasn’t quite sure about before, I now feel like I understand them perfectly. Has to be a book I can stand enough to re-read, of course.

How is your writing skill? I don’t know if you use or have used lang-8, but if not I really recommend it. I started using it after doing a lot of (too high level videogame) reading and I felt like frequent writing helped consolidate a lot of what I knew — then I started to feel like I was writing too much and reading too little, and so I kind of went to the other extreme. But that did help me kind of consolidate a lot of basic words without using flashcards.

Anyway, it’s a lousy answer for now, but I have high hopes: one, that you get to Japan by and by, and then you can go find the nearest library, read a book a day and tell me how it’s working for you after a couple months ^^ and two, that we as a community figure out how to support each other by creating and finding resources even for people who are just starting out. Because I think the answer to “How can I make tadoku into a reasonable method of study if I can’t get enough material?” is that you can’t, you probably do have to add in traditional vocabulary studies, and that’s a shame but given enough time and effort it’s also a problem with a solution.

The problem is that I can’t find enough books at my level to reinforce common words so I’ll end up forgetting them, reading books above my level is often a waste of time too because I can get through a whole 20 page story and not have understood a single thing because I didn’t know the words, so maybe in that case it’d have been better to be making/reviewing flash cards but if I do that I’m not reading which means I’m not getting better at reading.

Doing one sacrifices the other (unless you have unlimited time I suppose). You need one to do the other, it’s like trying to find a job and being told you need experience first but nobody will hire you so you can’t get experience.

I actually have a whole bunch of graded readers but as you said they are very different from books made for native speakers and even though they do reinforce some words and grammar patterns they don’t really help with reading simple children’s books, or other more difficult books. Also due to my location and lack of money I don’t have access to a large amount of easier children’s books.

I guess these are excuses though, other people I know seem to do fine (or at least they don’t complain about it if they are not). I think a lot of other people I know just have a much much greater tolerance for ambiguity and don’t mind reading 1000s of pages and missing a lot, or they don’t mind doing 1000s of flash card reviews each day. Both kill me. I’m not sure what the solution is, suck it up and do flash cards to fill in the gap so I am able to read the stuff that’s above my level, or keep scouring for better tadoku material online. At this point I’m getting read to start doing flash cards again, because I’ve just about run out of tadoku material that’s at my level.