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I have also been at it for a while now. What I notice nowadays is that the same English->Japanese cards keep coming up quite often, because they have very simil

I have also been at it for a while now. What I notice nowadays is that the same English->Japanese cards keep coming up quite often, because they have very similar cards/synonyms. Therefore, when adding new words, I take extra precaution to come up with a short 2-4 word sentence that is unique enough and captures the meaning quite well. Sometimes it might take me a few tries though, when I end up confusing it with another card anyway. This may also mean that sometimes I have to go and change a card/note I made a few years ago, because it 'conflicts' with something I want to add now. So with regard to the clippings feature I feel that generating single-word flash cards might come back to bite you. It makes English->Japanese "production" difficult and annoying in the long run. On the other hand, it also makes Japanese->English unnecessarily complicated with all the meanings associated with a single word. A relatively simple example that comes to mind is 手入れ, of which I would rather have two short sentences describing each use case. Or with regards to the clippings feature, I want it to generate the card with the meaning I encountered, because the other meanings of that word might never actually be used by the Japanese. I am not sure an app will (or even should) be able to generate such cards. Condensing both the Japanese, while getting the English meaning right, is hard enough for a human. It certainly would be awesome, because at the moment I have to resort to generating the cards manually for the words/sentences I encounter while reading manga or books on my Kobo e-reader. History shows that (1) I am too lazy to generate a card for a word that I had to look up, and that I tend to just keep on reading (and forgetting the word again later on), or (2) that I actually stop reading for a few days/weeks because I feel I have to enter the back log of cards in Anki before continuing.

chrisvasselli 11y ago
Really good observations. With regards to English->Japanese cards, I actually decided not to support them in the app. I used to study with both J->E and E->J flashcards, but I find that E->J gets you into the habit of thinking about one-to-one relationships between words in English and Japanese, when most of the time the relationship is not that simple. I found it more effective to study only J->E, and internalize the general meaning and "feeling" of the word. Then, as you start to encounter it in natural contexts, you'll internalize the subtleties to the meaning. When you go to produce Japanese, it's best not to start from English and translate to Japanese anyway, so I found the most important thing was to internalize the Japanese words. The whole experience you mentioned where you either didn't create flashcards for words you encountered, or stopped reading to catch up on generating flashcards is exactly why I built Clippings. And you're right, they aren't going to be perfect, but I still think it's way better than doing it manually. 手入れ is a good example, here's how that would work in Nihongo: When you create a clipping that included 手入れ, a flashcard gets created with 手入れ on the front, and "repairs, maintenance, tending, trimming, grooming" on the back. That's the primary meaning in the dictionary. If you get to that flashcard, and that doesn't sound right, you can edit the flashcard to add to or replace that backside text with "crackdown, (police) raid". There's no way we can know which meaning was intended in the text, but we can at least make it easy to edit. And if you want, you can always add your own custom text to be displayed on the back of the flashcard. If I encounter a sentence that really clearly shows how the word is used, I'll often add that on the back in addition to the dictionary meaning.

chrisvasselli 11y ago

Really good observations. With regards to English->Japanese cards, I actually decided not to support them in the app. I used to study with both J->E and E->J flashcards, but I find that E->J gets you into the habit of thinking about one-to-one relationships between words in English and Japanese, when most of the time the relationship is not that simple. I found it more effective to study only J->E, and internalize the general meaning and "feeling" of the word. Then, as you start to encounter it in natural contexts, you'll internalize the subtleties to the meaning. When you go to produce Japanese, it's best not to start from English and translate to Japanese anyway, so I found the most important thing was to internalize the Japanese words. The whole experience you mentioned where you either didn't create flashcards for words you encountered, or stopped reading to catch up on generating flashcards is exactly why I built Clippings. And you're right, they aren't going to be perfect, but I still think it's way better than doing it manually. 手入れ is a good example, here's how that would work in Nihongo: When you create a clipping that included 手入れ, a flashcard gets created with 手入れ on the front, and "repairs, maintenance, tending, trimming, grooming" on the back. That's the primary meaning in the dictionary. If you get to that flashcard, and that doesn't sound right, you can edit the flashcard to add to or replace that backside text with "crackdown, (police) raid". There's no way we can know which meaning was intended in the text, but we can at least make it easy to edit. And if you want, you can always add your own custom text to be displayed on the back of the flashcard. If I encounter a sentence that really clearly shows how the word is used, I'll often add that on the back in addition to the dictionary meaning.