4 ms·

first time I've heard about AJATT, here http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about/overview-page/ http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about/overview-

first time I've heard about AJATT, here http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about/overview-page/ http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about/overview-pag... it's description tells to not learn grammar, but I guess you didn't follow that rule? If so, why?

nullsense 6y ago
AJATT is just immersion, right? That's what I took away from it. It was the immersion aspect that I really took too along with Anki and sentence mining. If you have either a pre-made Anki deck with sentences for all the grammar, or a web page you can copy paste them from, or heaven forbid a Kindle or book that you can type them into Anki then blasting through grammar quick as you can as early as you can is _significantly_ faster than not doing so. If you only did sentence mining then you would eventually learn all the grammar, you'll just do it slower, so the lead time on being able to parse the language will increase. If you study grammar this way you don't have to sit and read dry explanations, but you can still more or less deduce how the grammar works. If you also want to read the dry explanations too there's also nothing wrong with that. In the case of Japanese there was a fantastic Anki deck called KO2001 which was 2000 sentences that covered lots of vocab and grammar with the idea that along the way it taught you how to read all of (jouyou) Kanji. There was also an amazing deck called "A dictionary of Japanese grammar" which had 8000 sentences covering all of Japanese grammar. I decided to take JLPT2 at the end of my first year of study. I spent the first 6 months doing RTK (remembering the kanji) all while doing immersion etc, so really I didn't know a heck of a lot after the first 6 months, but now reading and writing had become accessible to me. It was actually at this point I decided to take the JLPT2 and it was at the time I think only 4 months away. That's a relatively insane goal and somewhat nonsensical thing to do, but I first blasted through KO2001 so I knew I'd be able to read everything on the test (more or less). Then I just absolutely hauled ass and took a list of grammar points needed for JLPT4, JLPT3, and JLPT2 and I had suspended all cards on the dictionary of Japanese grammar deck and simply unsuspended 3 or 4 sentences per grammar point. I didn't pass the exam but I got 50%. I think you needed 60% to pass. I was stoked with that. I passed it 6 months later. 6 months after that took JLPT1 and failed getting again 50% where I needed 55% and passed it 6 months later with a decent score. End of first year of study I could barely muddle my way through a basic "hello my name is..." type conversation. But I knew the entire grammar of the language and had around 2000 vocab. 2nd year of study I now switched to just vocab and tried to do 35 a day. All mined from immersing myself in native media. I learnt 10k vocab that year. I also started going to regular conversation clubs that year and moved to the city and brought in a Japanese flatmate. End of the second year I could speak very fluidly one on one for hours, but noisy group settings still gave me a little trouble. End of 3rd year I was fluent. Noisy group settings, reading novels etc. It was a wild ride actually. After I moved to the city I would just randomly approach people I could tell were Japanese and just started talking to them in Japanese. Half would freak out in a positive way, half would freak out like why is this guy talking to me. The uncomfortable ones I just disengaged soon as I could tell, but the positive reactions often ended in either me inviting them to a party I was having or them inviting me to a party they were having. Made a lot of friends. Best time of my life tbh.
- saint_angels 6y ago
  thanks for sharing! when I started learning mandarin, pre-made Anki decks felt overwhelming and I've been building and using a personal deck ever since. Can you recommend a pre-built deck for Chinese grammar, if you ever tried a good one?
  - nullsense 6y ago
    I don't remember what I initially used for Mandarin. I tend to use a mixture of pre-made and handmade decks. A good pre-made deck is a godsend, but I always have a handmade one in addition for stuff that I find. Looking at the shared Anki decks, "Chinese Grammar Wiki Study Deck" looks pretty good. It's perhaps a little large, but I target 35 new cards a day, for a pace of 1000 new cards a month assuming 80% of the time I'll hit that the goal is 10k in one year. So 5k cards puts that at 5 months for me. "Chinese Grammar Wiki A1-B2" is potentially a better starting point if want a smaller, more manageable deck. That one only has 500 or so cards, which is easy to knock off in a couple of weeks. "Listening Deck for Chinese 4th Year" looks like a very good deck. It seems to have everything I would want; reading cards + listening cards - both of these are absolutely essential with Mandarin, it also goes from HSK1 to HSK6 and has a lot of cards. It probably has too many for me, so I would look at how to approach it but the quality of the resource seems great from what I can see, so would be very interested in this one. Sentences possibly come from a site called SpoonFed from what I can tell. How I use a particular deck depends on my goals. I modify them to suit my needs where I can. For example the Portuguese deck I'm using at the moment I think had 2 card types, maybe PT -> En and En -> PT, or perhaps it was listening and reading etc, but I know the only skill I need to train with Portuguese is listening, so I changed the deck to remove the card types I didn't need. The other thing that has worked well is suspending all cards on decks that are far too large to do all the cards, and using a list of grammar points or vocab and using the search feature to selectively unsuspend a few cards per thing that you're searching for. "20000 chinese - english sentences with proper pinyin" looks like a deck you could do that with. Inputting stuff into Anki takes time, so I try to minimise that time. Not eliminate it, because there's very much a large amount of utility in handmaking decks. But for example a good online dictionary where you can copy / paste sentences is a benefit. Generally when it comes to decks I'm looking for 2 kinds. Either a starter deck, or a complete reference deck. The perfect starter deck is around 2k sentences with audio (if no audio I just use TTS and this is good enough!) and covers from A1 grammar up to at least B2, but if it covers more then that's a bonus. B2 is like upper intermediate, and that range is all the common day to day stuff you hear and use all the time. I think like HSK1 to HSK4 in the case of Mandarin. Complete reference decks are usually between 5k to 10k sentences and are often from some corpus or dictionary. These are the type I like to suspend all and selectively unsuspend if I have a need for that. With decks I take what I can get, but I generally have a standard I'm looking for and if nothing pre-made meets the standard I'll find good reference materials and handmake it instead. Hope that helps.

nullsense 6y ago

AJATT is just immersion, right? That's what I took away from it. It was the immersion aspect that I really took too along with Anki and sentence mining. If you have either a pre-made Anki deck with sentences for all the grammar, or a web page you can copy paste them from, or heaven forbid a Kindle or book that you can type them into Anki then blasting through grammar quick as you can as early as you can is _significantly_ faster than not doing so. If you only did sentence mining then you would eventually learn all the grammar, you'll just do it slower, so the lead time on being able to parse the language will increase. If you study grammar this way you don't have to sit and read dry explanations, but you can still more or less deduce how the grammar works. If you also want to read the dry explanations too there's also nothing wrong with that. In the case of Japanese there was a fantastic Anki deck called KO2001 which was 2000 sentences that covered lots of vocab and grammar with the idea that along the way it taught you how to read all of (jouyou) Kanji. There was also an amazing deck called "A dictionary of Japanese grammar" which had 8000 sentences covering all of Japanese grammar. I decided to take JLPT2 at the end of my first year of study. I spent the first 6 months doing RTK (remembering the kanji) all while doing immersion etc, so really I didn't know a heck of a lot after the first 6 months, but now reading and writing had become accessible to me. It was actually at this point I decided to take the JLPT2 and it was at the time I think only 4 months away. That's a relatively insane goal and somewhat nonsensical thing to do, but I first blasted through KO2001 so I knew I'd be able to read everything on the test (more or less). Then I just absolutely hauled ass and took a list of grammar points needed for JLPT4, JLPT3, and JLPT2 and I had suspended all cards on the dictionary of Japanese grammar deck and simply unsuspended 3 or 4 sentences per grammar point. I didn't pass the exam but I got 50%. I think you needed 60% to pass. I was stoked with that. I passed it 6 months later. 6 months after that took JLPT1 and failed getting again 50% where I needed 55% and passed it 6 months later with a decent score. End of first year of study I could barely muddle my way through a basic "hello my name is..." type conversation. But I knew the entire grammar of the language and had around 2000 vocab. 2nd year of study I now switched to just vocab and tried to do 35 a day. All mined from immersing myself in native media. I learnt 10k vocab that year. I also started going to regular conversation clubs that year and moved to the city and brought in a Japanese flatmate. End of the second year I could speak very fluidly one on one for hours, but noisy group settings still gave me a little trouble. End of 3rd year I was fluent. Noisy group settings, reading novels etc. It was a wild ride actually. After I moved to the city I would just randomly approach people I could tell were Japanese and just started talking to them in Japanese. Half would freak out in a positive way, half would freak out like why is this guy talking to me. The uncomfortable ones I just disengaged soon as I could tell, but the positive reactions often ended in either me inviting them to a party I was having or them inviting me to a party they were having. Made a lot of friends. Best time of my life tbh.

saint_angels 6y ago
thanks for sharing! when I started learning mandarin, pre-made Anki decks felt overwhelming and I've been building and using a personal deck ever since. Can you recommend a pre-built deck for Chinese grammar, if you ever tried a good one?
- nullsense 6y ago
  I don't remember what I initially used for Mandarin. I tend to use a mixture of pre-made and handmade decks. A good pre-made deck is a godsend, but I always have a handmade one in addition for stuff that I find. Looking at the shared Anki decks, "Chinese Grammar Wiki Study Deck" looks pretty good. It's perhaps a little large, but I target 35 new cards a day, for a pace of 1000 new cards a month assuming 80% of the time I'll hit that the goal is 10k in one year. So 5k cards puts that at 5 months for me. "Chinese Grammar Wiki A1-B2" is potentially a better starting point if want a smaller, more manageable deck. That one only has 500 or so cards, which is easy to knock off in a couple of weeks. "Listening Deck for Chinese 4th Year" looks like a very good deck. It seems to have everything I would want; reading cards + listening cards - both of these are absolutely essential with Mandarin, it also goes from HSK1 to HSK6 and has a lot of cards. It probably has too many for me, so I would look at how to approach it but the quality of the resource seems great from what I can see, so would be very interested in this one. Sentences possibly come from a site called SpoonFed from what I can tell. How I use a particular deck depends on my goals. I modify them to suit my needs where I can. For example the Portuguese deck I'm using at the moment I think had 2 card types, maybe PT -> En and En -> PT, or perhaps it was listening and reading etc, but I know the only skill I need to train with Portuguese is listening, so I changed the deck to remove the card types I didn't need. The other thing that has worked well is suspending all cards on decks that are far too large to do all the cards, and using a list of grammar points or vocab and using the search feature to selectively unsuspend a few cards per thing that you're searching for. "20000 chinese - english sentences with proper pinyin" looks like a deck you could do that with. Inputting stuff into Anki takes time, so I try to minimise that time. Not eliminate it, because there's very much a large amount of utility in handmaking decks. But for example a good online dictionary where you can copy / paste sentences is a benefit. Generally when it comes to decks I'm looking for 2 kinds. Either a starter deck, or a complete reference deck. The perfect starter deck is around 2k sentences with audio (if no audio I just use TTS and this is good enough!) and covers from A1 grammar up to at least B2, but if it covers more then that's a bonus. B2 is like upper intermediate, and that range is all the common day to day stuff you hear and use all the time. I think like HSK1 to HSK4 in the case of Mandarin. Complete reference decks are usually between 5k to 10k sentences and are often from some corpus or dictionary. These are the type I like to suspend all and selectively unsuspend if I have a need for that. With decks I take what I can get, but I generally have a standard I'm looking for and if nothing pre-made meets the standard I'll find good reference materials and handmake it instead. Hope that helps.