HANJARO – Resource Recommendation

HANJARO | 漢字路  |  한자로

I recommend this useful resource for Korean learners who know and can read Japanese or Chinese. This is a site that inserts Chinese characters into the Korean text you paste. For longer texts like ebooks you have to download their program and use it on hancom or microsoft office.

It gives the user various options to customize the rendering to his or her needs:

• paste the text or paste the URL. I usually paste the text because I usually hate the formatting of the website.
• replace the hangeul with hanja or place hanja next to the hanguel word
• the option of choosing from Chinese characters used in Taiwan, China, Japan, or Korea.
• when it places the hanja next to the hangeul it place parentheses around the hanja word so what I like doing is doing control + h and replace ( with space ( so I can use lingoes off-line dictionary since lingoes only processes exact matches for Korean (I double click for it to look up the word). Lingoes offers k-j, k-e, and more !
• I use it when I generate Korean anki cards from readlang.com. I use the cloze deletion format so I put the text rendered by hanjaro on the back of the card instead of the original sentence to I lower my barrier of reading. Also the sentences that I encounter via reading  tend to be dense with information.

Here’s an example of text that went through hanjaro. I chose hanja for the rendering

7일(日) 한 매체(媒體)는 ‘프로듀스 101’의 네 번째(番째) 시즌이 내년(來年) 4월(月) 방송(放送)을 목표(目標)로 제작(製作)을 준비(準備) 중(中)이라고 보도(報道)했다. 이에 대(對)해 Mnet 측(側)은 “새로운 시즌을 논의(論議) 중(中)이다. 하지만 편성(編成) 등(等) 자세(仔細)한 사항(事項)은 아직 확정(確定)된 부분(部分)이 없다”며 말을 아꼈다.

‘프로듀스 101’ 시리즈는 그동안 아이오아이, 워너원 등(等)을 탄생시켜 대중(大衆)들의 뜨거운 반응(反應)을 이끌어 냈다. 또한, 가장 최근(最近) 시즌인 ‘프로듀스 48’에서는 아이즈원까지 출범(出帆)시켰다.

I actually know and am already familiar with all the words in the article excerpt so I don’t need the hanja inserted but I definitely read faster with hanja than without.

It has its limitations which primarily stems from the existence of homonyms that exist in Korean. However, that’s almost nonissue to me since I am very literate in Japanese and I’ve gotten fairly proficient in Korean from the time put I put into the language from the summer of 2011. It’s obvious to me when the hanja is wrong based on the context. I use the hanja as a visual aid to exert less effort while reading and to read faster. The beauty of kanji and hanja is that I read its meaning automatically, without my volition, and instantaneously. If I had to quantify the amount of energy it takes to read hangeul for meaning it’d be 1 and for Japanese kanji it would 0.1 or 0.01. It’s a fantastic companion to hangeul for reading for lazy people like me who happens to know how to read Japanese. I use hanjaro for internet articles and korean ebooks. It makes reading Korean more pleasant for me even despite its limitations.

Now, I can finally put my foot down when it comes to adding hanja based words to anki. Sometimes I’d be almost mad at myself for not recognizing a hanja word that I already know since I know the Japanese equivalent and they sound sorta similar and/or I’ve already looked it up in the past. I get into this conundrum of should I put this into anki to make sure I don’t waste time looking it up if I don’t recognize the word in a future encounter even though it’s kind of a freebie since I know Japanese or should I not add it and hope I will be able to conjure up the word’s meaning next time I encounter it from having looked it up and just based on the hangeul and context. Now because of this site I will only add hanja-words to anki that are truly difficult or tricky to remember. After all, the korean korean words (ex 코딱지 and no that word is not in my anki deck) are hard to remember as it is and I want to focus my energy on those words as opposed to hanja-words I already know that I don’t recognize that hide behind the hangeul-mask.

I found the the site by googling in Korean or Japanese (I can’t remember) and I’m just kicking myself for not having done it sooner. The thought popped in my head because I was reading about the pros and cons of writing in Korean in hangeul only vs writing korean in a mixed script of hangeul and hanja on this wiki website that was outlining all the points of contention between the 2 fierce groups. I was surprised to learn from that site that there are so many ways to propose mixing the hanja and hangeul in writing ie only write x type of words in Hanja. I never realized that there were so many ways to go about it. Anyway, I love this site because it enables me to take full advantage of Japanese proficiency.

I believe I will improve my Korean faster through reading if I constantly reinforced the hanja words with the hanja next to them instead of seeing them veiled under hangeul and look them up manually over and over. Before I knew about this site, I would waste my time looking up hanja words I already know but didn’t recognize because they were written in hangeul.

here’s an example of a hanja word that I couldn’t figure out from the hangeul and the context. It happened like a year ago or months ago?? It’s the only example I can come up with right now because I’ve been loving the hanjaro site and I’ve gotten more literate (in sense of understanding what I’m reading as opposed to being able to read shit out loud) in Korean these past few years. Variations of this has happened to me so many times!

So, I read an article and it used the word 화재 a bunch of times and I said to myself it’s definitely not 화제 (hot topic) and nothing is coming to mind as to what kanji/hanja word it is (I just know that it is a noun and it’s definitely a kanji/hanja word). of course at the end I either looked it up or figured out its the korean version of kasai (Fire disaster). Without fail, I realize that I already looked up 화재 sometime before the second I learned what the meaning was (just seeing the hangeul is completely arbitrary to me). So at that point I had read the whole article not understanding what hajae was other than it was a noun and it’s based on hanja so obviously I missed out. At that point I decided to not re-read the article because it annoyed me immensely and I did not care about the article that much. When I use it, reading takes less effort, I read faster, and I don’t waste my time looking up words I pretty much know but have a low familiarity with. It’s a win win win situation.

I tried using the site for Korean subs to see if it would help me comprehend/reading the subs faster but I found it incredibly distracting since hanja is traditional characters (there’s a lot of stuff going with one character lol). I tried with kanji just in case but it was still distracting since it’s not 100% correct. Not only that, it was subs to YG treasure box on V-LIVE (it is subbed in MANY languages) which is very easy to understand anyway. I love hearing the incorrect Korean from the Japanese people lol. They direct-translate like crazy and they always correct their Korean in the subs. I usually make anywhere from 2-5 anki cards per episode. It’s not as challenging as SMTM or talk shows for obvious reasons. I am better off with hangeul-only subs for this situation.

On a related note, whenever I go through korean song lyrics if I think the artist or song is remotely popular I google the song title, artist and wayaku because it’s so much faster for me to go through the lyrics with that compared to me going at it with a dictionary and the korean lyrics. Also I generate anki cards so it would speed up the process.

Part of the reason I do that is because Korean requires interpretation skills that I don’t possess yet. I’ll read the lyrics and be confused or unsure as to what it means because they often leave out subjects. I’ll figure out all the ways something can be interpreted and then I’ll come to a decision and then later find out (through an english or japanese translation) that I was wrong in that none of my interpretations were right or the one that I thought was the least likely was correct. I believe I gain more by using wayaku and just getting the answer to the correct interpretation than wasting my time trying to figure out the interpretation every time I look up song lyrics to a song I like. It’s time I don’t have and I don’t believe this activity will help me grow my interpretation skills. I think I’ll eventually hone in on this skill once I spend enough time inputting comprehensible input.

Hanja compliments Hangeul because hanja makes the text easier to read by rendering the act more effortless. There’s an effortless quality that I attribute to reading Chinese characters compared to phonetic alphabet like English or Hangeul. It’s a quality that’s highly desired by lazy people like me (Of course I’ve experienced first-hand that learning to read and write 2000+ kanji takes more time and effort than learning how to read and write hangeul. I did like how it broke up the monotony of studying grammar. I enjoyed having variety in that I had the option of doing an acitivity to learn Japanese that involved a different part of my brain or a lower level of energy or so it seemed.). Of course, if you don’t know Japanese or Mandarin you may assume that phonetic alphabets are superior to logographic writing systems in every way. It seems a lot of Korean netizens always say that hangeul is acknowledged by scientists as the MOST brilliant, logical writing system and that Korea was able to abandon hanja (I think it’s great that they celebrate Sejong the Great but he didn’t invent hangeul with the intention of changing the writing system to hangeul-only and they kinda make it seem like he would support that even though there’s no evidence to support that. I hate it when people put words in other people’s mouth. ) while Japan has a crazy writing system which is a sign that they have a primitive writing system ( Of course that’s what some Japanese netizens say about hangeul) and China is spending too much time and energy learning all those characters. Statements like that only demonstrate their ignorance and close-mindedness. There are disadvantages and advantages to the 3 writing systems.

When I went into Korean knowing English and Japanese, I knew that no matter how much I read hangeul it’ll never feel as comfortable as reading Japanese as far as reading for meaning or speed (as in not reading it outloud) in terms of obtaining the meaning or exerting least amount of effort possible. I think if it came down to which language I can read outloud fastest without taking comprehension into account it would come down to English and Korean of course but that defeats the point of reading which is to understand what you’re reading. Of course the downside to Japanese is that I have the dilemma of being unsure of the readings at times but I prefer knowing meaning over reading any day. I find not understanding the most “frustrating” part of sucking at language rather than not being able to read it out-loud. Reading hangeul is tiring. Reading Japanese is less tiring and takes less effort once you’re literate. As a lazy person, I’m glad I learned Japanese because of how effortless it can be to read stuff in Japanese at times. Every time I see a block of text in hangeul when I open online articles I feel a tinge of anxiety and ominous dread because I have a point of comparison. It’s the analogy of why would you go back to windows 95 when you can use windows 10 (I can’t think of a good one). The point is I’ve experienced the wonders of reading Japanese. It’s obvious to me that the Japanese writing system plays an integral role in the popularity of reading in Japan. Also it seems like everyone on TV has written a book. I’ve always cared about being able to understand a piece of writing more than being able to read it loud. Also, I’ve never had to waste time looking up words like MARTHA or VOLDEMORT (no i was not reading harry potter) since they write foreign words in Katakana meanwhile I’ve had that bitter experience many times with Korean since they only write in hangeul (in printed books they write foreign names and foreign words in a different font). That was one of the most demotivating characteristics of Korean with respect to learning it for me personally. I am very happy and blessed to have found this site.

Ultimately for words like KASAI/HWAJAE I prefer to sort it out by encountering it multiple times with the hanja next to it while I read rather than in anki or looking it up when I read. I’ve always felt super entitled as a person who knows Japanese that whenever I looked up hanja-based words that I already know that sound similar to Japanese or exist in Japanese I would feel irritated and mercilessly robbed of my my time and energy. Now I have no reason to feel that resentment when I read Korean on the internet or ebooks! I have a lot of articles and topics I’m interested in reading on the Korean internet and now I can finally hop to it. It feels like somebody handed me the keys to a door and I have access to the Korean internet where I can read stuff that I can’t read in English or Japanese. I hope to read more in 2019!

HERE are some articles I read so far: I like reading about people or topics that are of interest to me.

http://www.hankookilbo.com/News/Read/201605122062423406
http://www.pressian.com/news/article.html?no=69280#09T0

https://www.sisain.co.kr/?mod=news&act=articleView&idxno=26576 <-this was hard to follow at times. It was pretty bad. I didn’t understand the main points of the article. It was unclear to me and I had no motivation to re-read stuff to figure out the meaning of the sentence or phrases. I kinda gave up on this one. It’s too hard for me at my current level or I’m just too lazy to apply myself (no that’s a good thing because I gotta read what I’m really interested in) I think I’ll read an article about it in Japanese sometime in the future.

http://news.donga.com/Culture/more29/3/all/20141010/67068211/1

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Pitch Accent

 

I forgot to mention that I donated to dogen’s patreon page for 1 month in May to learn about pitch accent! It’s definitely worth more than $10 but I am frugal. For a person who has never bought a textbook for Japanese (tae kim is more than enough to get people started),  this is the only thing I spent money on to learn Japanese (I’ve spend a fair amount over the years on Japanese media like books, dvds, cds but they’re for entertainment first and foremost and their secondary function was learning! ). It made realize why I never noticed the pitch accent of certain words. I think he gave an example of an atamadaka word that changed to heiban because it was used in the middle of the sentence after a word that ended in some pitch accent ( I am on fuzzy on the details). I also realized that I did pick up on the pitch accent of some words from all my listening/watching Japanese media just because they say it the same way many many times ie 師匠　ししょう、　韓国　KANKOKU – korea is atamadaka without a doubt! It always left an impression on me how they always seemed to say kankoku forcefully lol. After watching dogen’s video series, I know that I definitely do not speak or read Japanese with perfect pitch accent but I still think my intonation is good.

I took notes in a notebook while watching and also downloaded the anki deck on the patreon page. I have not touched the anki deck lol and I have not touched the notebook since June. However, I definitely noticed pitch accent from then to now when I watched my Japanese shows ( I studied some of the patterns with the notebook by trying to say stuff aloud with the correct pitch accent). I think I’ll go back through some of his videos or some of the anki cards to get more stuff to notice. When I watched his videos in May, there were many instances where I couldn’t hear the pitch accent ie there was no way I could pass his tests.  When Dogen was saying “University is” with varying pitch accents, sometimes I could hear it, sometimes I thought I heard it, sometimes I knew I couldn’t tell the difference lol. Maybe I will try the tests again sometimes this year!  What I found really helpful for me was to try to say 2-syllable Japanese words in the 2 possible pitch accents: high to low and low to high.

also I’ve been meaning to look at these sites so I have more words/patterns to notice…

http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/

http://accent.u-biq.org/a.html

https://www.sanseido-publ.co.jp/publ/dicts/daijirin_ac.html

https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/summary/kotoba/term/049.html –  months

https://www.edx.org/course/japanese-pronunciation-for-communication-0  <- this is free

<<- there are dl links in the video info.

Japanese pitch accent from LearnJapanese

Also I’ve been meaning to check out youtube vids in KOrean talking about Japanese pitch accent since knowing Korean doesn’t help with Japanese pitch accent or long-short vowels.

Unlike Dogen, I have no aspirations of sounding “perfect” as in get mistaken for a native-speaker which requires perfect pitch-accent and sounding like a Japanese woman. Also, I have no desire to buy a pitch accent dictionary. I do want to improve my pitch accent to sound more natural and hear Japanese even better (I have no problem understanding Japanese TV). Because I watched dogen’s vids and familiarized myself with pitch accent, I use the pitch accent plugin for anki (I put it there so I can reference it but I do not test myself on pitch accent).  Dogen even has videos on how to make the sounds of the Japanese language with the mouth/tongue positioning. I signed up for his patreon solely for his pitch accent videos but I still checked out some of the other vids on making the sounds of the Japanese language out of curiosity in case I’m not making the sounds correctly since I share the same native language as him. There were moments where Dogen would make himself sounds very Japanese and then he would make himself sound like a Japanese man by changing a quality of his voice ever so slightly. Just when I thought he couldn’t sound more Japanese, he makes himself sound more Japanese! There are mind-blowing moments like that in his vids lol. He was not kidding when he said he was adamant about obtaining perfect Japanese pronunciation.

On a related note I checked out the episode of ANOTHER SKY that featured JIYEON from KARA (now disbanded kpop group). She mentioned how tough it is to speak Japanese when she acts since pitch accent doesn’t exist in Korean (minus a certain dialect) and people would correct her over and over again. I remember a few years back she was on jigoku sensei nube playing a very japanese role and I saw a clip just to see the atrocity. It was the typical Korean person speaking unpleasant-sounding Japanese due to lackluster intonation and pitch accent… She has definitely improved leaps and bounds since then. I also got interested in watching one of her movies for fun. It’s a movie with a tired plot that we’ve seen many times ie secret garden (korean drama), freaky friday. I was intrigued by the cast since I recognized people from talk/variety shows. That was the only reason I watched sanbun no ichi which featured Kosugi, danmitsu, and the guy from kat-tun. Also it was directed by shinagawa!

I also read an article on japanese buzzfeed ( I usually avoid this site like the plague because it’s click-bait whether it’s Japanese or English) a while back about this guy who moved from oosaka to tokyo as a kid and how he had the toughest time trying to speak like the other kids. I got curious so I searched chiebukuro and this guy who spoke standard Japanese moved to somewhere in the Kansai-area and he was saying it took him years to perfect his pitch accent. He was saying how everyone kept telling him to stop speaking fake kansai-ben in the beginning since his pitch accent was off.

Also I recall seeing some Arashi show where they had arashi members say NANI YANEN and everyone sounded off. At the time I thought it was the intonation since I didn’t know better. They were really trying to say it like the kansai people but didn’t succeed. I thought someone might pull it off since I’m sure they’ve heard nani yanen hundreds if not thousands of times. I know they have no problem hearing/understanding kansai-ben since I don’t but speaking and understanding are 2 completely different skills.

OMG speaking of Kansai-ben I was so dumbfounded when I heard Seungri from BIG BANG talk on hanseikai a couple months back because he was speaking in kansai-ben. I found it especially ear-grating because I’m not used to hearing foreigners speak kansai-ben minus jero (the enka singer) who sounds amazing which is not surprising since he is an enka singer. I recall him talking about the pitch accent or intonation for disney sea on shindoumoto kyoudai. I’m used to foreign accents in standard japanese but not with kansai-ben so Seungri’s japanese sounded jarring. At first I thought he was joking around or something and waiting for ariyoshi to call him out on it. I read around and realized he decided to adapt the kansai-ben dialect over the standard japanese because he’s supposedly sanma-san’s apprentice and wants to become or is a geinin (comedian).  Maybe he is hanging around with a lot of kansai people in Japan? To me his kansai-ben sounds just like his standard Japanese except he said yanen or yakara instead of whatever people say in standard Japanese. In other words, his japanaese sounds worse when he speaks kansai-ben due to the incorrect intonation, and pitch accent.  When he does that with standard Japanese, it doesn’t bother me because I’m so used to hearing that kind of japanese from foreigners or kpop stars. I was wondering if kansai-ben people were irritated by his kansai-ben and googled but everyone seemed supportive of him. Maybe after he does his 2 years in the military and spends more time speaking Japanese, he may develop  better intonation?? I’m doubtful though because his standard Japanese speaking is the typical way Korean people speak Japanese when they ignore intonation/pitch accent or apply Korean intonation.  He would be so much better if he just worked on intonation and he just seems to have ingrained, bad habits that stem from him applying his way of speaking of Korean on top of Japanese. At the end of the day, Seungri has the right to learn Japanese however he wants and he doesn’t have to improve his intonation, pitch accent since people have no problem him understanding him when he talks. However, he would sound better if he did improve in those areas.

here’s manzai about funny Japanese.

I’ve been a fan of JARUJARU since like 2009 during the red carpet/theater show days~~ Here’s some random info: the guy on the right is named fukutoku and he actually lived in AMERICA until he was 7 or 9 or something then he went back to Japan. He forgot all his English but his oosaka-ben sounds flawless!  I know this because he told this story on some show about how as a kid he pronounced Z as Z while everyone  else was pronouncing it as ZETTO.

transcript:
http://geininn-netatyou.com/wp/manzai/jyarujyaru/jyaru/

damn I wish these sites were prevalent in 2009!

2018 Resolution

One of the resolutions I made during 2018 was to make language learning more efficient and streamlined. I was racking my brain on what repetitive tasks I do that I can eliminate. My pondering led me to autohotkey, gaming mouse with many buttons (I’ve been looking into other time-saving scripts since I posted that HG format post), sharex (I use the sound recording feature and capture region feature. I will probably not open paint for a long time! ), anki plugins, clipboard managers like ditto, and strategically thinking about how I spend my time with anki.

Sometime this year I decided to stop editing and fixing up anki cards. It dawned on me that there’s no way to make it efficient (a lot them are basic cards that I want changed to cloze cards and of course I only had 2 fields back then and pasted crap whereever and selected any note type), it sucks up a lot of time, and I have too many cards I want to fix or edit or generate cards from. I do my reviews on an ereader so I can only edit cards on the computer. That would mean I’d be editing cards instead of making new cards or reading/listening/watching korean/japanese stuff. I noticed one time I edited and fixed up 10 cards and 20 minutes passed and I had 900 cards MARKED from ankidroid. Fixing cards take longer than making cards because I have to figure out why I marked it. I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment from fixing cards especially compared to making new cards or doing them or doing something fun in my languages. I’ve gotten better at letting stuff go ever since I read Marie Kondo’s book katazuke no mahou 1 & 2 in Japanese ( the joy of tidying up). By the way, that book is really easy to read. Now I tell myself, if it’s that important then I’m sure it’ll show up again in some memorable context.

I’ve also moved ancient cards (stuff from 2012) and leeches into a new deck so that my decks are more lean. I don’t look at the leech deck or the ancient cards deck but it’s there in case I search for something in anki. I did it after I heard mattvsjapan’s youtube video about deleting a card after 1 year. I can’t get myself to delete cards unless they are truly terrible.

Spending excessive time editing cards is the anki trap that everyone should avoid. I am learning Japanese and Korean to enjoy the media and broaden my horizons and be more enlightened, not to make amazing anki decks. Making perfect anki decks is not the end goal unless you’re selling it? (is it even that profitable?) I thought I could put a reasonable amount of time and energy towards improving/editing my anki cards but I due to time-constraints it’s actually impossible. More importantly, editing/fixing up anki cards does not improve my Korean/Japanese like reading or listening does. People fall into this rabbit hole of spending too much time editing cards or making cards. Anki is a tool to help me reach my goals faster and more efficiently. I can truly say without any doubt that if I watched Korean TV from 2012 looking up every word without using anki I would be nowhere near where I am today in terms of passive vocabulary. Space repetition is effective and helpful especially when you cannot or do not want to immerse full time. If you use anki, don’t just think about how much time you spend doing reviews. Realize that the time spent editing and making cards is time that you could’ve spent reading or doing some other productive activity in your target language.

READLANG + EXCEL for generating cloze cards

I took an excel class in High School and never thought I’d use it since I wasn’t planning to go into business school or finance. It turns out excel is useful for manipulating text.

I figured out how to automate the generation of cloze deletion cards using excel and readlang.com. Of course I’ve been a long time fan of control +h (find and replace text) so I’m not completely clueless about efficiency.

For Korean I use readlang.com’s chrome addon to collect the words I come across in internet articles and although the site generates cloze deletions when you export the text, I would never cloze delete a whole word for Korean. It is way too difficult. I like to make 2 clozes for a syllable of the korean word and another cloze for the meaning or I make cloze for the meaning as the same cloze number as the syllable that is easier to remember. My choice is either to make clozes manually in anki or figure out excel and automate that stuff. I obsessively thought about it one day and then figured out how to do it in excel I ended up using a combination of concatenate, replace, and substitute. In addition to clozing the text I also concatenated html and asterisk so that the word stands out. I put in html to make the font size big and underline the text. It feels satisfying to drag my mouse to cloze and format the words exactly the way I want. Also I use naver translate and so-net so generate korean-japanese and korean-english translations so it saves me manual look-ups when I go through the sentences in excel before importing to anki. Readlang.com’s chrome addon uses google translate by default so it is a hit or miss regardless of what language you’re translating. It doesn’t even work well for Spanish.

For Japanese I use rikaisama to generate the import.txt and I paste that into excel to manipulate the text into my liking before my importing. I set up excel scripts so that the word is wrapped in asterisks and underlined, and the first or second syllable of the word in hirgana in the the sentence is clozed. Just 2 years ago I used to manually cloze stuff out using ___ before importing because I completely forgot about excel.

For Spanish I’ve using workaudiobook (using audio and srt sub files from youtube), lingoes pop-up dictionary, and readlang.com to learn it sporadically. I run the sentences through deepl and reverso contexto before I import into anki. I paste everything into excel to set up everything before importing. I use substitution or replace (can’t remember) to make the word be bold, underlined, wrapped by asterisks, and be a huge font size. I am nonchalant when it comes to Spanish so if the deepl or reverso contexto both fail me I suspend the card and move on. Most of the time they pull through since they both kick google translate’s ass. I’ve been thinking that I do not want to learn Spanish and French at the same time since it’s inefficient and I don’t have time or desire to commit to such an undertaking. I have no aspirations of becoming fluent in Spanish or French because I know how long it takes and I have a lot of stuff to read and watch in English, Korean, and Japanese. I hope to implement this method for French sometime in 2019 when I feel like I made decent progress in understanding conversational Spanish. I was also thinking that learning Spanish and French is a good strategy since they complement each other. Instead of looking at it from the point of view that Spanish will help me learn French, I think of it as it’ll make forgetting French harder. I think the former is too optimistic and unrealistic. That is the same approach I took with Korean. I said to myself there’s no way I will forget Korean and go backwards if I am well-versed in Kanji. There’s just no damn way. I proved myself correct 🙂 In fact, mass-reading Korean novels etc without knowing about Kanji seems mad inefficient to me.  Yes you benefit from reading a lot but you benefit so much more when you know Kanji/Japanese. This year I read this book and I looked up 0 words when I read it  (I underlined anywhere from 0 to 10 words per page. most of the pages had 3-5 unknown words. Of course there was a handful sentences where I didn’t understand the sentence despite re-reading it.) but I definitely improved by the end because I know Kanji and Japanese. It was just a matter of me figuring out the word/hanja that is hiding behind hangeul. Of course there were non-hanja based words that I didn’t know that I couldn’t do anything about except try to figure it out from context. I plan on flip-flopping between the 2 languages every x months because me doing a 20minute session in Spanish one day and then a 20 minute session in French the next day or the same day is pointless. The inefficiency bothers me.

If you spend your time scrounging around comment sections for Korean webtoons, YouTube videos, and other parts of the online ecosystem, you’ve probably seen your fair share of words that you absolutely couldn’t figure out. They weren’t in dictionaries. They weren’t in Google Translate. But they were absolutely everywhere else. Don’t worry, you’re not crazy. […]

via 야민정음: 롬곡 and the Korean Trend of Rearranged Slang — 서울드림

PRE-MADE ANKI DECKS FOR JAPANESE

No I am not writing to write platitudes about the benefits of making your own deck. I
don’t understand how those Japanese language learning bloggers write platitudes and common sensical statements about the most banal topics. I don’t blog that frequently because I have to be smart with my time and only blog about stuff that’s worthy of my time.  I’m gonna talk about the pre-made Japanese decks that I found indispensable and time-saving. Especially in this day and age some pre-made decks may have the potential to be amazing with the advent of plugins like wordquery, sanseido.

The 2 types of decks that I found indispensable were the HEISIG deck WITH the top stories and the onomatopoeia decks

So if you get the deck HEISIG deck with top 2 stories and then use the PLUGIN
KanjiVocab – smart automatic vocab for RTK
you save a lot of time! Now I can test myself with writing kanji without wasting time thinking of what the keyword is referring to or manually typing hiragana or copy pasting stories.

Honestly my heisig deck got messed up years back when all my cards duplicated and I didn’t know how to fix it. So I ended up creating a new kakitori deck where I added words I wanted to know how to write. Just in case you didn’t realize, if you do Remeber the kanji you still have to practice kakitori to write actual Japanese words. I think I have 500 cards in that deck and it’s a struggle because I don’t have stories in all of them and I ain’t copying/pasting from the koohii site so some cards are easy and some are hard etc. I always wanted to go DO THE RTK again with an amazing pre-made deck and now I can.

as for the top 2 stories as an uncreative person I appreciate them a lot. Also a lot of them are dirty or funny in a perverse way so that makes remembering the stories easier. I absolutely don’t mind. I live in America so I am used to filth!

ONOMATOPOEIA
There are 3 decks that are shared currently. One of them is from tofugu and it has over 900 cards. There’s a cornucopia of onomatopoeia out there and it’s never-ending lol. For some reason I thought once I’m 5 or 7 years into Japanese I’d see all the onomatopoeia and get used to them by then but it’s just never-ending and you can’t expect yourself to know/memorize 100% of them. Also I thought 10 years in I’d be able to just feel/infer the meaning of most unknown gion I come across based on how it sounds and the context but half of the time either I have no idea what the gion is alluding to or means or after I look it up I go I was not definitely feeling/guessing that (It is pure serendipity when I do guess correct or am close and of course I am filled with glee! :D). Also this tends to happen more often with novels than tv shows. I attribute this to the audio and additional available context. People on Japanese TV try to tell stories in an interesting/scary/funny/etc way and there’s usually emotions involved and people tend to emphasize certain words when they talk and gion is emphasized OFTEN especially with the HUGE Japanese text they plaster all over the screen. Now that I think about it watching talk/variety shows was the most effective way for learning gion in my japanese leisure time experience(I don’t like using the word immersion because people may think that means I’m watching shit that i don’t understand and may feel ambivalent about lol.  I only watch the cream of the crop when it comes to talk/variety shows. i encourage people to be picky af ). Also, I’ve also picked up gion effortlessly from songs since they’re so catchy and memorable like shanari shanari (the word sounds so pretty too). Clearly due to the nature of gion, audio is indispensable and emotional usages are especially memorable. Guess from now on I won’t bother looking up gion in novels unless it really intrigues me since there’s no audio which is the key to making gion easy/effortless to remember. So I’ve accepted that it’s A never-ending journey but I thought it’d be a good idea to have a deck purely dedicated to onomatopoeia with huge anki intervals. So I did just that by importing these decks, tagging them, and combining them. With onomatopoeia the Japanese dictionary is usually more helpful but English can be helpful/more memorable too so I ran sanseido, wordquery for daijirin, meikyo and the j-e-dict to supplement the meaning to the cards. Then what I did was set up SPECIAL DECK SETTINGS. I made huge intervals so I’m not seeing them every day as you would with the default settings (that’s what it LEGIT  feels like) and I made the STEPS a RIDICULOUSLY huge number like 190 years from now. I did this so I could get through the cards more quickly since not all the cards are worth learning whether it’s too easy/common or it’s low-quality for whatever reason which is possible since I didn’t make this. It’s easier for me to hit AGAIN than suspend on my nook ereader. Because I can’t hit AGAIN for the sake of again I only go through NEW CARDS for the day since I don’t actually have the option of pressing AGAIN for a card that I’ve already seen. Once I make it through all the cards I will look for the cards that are due in 190 years in that deck or search for stuff that’s in the learning phase and suspend and tag them, then I will change the anki settings so that I can mark AGAIN on future reviews and set the step to something reasonable like 2 days from now. RIGHT NOW I’m still in the phase of going through all the cards since I imported a bunch of crap from a Japanese site.

From doing this deck I can confidently say that going after gion like this is helpful. I wish I did this earlier! Sometimes I like reading the description/definition of the gion and it does aid in deepening  my understanding of the gion. I did the same thing for korean after I realized how helpful this was. But then when I made the deck from tables and whatnot from the japanese websites and the wordquery/hanseido plugin I was reminded that my onmatopoeia game in Korean is weak. It’s much harder to do the premade onomatopoeia korean deck than the premade onomatopoeia japanese deck… some of the onomatopoeia just doesn’t sound like what it means or I can’t remember it (the sound or the meaning or both). It’s just harder to remember or hear what I’m supposed to hear or feel what I’m supposed to feel. SO I realized that I should give myself more credit for my japanese onomatopoeia skills.

I’ve tried getting other pre-made decks for Japanese but they’re not helpful since I’m already advanced and I already have a huge backlog of crap I want to add to anki AND it’s so easy and effortless and efficient generating anki cards with RIKAISAMA on PALE MOON.

<– Soyu has been saying  some fierce, cut-throat stuff on Produce 48…. I loved how she said this. It reminds me of the lyrics 前髪の造形に神経を奪われて  from shiina ringo. I’m sure YOU KNOW someone like that. I sure do it’s damn irritating to be around people with bangs. They always put in a dramatic pause or sound effect before the trainers give feedback to the trainees. Of course as a viewer i try to predict whether they’ll say something positive or negative.

RECENTLY I found out about this site for japanese onomatopoeia!

http://thejadednetwork.com/sfx/

cheers!

I can’t recommend any pre-made decks for Korean but I generated some cool decks from Japanese sites with HUGE TABLES and quizlet.

 

OBSESSED with BRODUCE!

 

haha I was originally going to name this blog post “found my crack for 2018!” That crack was gonna be Produce 48 but it turns out to be Produce 101 Season 2. This post was going to be in the same vain as my Unpretty Star post back in March of 2015 in the conception of the post in my head! I am genuinely surprised at how amazing this show was from start to finish! Unpretty Rapstars wouldn’t have blown up if it wasn’t for Jessie and it’s the same thing here. The show would not have blown up if it weren’t for the people in it.

This is my second edition of thank god I know Korean and that my inconsistent, sporadic efforts of watching korean tv (and mining words while watching and HALF-ASSING my reviews as much as possible) from 2012 to 2015 weren’t for nil. It really would be a pain the ass if I had look up something every 10 seconds or watch it with english subs or japanes subs or something ( IT’S JUST NOT THE SAME)

<-–  There’s so many interactions and convos that I loved to BITS in this show including this! unforuntaely I found out ahead of time that daniel’s group won before watching the eps since the mnet performance is already up on youtube since it’s already been over a year.

<- otome at full force! 

< – I took this screenshot because they didn’t blur his tattoos.
 <- OMG Daehi’s handwriting! I took a picture because it looked interesting and unique to me. I notice there’s an OTOME quality to him that I like a lot!

 <- mnet’s editing here added to the hilarity. I wonder how jisung felt about the edit.

It was a bunch fo coicindences that lead to me discovering my crack! I got to the OMONA lj somehow from googling something that popped into my head. Then I saw matsui jurina and I was like what is she doing there? Then I found out produce 101 was collaborating with AKB48 and their sister groups for Produce 101 season 3. To me that that sounded SO INTERESTING and it’s something that I never thought I would ever see. By see I mean like having a jpop idol perform in front of the teachers of Produce 101. Seeing their reaction was as fun and satisfying as I imagined it to be! (I was sad to hear that yabuki nako’s audition won’t ever be released since it was deemed too sexual and inappropriate or something. I actually know that AKB song –tonari no banana- and I like it alot because it’s catchy and the lyrics are interesting. If you want to interpret the song “that” way you can but I never did. I just thought it was cute and relatable). I was into AKB48 to some extent in 2008 to 2011 since they were being pushed like crazy and I was into Japanese TV and I had my oshimen and others members that I liked and they had the AKBINGO show which could be very funny depending on the episode. However the year is now 2018 and most of the members I liked the left the group so I’m not into them as much though I will forever be Sashi’s fan! I did watch the speeches of the members when the group was at its peak. I do understand the appeal of Japanese idols that even though they may not be good at singing or dancing the fans love supporting them and watching them grow/improve and sometimes cute/fun is enough for the fans. So when I heard about the show 2 eps had already aired so I watched them and I felt very impatient for the 3rd ep and I felt gald I found out about it 2 weeks in rather than before it aired because the waiting game is killing me.

I had seen Produce 101 season 1 and I enjoyed watching it but I didn’t feel compelled to watch season 2 because I figured it’d be the same format so I’d be bored. Also I THOUGHT that I find girl groups more interesting than boy groups so I didn’t want to watch it. Also the IOI group wasn’t much of a success in my eyes with their lackluster debut song DREAM GIRLS (It’s very generic and boring. calling it the poor man’s into the new world (SNSD) would be a compliment) and the other 2 songs that weren’t up my alley. But then I found out that the group formed from the second season was actually successful and I was so impressed by their debut mv ENERGETIC because the song was catchy and the dance was captivating. I’m not into kpop or boy groups but it grabbed my attention and I watched it beginning to end (usually I fastforward 45 seconds, listen/watch a little bit and then stop when it comes to checking out kpop mv and stuff since not everything is going to grab me). In a Produce 48 video that MNET posted on naver/youtube that wasn’t included in the episode they featured ariyoshi risa and takada kenta from the previous produce 101 seasons. So I wanted to watch it because I was curious about this Japanese trainee. I decided to watch it during the 6 days of the week when produce48 doesn’t air. Also I figured it’d make produce 48 easier to watch since the format is nearly the same down to the stuff they make national producer representative say.

Even though I’m watching Produce 101 season 2 a year after its initial broadcasting as opposed to while it’s airing. It worked out better for me in that I love this show so much that after episode 3 or 2 or 4 I knew I had to watch this show every day to finish it ASAP. I’d die if I had to wait a week for an episode. I usually am patient and able to wait weeks or months to watch the next episode when it comes to TV shows… it never really hooks me to that point.

I think the only other male-idol competition shows I’ve seen were the one for WINNER and the one for becoming a member of IKON ( I could not watch the last episode but i hate live-finales anyway.) and Produce 101 season 2 blows both out of the water both in terms of performances and entertainment value.

I’m going to write my random observations, rambling and ruminations about the show.

*******

I thought it was hilarious when the idol trainees did sexy dance moves during the 1st two eps that made the Lee Suk Hoon (a very talented singer who was on immortal song way back when) feel uncomfortable lol. He’s a guy and he’s not gay so it was awkward…

They had so many ranking ceremonies in this show. I don’t know if they had more than the first season but it seemed like a lot but I wasn’t bored by it. Compared to the 1st season the ranks move more dramatically and unpredictably. I don’t remember being this emotionally invested, shocked, and connected for the first season. It was incredibly sad watching it at times but it’s just the reality of the idol world/television surival series. I sometimes fastfowarded the parts when BoA described the trainee before announcing his name or when they took forever to announce stuff but I definitely had to listen to any and all other talking.

I loved seeing the interactions/facial expressions/reactions/bonding between the trainees. It was evident from the first 2 episodes like when dong-bin got nervous during his bubblegum performance or when people did cringey dances or when lai guan lin and his fellow chick trainee did their dance fundamentals practice routine.    I’m sure that was present in the 1st season but I didn’t love it to bits like I did for the second season. Surprisingly I loved the SPORTS FESTIVAL they did for episode 10(?). It was incredibly funny and fun to watch. A big part of the reason why it was so fun is because I got to know these trainees for the past 9 episodes and every episode is usually as long as a movie. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED the part when Jae-hwan started laughing like he lost his mind. I was genuinely jealous and happy that he was laughing and having so much fun rather than shocked. It reminded me of the pure joy and fun one experiences  during childhood. Usually when they play game and stuff on korean talk/variety shows I never find it that funny and fast-forward the crap out of it but I savored each second for this show. In the same vain I was surprised I enjoyed watching the arm-wresling ( I loved their interactions like saying something to the opponent to intimidate them ) and the ghost scare prank ( omg daehi screamed with such a high-pitched voice. I love his otome-ness. I also love fujimon’s otome-ness). For produce 48 they did some scare prank too but it wasn’t as interesting or funny ( it was the typical uninteresting crap I expect from korean talk/variety shows that doesn’t do shit for me so I fast-forwarded). I absolutely loved the bonding they showed between the trainees. It was fun to watch and made me fuzzy inside. Something about this show is very special. They were incredibly lucky to have daniel kang and all the other trainees that were incredibly talented or interesting. I was in pure shock when I heard Daniel thought of joining show because jisung wanted to join the show because I thought of the what if’s….  I don’t think Produce 48 could ever surpass this show simply because they can’t have interactions/conversations/lines that are as memorable simply due to the language barrier.  Even though the episodes are so long I feel so sad now that I can’t watch it anymore since there’s no more left.

 

(<—- hilarious!)

I loved the korean-ness of the show. By that I mean the ggal-ching (the thing you put in your shoes to make yourself taller), the lipstick, the cushion. I DID NOT realize Korean guys or kpop guys wear lipstick. for some reason I thought they stopped at guyliner. I was mistaken. I thought the Daniel’s lips stood out sometimes but I never connected the dots in my head that that’s lipstick. I think he did the gradation lip look at one point and it looked really good (unless that’s his natural lip color). I also loved Daniel’s blonde hair! That color works so well on him as if he’s naturally blonde. I used to think that asians don’t look good with blonde hair usually but I realized it just depends on the person and the shade of blonde.

I went into the show knowing that Daniel Kang won and during the first few eps I didn’t get why because he didn’t stand out. In fact he was never the center but sometimes I get the impression he’s the center of the particular performance because he stands out. It was apparent when I saw the 2 sorry sorry performances. People in daniel’s group had star quality and each person stood out while the people in the first group were difficult to remember/differentiate. I also noticed him whenever they put him in the shot for his facial reactions to stuff.

I could say so much more if I took notes or something while watching it but I loved the show way too much to be doing anything like that.

I noticed that in one of the earlier eps that they didn’t sub the second half of the episode. usually they do their editing/post-production thing where they put text on the screen to make it more interesting and fun to watch. most importantly, they add korean text whenever people talk so I don’t miss a word and generate anki cards with ease. I thought maybe they just ran out of time didn’t have time to add in the korean subtitles. I was annoyed though! there are english subs available for this show for anyone who like me is watching this  with learning korean as another impetus to watch besides pure enjoyment and joy. I would’ve definitely turned the english subs on for those parts if I knew they existed (so I don’t miss out. english subs is better than no subs… in case the translator catches something i couldn’t catch) but I didn’t bother searching for english soft subs. But I watched one of eps with the english subs on a little bit because that part wasn’t subbed in korean very much but I quickly realized I probably am much better than the translator at korean. i realized the translator misheard 과정 as 가족 and went to town with it lol (I’m sure all you anime fansub watchers know what I’m talking about when the translator mishears or misunderstands stuff and then translates with all this confidence and you’re like…. surely you’re aware that you’re unsure yet you translation oozes of unwarranted confidence). Even if you were speed-translating or whatever you call it no fluent korean person would ever mis-hear/misunderstand like this (those words sound so different… bad sound quality or not) especially with the way it was used in the sentence for that particular instance.

At first I thought the lyrics of na ya na is melodramatic with parts like “I’m scared that this might be a dream.”However, later I realized how the lyrics of the song matches the show perfectly and isn’t melodramatic since being a trainee is so depressing. ( lol I pulled up more of the lyrics   너는 내게 너무 예뻐서 꿈일까 난 너무 두려워. guess it is melodramatic but I’ve grown to love the lyrics nonetheless )  In the episodes where they announce everyone’s rankings there’s a lot of surprises and I remember this one particularly trainee was shocked and couldn’t believe his name was called and if I remember correctly he said “is this a dream?” or something along those lines.   Then I also thought how the lyrics apply to everyone since you can’t predict the results of the voting as evidenced by all the shocking, happy, and sad moments in the show during the ranking announcement ceremonies. It must be surreal to know you were one of the 11 people who got picked out 101 or 90 something trainees especially since BoA paused for a long time before announcing the name! (Well it’s not her fault). Other than the long pauses that BoA had to place I must say that MNET did a fantastic job with the live finale. I remember the kpop star season 1 finale being crappy in the way that live finales of competition shows are known for…

I thought it was hilarious how they used the dothraki background music from Game of Thrones on dong-ho (apparently he goes by baek ho in nu’est).

I recommend recording audio on clyp.it  to ask people online to transcribe for you if you want that.  I definitely use it when I get really curious and love whatever it is I’m watching.

Here’s a few of the questions I asked. I asked a lot of questions because I love this show and there’s 11 eps and each episode is at least 2 hours long so there’s definitely stuff I learned from the show.

1   2   3   4  5

I highly recommend this show to anyone who is remotely interested in it!

out of the final group my favorites are ji-sung ( i love talk/variety people), jae-hwan (his voice makes energetic that much more powerful), ong seong-wu ( love his unique last name, good looks, and talk/variety skills), kang daniel ( wow he deserves to number one), lee dae-hwi ( i only noticed him in the beginning for obvious reasons) , lai guan-lin ( loved his troublemaker routine with this trainee friend from cube and the part when they played charades and he was like i don’t know what that means and said PASS). So I will be very busy in the future trying to watch all the talk/variety show appearances by the members of WANNAONE (radio star, happy together, snl, WEEKLY IDOL – wow I can’t believe they made them perform nayana at 2x… etc etc LOL NEVER mind snl made them perform it at 8x ) because I want to learn more about them and my MO for talk/variety shows is usually watching the episodes that feature guests who pique my interest.

I decided to look up the meaning of words and take screenshots while watching the show so I can keep watching show instead of pausing to make anki cards. I think this might be more efficient since I’ll make the anki cards later on and just focus on that task instead of going back and forth between watching and making anki cards. Also giving myself that week between taking the screenshot and making the anki card may help in deciding to not add cards that aren’t worth adding if let’s say they use the word 10 times after I took the screenshot (at that point I may feel like I don’t need to make an anki card since I heard it being used so many times or make less cloze deletions). And as always native material didn’t fail me and I got some really cool and useful words/grammar (mostly vocab ) from this show!  I don’t understand those people that still do textbooks despite having gained enough proficiency to go after native stuff.

On a random note, I heard that show me the money season 7 is actually 777 which made me think that it’s airing on 7-7-2018 (okay I realize now that the year is 2018 so it doesn’t match up 100% lol) and I got excited and overwhelmed because I feel like I have my hands full with produce 48 because the episodes are so long. But then I realized nothing aired on that day and I find out that the auditions are kicking off on 7-7 and the show is airing in September.

on another random note I love learning Korean from song lyrics especially rap stuff like ZICO because there’s wayaku available (japanese translation) and also english translations available. It saves me a lot of time because the problem is either I don’t know the words or I don’t know how to interpret or infer the intended meaning of the lyrics (since there’s no subject so you gotta infer that and more + any new cool, hip, lingo that I am not savvy on. I seem to have more problem understanding korean song lyrics since korean grammar is more complex than Japanese grammar to say the least lol. I think I read somewhere there’s 10x more grammar somewhere but who knows… japanese has less grammar and keeps it simple but has pitch accent to make up for the difficulty level lol) and I notice this happens way more frequently rap stuff and trying to tackle this with only a dictionary (especially korean korean one depending on the word ) or google is just time-consuming.  This is kinda related since wanna one members collaborated with zico for the sub unit song and I mined from the wayaku while referencing the english translation.

random links

 

 

 

Dongho feat Megaton Bar from Broduce101

https://kpople.com/hidden-meaning-behind-open-up-choreography-produce-101/

 

An appreciation of Never from Broduce101

 

An appreciation of Never from Broduce101

MY hg CLOZE DELETION format for Korean Anki cards made from TV SHOWS

UPDATE to this ENTRY

front of card

Back of the card

HS RAPPER (spoiler below)

 

 

 

 

 

 

HIGH SCHOOL RAPPER

to be completely honest I didn’t want young b to win high school rapper for the sole reason that I liked his song the least out of everyone who performed in the finals. I acknowledge that he’s great at rapping but I was confused as to how he got the most votes. Maybe it was different seeing the performance in person or maybe his popularity/fame from show me the money had a bearing on the results. I knew for the longest time he won this show because they mentioned it a million times on show me the money so when he finished performing on the HS finale I thought that’s it??? since he was the last to perform and the ante had been getting upped time and time again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

+++++ end of spoiler

well what I see is black and white since I use an ereader but it’s legible nonetheless. and there’s one more CLOZE card   that only has ttak blanked out with the {{c2:}} blahblah code .

another example:

 

FRONT: ++++++++++

the Korean definition was generated by hanseido. I don’t obsesses and waste time trying to go 1000% monolingual dic especially for korean ( I love what steve kauffman says in his youtube vids about the issue.)

On an unrelated note I learned why  for certain korean/japanese words it’s so much easier just to learn the english word…. it was because the word was ORIGINALLY IN ENGLISH and it was translated to Japanese and then the korean people just took the words that japanese people painstakingly translated and just brought the words into korean by reading the words with their hanja readings. I found about it from a japanese book I was reading last month which talked about how Japan was obsessed with learning from other countries in the 1800s?? 1700s?? in the various advanced fields like science and so they had to translate all that shit from other languages to Japanese and of course they came across words that don’t exist in Japanese so they had to invent them using the kanji that they have. So that is why with some words it’s just easier to use English because it was the original word (but then again they translated from many languages…. not just english. there were so many countries with booming culture and sciences back in the day) and the 1 word is so much easier to remember than an explanation/essay. ).

I set up anki so that Hanseido look-ups come to the front of the card since I won’t even read it let alone remember it if it’s in the back). I usually don’t put screenshots in the front because it’s too much work (for this one I just felt like it and I thought it would help me remember) and I will never put a screenshot with text on the front.

Back:+++++++++++++++

Edit field just to show the multiple cloze deletions I have going on here. sometimes I do c3 for the definition. it all depends on what I feel like doing.

FIRSTLY, I find cloze deletion and anki great for upper intermediate/advanced and may even more upper intermediate (these terms all just broad so..>). I don’t recommend it for beginners or intermediate

I recently came up with a brilliant format and process for making anki cards for Korean while watching korean talk/variety shows. I’m sure it could be applicable to other languages too. I love cloze deletion cards and they are especially effective for me for Korean. This is in part due to my level, my vocabulary because I would think it’d be very taxing and painful to do cloze deletion cards as a beginner or intermediate even. If anything though I think you’re better off doing other things like actual reading/listening to build your vocab than making and reviewing srs cards if you’re a beginner　（I think that using anki to learn the top 2000 or even 5000 words of a language to be really inefficient compared not using it especially if you have a lot of free time). I find it to be really helpful as an advanced korean learner. I hate the traditional sentence/plain word vocab card formats for Korean when using anki because to me it makes no sense to be testing yourself in anki the way you’re testing yourself whenever you watch any native material containing unknown words. Of course that was my go to format for Korean in the beginning!

The way I see it is that the whole point of doing anki cards is so that when i add word x to anki and do the reviews I expect myself to recognize it (and remember the meaning) or at least know that it’s in my deck when I see it in the wild again. By recognizing I mean instantaneous recognition so anything longer than 5 seconds is really BAD. If I add word x by itself on the front or the sentence containing word x on the front of a card with the answer on the back (the usual flashcard/anki format) I’m essentially putting myself in the same exact situation as initially coming across unknown words on a tv show or novel etc. for example, I’ll watch a tv show, they’ll say something I don’t know and they also happened to have the text across the screen and I care enough so I look it up in lingoes or google or naver etc. What usually happens is if I find the correct definition everything is crystal clear and I understood it and I may or may not completely forget the word or definition or both 5 minutes/30 seconds later. For me, the traditional format is too much work and it’s not effective. What happens is I either I don’t engage with it properly so I’m not really doing the reviews or I do engage with it properly and do the painful thing where I force myself to conjure the definition out of thin air since the only clue is the word or sentence containing the word only to mark AGAIN a month later or just draw a blank go no f’in idea (the former with the thinking hard thing is especially awful and ineffective in my experience). When I half-ass it I either read the sentence or half-read it (reading it in a lazy way) or don’t read it (but don’t realize I’m not reading it) or only read it a little of it (not enough) and I usually press the SHOW answer after 0.5 seconds (barely enough time to actually engage/think about it but I am impulsive like that especially when I am not into it and maybe I grew irritated at this format over the years), read the answer go yeah that seems familiar but for some reason I can’t remember it at all (or it’s like the first time I’m reading it) and proceed to press hard ASAP (again barely enough to read it or I half-read it) until I feel like hitting AGAIN in some future session. So of course this didn’t happen with all my korean cards but it happened frequently enough to make me not give a shit and keep marking hard, then again depending on how I felt rather than if I actually knew the answer. I acknowledge that my disenchantment towards Anki played a role in rendering the traditional format ineffective for me. That was inevitable from having used anki all these years and having a lazy disposition. However, I recall that even when I did my reviews seriously (using the traditional format of sentence/word on the front and definition on the back) I could tell some of it was just not working and I was wasting my energy.

If I add word x to anki and I want to be able to recognize it/remember the meaning when it pops up in native media in the future, the best way to remember it using it anki is not testing myself in the exact situation that I encountered it in minus the sound ( I never considered adding audio to my korean cards because I don’t need IT and it takes up time. I only record if I’m going to ask people “what did this person say” ) I’ve realized doing that just makes no sense. one reason reason is that it’s BORING! You’re subjecting yourself to the same experience minus the audio. I feel that much more unmotivated to read something I already read especially if it has an unknown word in it. You have to practice SMART not HARD. Training and performing are completely different. Basketball players do other things besides play basketball to train and piano players don’t play the song over and over again from start to finish to practice. They do stuff in training that they don’t do during the performance because it’s effective. You could write out each of the regular usage kanji ( about 2000) a thousand times and still not be able to write all of them out off the top of your head (OF course I’m recommending RTK for this very reason) but I think in Korea they encourage nonsense like this last I heard because they love working hard (they should focus on working smart more). You have to approach it in a strategic manner or you’re just wasting time. It’s great that you’re hard-working and you have all this energy and drive to reach your goal but if you’re going it about it in the wrong way it can be ineffective and tortuous! It’s not always no pain, no gain. So I finally realized exactly why the cloze deletion works so well for me. I knew it was more effective than the traditional formats for me but I couldn’t explain why. I knew that the traditional flashcard format card doesn’t make ANY sense.

I realized that clozing each syllable (I usually do every syllable of the word since most words are 2 syllables.  When the word is long ie 3 or more syllables I usually choose 2 syllables to blank out. If the word is really bad I cloze more than 2 syllables ) of the korean word makes it so much easier to remember. The only time I kill a whole word is if the word is one syllable and if it’s hard i give myself a hint with English alphabet like j for 지. erasing the whole word and trying to remember that is TOO MUCH WORK and I don’t think it’s worth it. You’d think that making 1 card is better than making 3 but it’s the exact OPPOSITE in my experience if you do it right (the time difference for making 3 cards vs 1 is a matter of 2 seconds and reviews for cloze deletions cards are much easier, faster, and more fun. Additionally, I can change the ease intervals etc so it really does take less time than the traditional format. It requires production from me but it’s not burdensome. In fact the traditional format of sentence on the front with the definition on the back is so burdensome I can’t even get myself to do the review properly AND I painfully go through the cycle of not remembering or mis-remembering – this is a waste of time and you most definitely never do this with cloze cards provided that you don’t cloze the whole word). It’s so much better than clozing just one syllable of the word or doing the traditional format of word on front or answer on back. I went through a phase where I made Korean anki cards like I made Japanese anki cards and had to acknowledge that it’s just not working for Korean. By that I mean that I would make only 1 cloze card for Korean WHERE I clozed one of the syllables of the word. something about the bacchim and number of possible vowel and sound combinations just make it hard to remember the word  or maybe it’s better to say that much easier to forget it or remember it vaguely or incorrectly (vague to the point that I don’t know if the word is in my deck or not or i have no idea what the f the word means even though the word has been in my deck for x years with a screenshot from the korean tv show) ie 3 or 4 syllable words that with syllables that all have different vowel sounds and some or all have different bacchim in them. hell even 2 syllable words can be tough to remember due to the bacchim/vowels (though I know Japanese so I take full advantage of hanja to easily remember the sino-words ie not just thinking of the vowel of the sound as an arbitrary vowel since I know the damn hanja. ) Guess I love me some bacchim-less multi-syllable words that have repeating vowel sounds for the syllables like 비나리, 사이비,거시기,누리 lol (these words are random but easy to remember lol). CLOZE deletion is also wickedly effective for onomatopoeia compared to the traditional format. Cloze deletion cards help me notice things that I wouldn’t notice in the traditional format. Cloze deletion format is a MUST for me for Korean.

For Japanese I usually have only one cloze that’s one syllable (hiragana) of the word by itself or the word in the sentence with the full definition in japanese and english below it. When I tried to adopt the strategy for Korean it was still too difficult and I realized why…. so the ONE SYLLABLE in Korean is more complicated than the one syllable in Japanese since Korean has spelling and all these vowels and consonant sounds that don’t exist in Japanese and of course there are Japanese sounds that cannot be properly represented by Hangeul. I realized  the only way to make the cloze card effective for Korean is to make multiple cloze cards (c1 c2 c3). I didn’t like the idea of multiple cloze cards because you’re making 2 or 3 cards instead of just one but from doing the single c1 cloze with Korean I realize making multiple clozes actually takes less time overall since my anki settings are super lax anyway (I can mark easy that much more frequently and even if I press OKAY it’ll still send it out far. Currently my settings are set that for new cards it’s 7 days for okay and 11 days for good. I think my settings for japanese is like 9 days and 14 days?? also the step is 2900 minutes. I was initially hesitant about making my intervals that huge for Korean but it turned out to be a boon because I can truly focus my energies on cards that are difficult rather than begrudgingly press easy on easy cards too frequently which was exactly what I would’ve experienced with the default anki settings.).

Of course my retention rate is not 100% with the cloze deletion format but it’s definitely higher than the rate for the traditional format. And I don’t think you should be aiming for a 100% anyway… I don’t know what the exact ideal number is but I would rather be undertested than overtested. I want to reap the benefits from anki without the unnecessary time sink.

I’ve found some great ways to STREAMLINE THE PROCESS for generating cards while watching KOREAN talk/variety shows. I have a different for process for stuff I mine from reading because I go after efficiency.

I recommend and use the following:

lingoes dictionary – I use never japnese/korean dictionary from 2009 (?)(that’s the date on lingoes if I remember correctly.). there’s also k-e. I like it because it’s really fast since it’s off-line and searches as you type. You can also set it up so it looks up text you double-click on, etc but it does not know how to unconjugate so it’s only helpful for nouns for the pop-up function.

Also recently I’ve fallen in love with the example sentences. I always ignored them until this year lol. I always ignored them because I only cared about what the word means in the instance that I came across.

AUTOHOTKEY (set to naver/daum/some korean-english dictionary/naver k-e example sentences/naver j-k examples sentences/ and my HG and OG Japanese google imi wa appended to the word). as I mentioned the lingoes dictionary is not up to date. I wish it was up to date! I got the idea from this blog https://mykorea.blog/look-up-a-word-or-phrase-in-a-korean-dictionary-using-autohotkey/ PAIR This with a gaming mouse with the macros set up and you save a lot of time and feel a lot more motivated to stuff up

WORD QUERY – this anki plugin is amazing. after installing it you find and install the dictionaries then go to word-query when you’re in anki and set-up a card-template for the look-up. You put the word in the specified field and it generates the defintion entry in the specified field ! it does not know how to unconjugate since it searches the dictionary. It can be run in EDITING window and BROWSE window.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/775418273

For Korean I use korean-english/ korean-korean and naver korean-japanese dictionary and the hanja dictionary (sometimes it’s helpful or maybe I just do it for the shits and giggles. it generates all the homophones in hanja form! I usually don’t pay attention to this).

I also use it in conjunction with readlang and rikaisama (Japanese)  since I import cards using those programs/services. Readlang doesn’t know how to unconjugate so you’d have to painstackingly unconjugate the verbs so I only use it on certain cards which I mark via tagging before importing.

HANSEIDO – This gives you korean definitions. I use it to mass generate defintions. I select all the korean cards in browse and generate the definition. again, it does not know how to unconjugate. you can not use it in the EDITING FIELD. It can only be executed in the browse field. I was curious and tested it to see if it would look up hanja since there are lotta of homophones depending on the word and it WORKED!

CLOZE DELETION SHORTCUT PLUGIN called BASIC C1 WRAPPER- I installed other plugins I would never use and replaced the code with the cloze deletion shortcut for c2 and c3 and c4 etc. so for me it’s control + 2, control +3, control + 4 to make the highlighted text clozed. there’s also the space bar one

ACTUALLY, this plugin is a lifesaver for making clozes

(but I realized that since it’s based off the one for the spacebar plugin, the spacebar plugin stops working if I install it so I chose this over the spacebar plugin!)

as is this (I use the new button/short-cut  for clearing all the clozes in the field) and this 

PAINT.NET PROGRAM – for  cutting out the text from the screenshots. I like this over gimp and MS paint and this other program. I use the shortcut key “s” to select a chunk of the picture so I can cut it and paste it into anki. Also I use the macro mouse for copy pasting (control c, control v). Unlike the other programs, paint.net has shortcuts for accessing a specific picture when you open up multiple pictures. Sometimes I take screenshots and save them to generate cards later and so after I open a handful of pictures I switch between the pictures by using the shortcuts control + 1 for the first pic open, control + 2 for the second pic open, etc etc

EDIT: I now use sharex. check out mattvsjapan’s youtube vid about the program!

TWEAK ANKI SETTINGS

This isn’t a plugin or a program but anki is completely different with different settings. I used to be overtested like crazy from the default settings as well as the damn steps. So I don’t feel burdened or ashamed of generating multiple cloze deletion cards simply because my settings are set so I can push easy cards far out rather quickly and cloze deletion cards are easier to remember than regular cards and I did regular cards already and know they don’t work as well. My settings for Japanese are even more lax since I’m that much more confident and comfortable with Japanese. I have different settings for each deck depending my level and the format (THE CLOZE DELETION card format has huge ease intervals etc for obvious reasons!). as you get better at a language at the language you should increase the ease interval/etc.the default settings are just too much. and if you need those default settings to retain a decent percentage than you’re probably better off not using anki and YOU SHOULD instead read and listen consistently to learn/familiarize yourself with the common words/sentence patterns/ etc.

https://vladsperspective.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/optimize-your-anki-youre-overtesting-yourself-on-too-few-cards-make-huge-gains/

and don’t forget to change the STEPS. I hate steps! My step is just one and it’s usually 2900 minutes. If I fail a card I do not want to see it 1 minute later since it will interrupt the flow of my anki review mojo. I love anki now. But seriously why the hell do people want to see anki cards 1 minute and 10 minutes after failing… that just sounds like torture. if you need to see it that frequently that maybe you shouldn’t have added that card. I feel more motivated to read my anki card after failing it if anki shows it to me 2 or 3 days from when I initially saw it rather than the next day or 5 minutes later.

When the dictionary and google and naver translate fail me I go to chiebukuro, reddit, or korean stack exchange. I prefer chiebukuro solely for the fact that it’s less of a pain in the ass. Also Japanese people are very kind and sometimes Japanese is better than English for the explanation since the 2 languages are grammatically similar but Japanese and Korean are very different languages and some shit is just is hard to translate to Japanese and vice versa. the stack exchange wants me to write a paragraph in the question field or something. it always bitches about how I don’t have enough text. It’s ridiculous.

So I usually download the episode than watch it on youtube or ondemandkorea etc because it’s so much more convenient with rewinding and fast-wording or even looping. I use kmplayer because I can set it up so that I can rewind and fastforward by scrolling and that it very convenient. Also I can press f5 and f6 to set point a and point b respectively so I can loop the video (I don’t use this often). also if I press control + c kmplayer will take a screenshot and put it in my clipboard which I can paste into paint/gimp/etc. KMPLAYER takes the screenshot of the video at full screen which makes the text BIGGER so it’s really convenient since korean shows are notorious for having small text. Meanwhile Japanese shows have HUGE text literally covering 20 % of the screen as you can see all over this post which I like for practical reasons ie reading/putting it into anki though sometimes I wish it were a little smaller but it’s still better than Korean TV text. I always gotta make the Japanese video smaller before taking a screenshot to add to anki while for Korean it’s ALWAYS fullscreen just to get that tiny text as big as possible.

So when i come across something that I want to add to anki I…

1) press control + c on kmplayer. I either let the video play ( I can rewind if I want to etc) or loop it at a specified scene.
2) paste in paint
3) search lingoes
4) run word query with control + enter (right enter). I set it up so that the word-query dictionary fields do not show up during reviews. they take up a lot of space so I just copy whatever I want into the cloze field.

5) if that doesn’t work I go to google or whatever. Or I could add a tag to it to go back to fill the definition in later so I can just keep watching the episode. sometimes I have to ask on chiebukuro or korean stack exchange and the responses can take days sometimes.

6) I cut out a square or rectangle that contains the text and paste into the screenshot field of my anki card. I set this to show up in the BACK. Sometimes I find the scene itself ( without the text) helpful to remember so i’ll include it on top of the text.

7) if I find something in lingoes with an example sentence I paste the definition, example sentence, japanese translation all on the same field. then I use the shortcut for cloze deleting and cloze delete each syllable of the word (usually 2), and a part of the definition (a syllable or two). I try not to make too many cloze deletion cards. I usually generate 2 cloze deletion cards since first card is for the syllable of the word & syllable(s) of the defintion and second card is for the second syllable. I cloze the definition under the cloze of the syllable that’s EASIER to remember. If the word is particularly hard I will make 2 clozes with 2 syllables of the word and a 3rd cloze with only parts of the definition clozed out ( I rarely do this one because I don’t like making 3 cards for a word unless the word is particularly tricky or challenging).  it all depends on how I perceive the difficulty of the word in terms of remembering it.

I repeat the steps if the word has another meaning (which was not used in the talk/variety show) that I think is easy to remember/ it seems worth remembering. kill 2 birds with one stone.

b) if lingoes doesn’t find anything but word query dictionary finds something then I use that. If i don’t have the sentence I just use word and definition with stuff clozed out.

** when I initially discovered the wonder of cloze deletion I was between a rock and a hard place because cloze-deleting a screenshot of a tv show is time-consuming (compared to clozing text with the ms paint and copy-pasting. i sure as hell won’t type out the sentence) but effective since the screenshot is memorable and I actually get something out of my anki review since something is blanked out. Inserting a screenshot that contains text without blanking anything out does nothing for me for korean. I realized one day I can just cloze the definition entry and put the screenshot on the back as a reminder/test as to why I care about the word. That’s why I love clozing the example sentences in lingoes. I feel more motivated to read the sentence or phrase in the screenshot knowing that I read the definition or explanation just a few seconds ago.

8) as I’m adding my cloze deletion cards I also add the word by itself to another field so I can look up all the crap on hanseido later on. I put the hanseido definition on the front since it’s a different definition than the one I grabbed from the other dictionaries and I’m more likely to read it if it’s on the front of the card. no scratch that; i will not read it if it’s on the back. it’s some psychological/conditioning thing!  I’m very impulsive with the pressing.

9) after I’m done adding for the day I run hanseido in browse

10 ) be amazed by the number of cards I Made (remember one word could have 2 or 3 cards) in one day and actually remember shit!

Anyway, going back to the initial example I gave courtesy of some episode of HIGH SCHOOL RAPPER. I know that if I did the traditional format of pasting the screenshot let’s say on the front and the answer on the back I may not remember the word or the meaning despite countless reviews on anki. There’s a lot going on in those 2 syllables to just make ONE CARD.  I gotta break it down to get something out of it.