How to make the beginner's course easier
Added 2023-08-01 06:09:07 +0000 UTCI wondered if it is possible to lower the entry barrier of the beginner's course. From the feedback I get, it seems to work well for most people. For some however, there is too much to digest on a single card. One thing that could be done about this quite easily is to create a supplementary deck that teaches the vocabulary used in the course in isolation, one word per card with audio. Also, conjugations of those words could be taught separately. This means: To prepare for the course, you could learn the words and conjugations in advance. This would hopefully reduce the information density of the cards a bit. So I am not talking about a separate 10k vocab deck, but only about the vocab used in the course.
While I am not a big fan of rote repetition and grammar exercises, I did both of these things myself in the beginning and found it helpful. So one could start with these supplementary decks, memorize some words in advance, then go ahead with the actual beginner's course. What do you think?
Also, a short update: My new job is keeping me very busy, but I continue to answer questions I get and I will publish v14 of the beginner's course soon.
Comments
In my humble opinion your decks contains a lot of input already. Enough to make progress. What about idea of creating a deck for output, i.e. writing? Front of the card - sentence in English, back - Japanese. If you write almost correct - archive card and move forward.
Aleksandr Kunin
2023-10-20 07:48:31 +0000 UTCI just noticed that you wrote you're doing this edit for your cards. I hope you do not to it for each card individually! You can achieve this for all cards at once by editing the card template. If you need help with that, please drop me a message... And regarding roumaji in general: Having them on the front or back or on the cards in general depends on the learning goal: Someone who loves reading should learn kana in the beginning and remove them. Someone who wants to learn words, grammar or listening comprehension might want them on the cards in the beginning. I think it makes sense to offer several card templates in addition to the deck, which change the cards accordingly. Plus a manual on how to use those templates. I will add that in the next update.
Joe
2023-08-21 06:41:59 +0000 UTCPut your hand on the keyboard and close your eyes. It is as easy as that.
Zeno
2023-08-12 02:40:51 +0000 UTC@Joe, do you really intend to double the workload? If the deck is overly dense, the solution should NOT be to create a duplicate of the beginner's course, strip off the grammar cards, and release it as a pre-beginner course...
Zeno
2023-08-12 02:39:06 +0000 UTCI agree with you @Oliver
Zeno
2023-08-12 02:27:14 +0000 UTCToo many people keep telling me to avoid drilling conjugation. I feel that it has a place, at least examples. It can make sentences more comprehensible, which makes it valuable. Learning individual vocabulary words can make sentences more comprehensible also. Just drilling on random words on a frequency list doesn't work very well except at the very beginning, but learning words that are in the specific material you are trying to understand can be a wonderful help. Maybe making it separate deck like the math deck would be the way to go. That way people who aren't interested could skip it.
stephen fuqua
2023-08-04 20:33:52 +0000 UTCIMO the Romani should be remove from the face card I do this edit for my cards so I don’t intentionally try to read words like they’re structure for english
Abao Aweikago
2023-08-04 10:00:40 +0000 UTCAh, I only half caught that part. I'm sure that some people would benefit from this, so if you want to spend your time on it, it won't be a waste. I am a bit biased towards wanting more advanced content since I'm already past the beginners course, which is probably true for most people on your patreon.
Sam Samson
2023-08-02 23:24:58 +0000 UTCThank you for your reply! What I have in mind is not a course for building new vocab, but extracting the words of the beginner's course in order of appearance and putting them into a separate deck. After learning those, people can start the beginner's course and are armed with some prior knowledge. This hopefully would reduce the information density of the cards a bit. Sorry for not explaining this precisely. This is something that I can more or less compute from the deck's raw data.
Joe
2023-08-02 04:50:42 +0000 UTCI think that there is value in learning vocab in isolation, but there is already a plethora of content that already does that, including many that skip the written aspect. I recently finished the beginners course and now I'm using a different anki deck for building vocab before doing the intermediate course. While some aspects of it are lower quality than your course, its realistically good enough. So I do think there would be some value in you making a vocab-exclusive course, but other options would probably be more worthwhile IMO.
Sam Samson
2023-08-02 01:33:37 +0000 UTCFrom what I can remember, at the very beginning, my main problem was the lack of vocabulary. At the very beginning, I'm not sure that the introduction of conjugation was much help, as there were too many things you didn't understand yet to really understand the explanation. I remember using a lot of different resources to get used to the words, and I remember failing lot of cards as soon as they contained a word I didn't recognize. In my opinion, the conjugation/grammar exercises can come much later, perhaps between beginner and intermediate level, to consolidate what has been learned during the beginner course.
Christophe G.
2023-08-01 13:29:42 +0000 UTCIt's always good to read that people can easily learn with the beginner's course. Since I do get feedback from people who struggle a bit, I still wondered if there's meaningful a way to make things easier. A vocab and conjugation deck is something I can create programmatically without too much effort, but before doing so I wondered if people would actually use it. I think it makes sense to start with 50-100 words in the beginning. By the way: Maintaining the beginner's course is not that much of an effort by now. It depends a bit on the type of feedback people send, but it's definitely much less work than creating the intermediate decks. But I get your point and actually would love to continue working on the intermediate content asap...
Joe
2023-08-01 12:05:50 +0000 UTCWhile I think its noble to continue updating the beginners deck, personally I think it does its job incredibly well, the only barrier for entry really for it is learning the kana and kanji, which you've kind of address with the addon, so even that isn't a problem for the more tech-savy. It seems really the best thing to focus on if anything is the intermediate deck, putting more focus on vocab and harder grammar there, that said the poll implies I'm completely wrong lol so what do I know.
Oliver O'Reilly
2023-08-01 10:44:42 +0000 UTC
