Something that I've been doing for years and I'm still doing it today is when I can tell from the monolingual definition of a target language word that it's a noun for a physical object e.g. メガネ -> glasses, I'll search it on Google images with the language set to my target language. And if the new word is very spefific, I also still use bilingual dictionaries to look up those technical terms from areas like anatomy, math, physiscs, politics, chemistry, ...
Set preferred monolingual dicts as priority in yomichan so it’s the first dictionary and English dicts as last. Mine dictionary words Read easy novel using monolingual dict
I made a ChatGPT prompt that makes it give me a simpler definition in Russian, and because I am a learner of L.O.I (Listening Only Immersion) instead of refold/MIA/AJATT, I don't read or use subs (subs may be used for the first month to give you a kick start) no word look ups, and the rationale behind this is that if you don't use English to look things up then you can get a better understanding of the word in your target language, and with this I had a problem, I couldn't use text English or Russian, and before I found the holy grail, EL! (Eleven Labs) a natural (for the most part natural) text to speech that saved me and allowed me to use anki because after I got that simpler definition I could just copy and paste it into EL download put on the back of the card along side the target word and BOOM, no text monolingual flashcards.
Ive been learning Japanese for a year and a half, the only reason I still use English definitions, is because you're not going to acquire the words from definitions, you acquire words from seeing them in immersion and understanding more and more. However, I still do use a monolingual dictionary when the English definition doesn't make sense, so I guess I'm doing it backwards but it still somehow works lol.
I completely agree with you, which is why I decided to do it differently and focus on using example sentences and I mean hey, If it works for you and it's not affecting your output then why not! :D
I do literally the exact same and have been learning for about the same amount of time as well. There was a period where I'd used the ja-ja dictionary, but I eventually did switch back. Haven't had any problems yet and I don't really translate anything in my head so... 🤷♂️. Even still, when my brain's being dumb there's been lots of times where only the Japanese word comes to mind and not the English one. There'll probably be more of a reason to switch when I start outputting more often. Who knows lol
Just want to say, I did the transition some time ago, without laddering or any structured approach really. I only created some cards as I encountered unkown "dictionary" words that really seemed important, and helped myself with some native language definition as well, but most of the time I just looked up the words in the definition (yomichan) without creating cards, and slowly I just ended up acquiring the dictionary vocab on the course of some weeks. I basically just thew myself in there. I actually really enjoy searching for definitions and studying with them, the satdisfaction of understanding a complicated definition is a great motivator. I encourage anyone, even if they not yet feel "ready", to at least try out monolingual study, it really makes a difference. I even ended up searching many many words that I thought I understood very well on the monolingual dictionary, just to get a proper explanation and re-learn things with much more confidence and meaning.
For easier content to study from. I reccommend watching TH-cam videos of children stories of your target language and you can find a lot of videos with subtitles for them and study that. And then gradually “level up” your content overtime as you understand. Children content is geared towards novice learners so. It’s not gonna be stuff too complicated. Thank you so much for your knowledge and info on the monolingual transition cuz this has always stumbled me. Right now my goal is on get back into studying Korean and Spanish.
For me personally I used to create cards for each word in the definition I didn't know, but the problem was that too many of my reps were boring dictionary definitions. For a variety of reasons in December I redid my sentence mining deck almost entirely from scratch (all monolingual now, deleted all the dictionary cards, made all the anime cards have audio and screenshots, made the front of the card just the sentence as opposed to the sentence + image, deleted all the manga cards as i put a screenshot of the scene on the front which had furigana now i just retype the sentence for manga and have the screenshot on the back), and one of the many changes I made was putting all the definitions in the definition on the back. For me this made repping more engaging but the "sentence banking" alternative seems interesting. However a potential problem is that sometimes words in the definition are just uncommon synonyms that you might not have in your sentence bank. Anyways although the back of my cards can have several definitions it doesn't slow down my reps too much as I can kinda just skim over them, and also often the meaning is obvious I just am unsure of the reading. Also I usually include all the meanings a word can take even the ones that don’t apply to my example because I feel it gives me a nice wholistic impression of the word and makes it so I don't have to look it up again when I see it in a new context (tho sometimes i still do have to do that lol) Edit: something ive noticed recently is that since my vocab has gotten bigger a lot of my cards are figurative expressions. i usually just use weblio or goo but was wondering if anyone had other reccs as to how to deal with these Final edit: One thing Khatz recommends that I find very helpful is writing out the sentences by hand (for the purpose of time I do this whenever I miss the sentence, Khatz says its fine to do it whenever you "miss a sentence enough")
I think aspects of the Fluent Forever method would be helpful when using Anki - for example, using Google Images as a picture dictionary with infinite example sentences; & putting images on one's cards instead of translations, so that the cards themselves are always monolingual.
I forgot to mention the use of Google Image search! I used it a lot back in the day with a plugin that was available that made it easy to search within Anki and was super beneficial. Good advice! :D
Something about the banks I'm curious. The decks you put in the bank are decks you've "processed" (watched while deleting or suspending for the new cards deck) correct? So you're only left with those suspended ones right? Assuming the decks in the banks have been ran through, how are you you able to have a bank with which to pull ex. sentences from? Once done, Do you re-import that deck so you have back the one's you deleted? Does my inquiry make sense here haha. Like if i "watched" through many decks deleting most unknowns(which could've been used as example i+3,4 sentences later on in the bank), how could there be a bank to use. Also lets say you do re-import the same deck. You'd then have duplicates from the suspended new cards study deck no? Sorry for the ramble, just wondering about this. Thanks a ton, you're a pillar in this community!
I'm 35 years old... Spanish is my native language and I never used an English monolingual dictionary in my life, not even a notebook to write words down to memorize them later... I learned by reading, doing homework at school (?, consuming media, trying to apply what I heard/learned during the day.... you know the "natural process", and one day I was able to talk in English without "translating" everything in my head. Technology can make your life easier if you know how to use it, that's a fact... but I see a lot of (generally young) YTbers/counselors (gurus?) whatever they're called, advising everyone on doing the "monolingual transition" like if it was THAT necessary and if you don't then "you're learning the wrong way!" and it will take a tall later on in your life. You will be fine using a bilingual dictionary in your native language (for example ES-JP in my case.).. if you don't know the meaning of 犬 in English and you're not a very advanced Japanese student yet, why would you use a Japanese monolingual dictionary and make your life more complicated? You'll find a wall of text in Japanese like: "A domesticated carnivorous mammal that typically has a long snout, an acute sense of smell, non-retractable claws, and a barking, howling, or whining voice"... It's a DOG. You already know what a dog is in your language, you just need to assimilate the meaning in Japanese. You can create a simple Anki card with a picture of a dog if you want, maybe a short sentence and that's it. A lot of people also "mine" hundreds of words a day just by "one clicking an add-on", that simple it is, which is cool but they're skipping the natural process of creating your own material... you know we used to highlight stuff, look up the meanings in the dictionary, make a little summary for later, speak the word loudly... everything manually! You can use technology nowadays and it's perfect! but if you're just tanking, bulking, mass mining... like a madman without taking a break to actually learn stuff... you'll be just memorizing and after a few weeks you'll forget everything which is why some people complaint of SRS methods. There's nothing wrong with using SRS or other software, there's nothing wrong with using a bilingual or monolingual dictionary... the problem is those people that just think that a piece of software will do everything for you or that if you can understand a monolingual dictionary you'll be mastering a language... then when you ask them "how are you doing?" they can't answer it (but they know 40k Japanese words). Instead make your own cards, modify them, highlight stuff, look up on a dictionary, google stuff... if you downloaded a deck, modify/format it to your liking. I guarantee you that by doing all those things you'll be creating links in your brain that will help you to remember/recall stuff.
I've always been aware of the whole monolingual transition thing but I still make 99% of my cards with english definitions purely for speed. Often I look words up with yomi-chan for the Japanese definition but I see a word I don't know in the definition so I don't bother using it. After seeing this video I'm going to try to add Japanese definitions from now on! Also, I would love to know if having an entire database of cards slows down Anki at all. I wasn't sure so I never gave sentence banks a go. I currently have 20k subs2srs cards and it runs fine but I'm wondering if the same can be said with 50k cards, 100k cards etc.
I love the content lately. You said in one of your videos that learning german for 9 months was a waste of time. What level did you approximately reach in german? And what do you think, where is your japanese level at?
Thanks this was a really cool video💯 Quick question if I'm learning Kanji with migaku but fail cards because I don't know the new vocabulary word attach to the Kanji like for example deru which I know for the Kanji 出 am I doing my reviews wrong?
Thanks! I only marked myself on how well I knew the English keyword at that stage. I would treat the vocab as supplementary if you want to look at it, but you can ignore it for the most part and learn vocab using sentence cards instead (which is more fun imo) :D
@@BritVsJapan Oh I am.... currently 600 cards into core2k deck. I learned not to learn Kanji in isolation so I find it easier but I'm starting to think I should try to convert my more then 10,000 hours of anime(weebo alert😓)by switching over to a anime deck. As I'm currently only in the young stages of like 300 Kanji I heard different views of sentence mining like you should start early or after you have learnt the joyo kanji's and etc.. I'm am a little confused on this point 😭
Hi, do you have any advice for learning the radicals on your anki deck? I am struggling because the names just don't make any sense to me. Is there any detrimental effect of me making up my own names for them that better match the shapes I see? I want to get these radicals engrained asap so I can move onto seeing Kanji better and learn the RTK deck. Thank you.
Good man keep it up. Any opinions on how many hours to fluency? I've put in about 800 hours into Gaeilge (not counting schooling hours as they were completely ineffective). I'm conversational on many topucs but I speak slowly and have to search my mind for words and phrases.
Depends what you call fluency really. After 18 months of passive listening as much as possible, about 2 hrs of study, 2+ hours of active listening, 1+ hours of reading a day I was at a high level of conversational fluency. I could likely be in a work environment and be fine. It's hard to put numbers on it really, but depending on the work you put in you're looking at 1-3 years. Hope that helps :)
@@BritVsJapan hey matt, what do you mean by 2 hrs of study? Is this like writing or grammar... 3 hours of active immerison seems pretty reasonable for me, but i could only really get another 3 - 4 hours passive? Would this be enough to reach your level after 18months
regarding the constant listening: Is it okay to just listen to stuff that is way above my level, for example podcasts? I listened to Textbook Dialogues on repeat but they are so frkn boring, that it is more fun to me listening to the unscripted "noise" of a native. But If you say this wont get me any far, I will stop it. What did you do at the beginning? Were you worried about the difficulty level of your input at all?
I used anime in the earlier stages and would definitely recommend something on the easier side. Podcasts can be fine if it's to do with something you're already knowledgeable about but I think I would recommend grabbing your favourite TV show and convert it to mp3 to listen to, works super well if you use subs2srs to make anki decks for them too :)
I've just been searching up words first in japanese then sentance mine the definitions when any I plus one sentances come up, sometimes I'll search a definition of a word, and in that definition I look up another definition of a unknown word and take a sentance from their ( 2 definitions deep) will this get me their eventually ? I couldent really follow ur video on the method u proposed as I never heard of laddering and I got confused
For laddering you just add all the definitions you find for each word on the back of 1 card so that you can work your way back through the definitions to the original sentence when you go to review it. My argument was that this is a lot of info for one flashcard and to split each word you're trying to learn up into multiple cards instead and to also use more example sentences from content you are aware of to make it more comprehensible. So very similar to what you are doing, just getting those example sentences from TV or books as opposed to from the dictionary. Sorry if I explained it poorly in the video :S
I'm currently reading a manga and I'm using J-E dictionary to understand the story. When I tried this method, my reading became a chore, is there better solution?
If it's a chore then wait a bit longer until it's a bit easier. I also wouldn't worry too much while actually reading, eventually you will want to switch to a J-J dictionary for reading but at first when you switch, just focus on getting anki setup for it :) But yeah don't feel pressured into having to do this now, if it feels too hard and it's putting you off reading and studying then by all means wait and try again in a month or two.
For those of you who are doing or have done the monolingual transition, what helped you through the process?
Something that I've been doing for years and I'm still doing it today is when I can tell from the monolingual definition of a target language word that it's a noun for a physical object e.g. メガネ -> glasses, I'll search it on Google images with the language set to my target language. And if the new word is very spefific, I also still use bilingual dictionaries to look up those technical terms from areas like anatomy, math, physiscs, politics, chemistry, ...
Set preferred monolingual dicts as priority in yomichan so it’s the first dictionary and English dicts as last.
Mine dictionary words
Read easy novel using monolingual dict
I made a ChatGPT prompt that makes it give me a simpler definition in Russian, and because I am a learner of L.O.I (Listening Only Immersion) instead of refold/MIA/AJATT, I don't read or use subs (subs may be used for the first month to give you a kick start) no word look ups, and the rationale behind this is that if you don't use English to look things up then you can get a better understanding of the word in your target language, and with this I had a problem, I couldn't use text English or Russian, and before I found the holy grail, EL! (Eleven Labs) a natural (for the most part natural) text to speech that saved me and allowed me to use anki because after I got that simpler definition I could just copy and paste it into EL download put on the back of the card along side the target word and BOOM, no text monolingual flashcards.
Ive been learning Japanese for a year and a half, the only reason I still use English definitions, is because you're not going to acquire the words from definitions, you acquire words from seeing them in immersion and understanding more and more. However, I still do use a monolingual dictionary when the English definition doesn't make sense, so I guess I'm doing it backwards but it still somehow works lol.
I completely agree with you, which is why I decided to do it differently and focus on using example sentences and I mean hey, If it works for you and it's not affecting your output then why not! :D
I do literally the exact same and have been learning for about the same amount of time as well. There was a period where I'd used the ja-ja dictionary, but I eventually did switch back. Haven't had any problems yet and I don't really translate anything in my head so... 🤷♂️. Even still, when my brain's being dumb there's been lots of times where only the Japanese word comes to mind and not the English one. There'll probably be more of a reason to switch when I start outputting more often. Who knows lol
Ill be making the transition soon. Great video, thank you!!
Just want to say, I did the transition some time ago, without laddering or any structured approach really. I only created some cards as I encountered unkown "dictionary" words that really seemed important, and helped myself with some native language definition as well, but most of the time I just looked up the words in the definition (yomichan) without creating cards, and slowly I just ended up acquiring the dictionary vocab on the course of some weeks. I basically just thew myself in there.
I actually really enjoy searching for definitions and studying with them, the satdisfaction of understanding a complicated definition is a great motivator. I encourage anyone, even if they not yet feel "ready", to at least try out monolingual study, it really makes a difference. I even ended up searching many many words that I thought I understood very well on the monolingual dictionary, just to get a proper explanation and re-learn things with much more confidence and meaning.
For easier content to study from. I reccommend watching TH-cam videos of children stories of your target language and you can find a lot of videos with subtitles for them and study that. And then gradually “level up” your content overtime as you understand. Children content is geared towards novice learners so. It’s not gonna be stuff too complicated. Thank you so much for your knowledge and info on the monolingual transition cuz this has always stumbled me. Right now my goal is on get back into studying Korean and Spanish.
Great tips, awesome to see you putting more content out. Thanks for the making this much easier for me.
For me personally I used to create cards for each word in the definition I didn't know, but the problem was that too many of my reps were boring dictionary definitions. For a variety of reasons in December I redid my sentence mining deck almost entirely from scratch (all monolingual now, deleted all the dictionary cards, made all the anime cards have audio and screenshots, made the front of the card just the sentence as opposed to the sentence + image, deleted all the manga cards as i put a screenshot of the scene on the front which had furigana now i just retype the sentence for manga and have the screenshot on the back), and one of the many changes I made was putting all the definitions in the definition on the back. For me this made repping more engaging but the "sentence banking" alternative seems interesting. However a potential problem is that sometimes words in the definition are just uncommon synonyms that you might not have in your sentence bank. Anyways although the back of my cards can have several definitions it doesn't slow down my reps too much as I can kinda just skim over them, and also often the meaning is obvious I just am unsure of the reading. Also I usually include all the meanings a word can take even the ones that don’t apply to my example because I feel it gives me a nice wholistic impression of the word and makes it so I don't have to look it up again when I see it in a new context (tho sometimes i still do have to do that lol)
Edit: something ive noticed recently is that since my vocab has gotten bigger a lot of my cards are figurative expressions. i usually just use weblio or goo but was wondering if anyone had other reccs as to how to deal with these
Final edit: One thing Khatz recommends that I find very helpful is writing out the sentences by hand (for the purpose of time I do this whenever I miss the sentence, Khatz says its fine to do it whenever you "miss a sentence enough")
この動画を作ってくれてありがとうございます
I think aspects of the Fluent Forever method would be helpful when using Anki - for example, using Google Images as a picture dictionary with infinite example sentences; & putting images on one's cards instead of translations, so that the cards themselves are always monolingual.
I forgot to mention the use of Google Image search! I used it a lot back in the day with a plugin that was available that made it easy to search within Anki and was super beneficial. Good advice! :D
Something about the banks I'm curious. The decks you put in the bank are decks you've "processed" (watched while deleting or suspending for the new cards deck) correct? So you're only left with those suspended ones right? Assuming the decks in the banks have been ran through, how are you you able to have a bank with which to pull ex. sentences from? Once done, Do you re-import that deck so you have back the one's you deleted? Does my inquiry make sense here haha. Like if i "watched" through many decks deleting most unknowns(which could've been used as example i+3,4 sentences later on in the bank), how could there be a bank to use. Also lets say you do re-import the same deck. You'd then have duplicates from the suspended new cards study deck no? Sorry for the ramble, just wondering about this. Thanks a ton, you're a pillar in this community!
4:31 マインドクラッシュ
I don't think it's 100% necessary. It is a boost though, for sure.
I'm 35 years old... Spanish is my native language and I never used an English monolingual dictionary in my life, not even a notebook to write words down to memorize them later... I learned by reading, doing homework at school (?, consuming media, trying to apply what I heard/learned during the day.... you know the "natural process", and one day I was able to talk in English without "translating" everything in my head.
Technology can make your life easier if you know how to use it, that's a fact... but I see a lot of (generally young) YTbers/counselors (gurus?) whatever they're called, advising everyone on doing the "monolingual transition" like if it was THAT necessary and if you don't then "you're learning the wrong way!" and it will take a tall later on in your life.
You will be fine using a bilingual dictionary in your native language (for example ES-JP in my case.).. if you don't know the meaning of 犬 in English and you're not a very advanced Japanese student yet, why would you use a Japanese monolingual dictionary and make your life more complicated? You'll find a wall of text in Japanese like: "A domesticated carnivorous mammal that typically has a long snout, an acute sense of smell, non-retractable claws, and a barking, howling, or whining voice"... It's a DOG. You already know what a dog is in your language, you just need to assimilate the meaning in Japanese. You can create a simple Anki card with a picture of a dog if you want, maybe a short sentence and that's it.
A lot of people also "mine" hundreds of words a day just by "one clicking an add-on", that simple it is, which is cool but they're skipping the natural process of creating your own material... you know we used to highlight stuff, look up the meanings in the dictionary, make a little summary for later, speak the word loudly... everything manually! You can use technology nowadays and it's perfect! but if you're just tanking, bulking, mass mining... like a madman without taking a break to actually learn stuff... you'll be just memorizing and after a few weeks you'll forget everything which is why some people complaint of SRS methods. There's nothing wrong with using SRS or other software, there's nothing wrong with using a bilingual or monolingual dictionary... the problem is those people that just think that a piece of software will do everything for you or that if you can understand a monolingual dictionary you'll be mastering a language... then when you ask them "how are you doing?" they can't answer it (but they know 40k Japanese words). Instead make your own cards, modify them, highlight stuff, look up on a dictionary, google stuff... if you downloaded a deck, modify/format it to your liking. I guarantee you that by doing all those things you'll be creating links in your brain that will help you to remember/recall stuff.
When repping a monolingual card, should i try to remember the monolingual definition or just get a general feeling of the word and move on?
I've always been aware of the whole monolingual transition thing but I still make 99% of my cards with english definitions purely for speed. Often I look words up with yomi-chan for the Japanese definition but I see a word I don't know in the definition so I don't bother using it. After seeing this video I'm going to try to add Japanese definitions from now on!
Also, I would love to know if having an entire database of cards slows down Anki at all. I wasn't sure so I never gave sentence banks a go. I currently have 20k subs2srs cards and it runs fine but I'm wondering if the same can be said with 50k cards, 100k cards etc.
should people use x for example sentences?
I love the content lately. You said in one of your videos that learning german for 9 months was a waste of time. What level did you approximately reach in german? And what do you think, where is your japanese level at?
Nice Index XD BTW there is a VR game Vtuber called みゃー that plays VR games everyday that you might enjoy. Your channel has been a life saver thanks.
oh cool I'll check them out! :D Glad it's been helpful :p
nice
what I do with laddering as a more casual monolingual transition method is to only ladder down a few levels.
Thanks this was a really cool video💯
Quick question if I'm learning Kanji with migaku but fail cards because I don't know the new vocabulary word attach to the Kanji like for example deru which I know for the Kanji 出 am I doing my reviews wrong?
Thanks! I only marked myself on how well I knew the English keyword at that stage. I would treat the vocab as supplementary if you want to look at it, but you can ignore it for the most part and learn vocab using sentence cards instead (which is more fun imo) :D
@@BritVsJapan Oh I am.... currently 600 cards into core2k deck. I learned not to learn Kanji in isolation so I find it easier but I'm starting to think I should try to convert my more then 10,000 hours of anime(weebo alert😓)by switching over to a anime deck. As I'm currently only in the young stages of like 300 Kanji I heard different views of sentence mining like you should start early or after you have learnt the joyo kanji's and etc.. I'm am a little confused on this point 😭
Hi, do you have any advice for learning the radicals on your anki deck? I am struggling because the names just don't make any sense to me. Is there any detrimental effect of me making up my own names for them that better match the shapes I see?
I want to get these radicals engrained asap so I can move onto seeing Kanji better and learn the RTK deck. Thank you.
Good man keep it up. Any opinions on how many hours to fluency? I've put in about 800 hours into Gaeilge (not counting schooling hours as they were completely ineffective). I'm conversational on many topucs but I speak slowly and have to search my mind for words and phrases.
Depends what you call fluency really. After 18 months of passive listening as much as possible, about 2 hrs of study, 2+ hours of active listening, 1+ hours of reading a day I was at a high level of conversational fluency. I could likely be in a work environment and be fine. It's hard to put numbers on it really, but depending on the work you put in you're looking at 1-3 years. Hope that helps :)
@@BritVsJapan hey matt, what do you mean by 2 hrs of study? Is this like writing or grammar... 3 hours of active immerison seems pretty reasonable for me, but i could only really get another 3 - 4 hours passive? Would this be enough to reach your level after 18months
regarding the constant listening: Is it okay to just listen to stuff that is way above my level, for example podcasts? I listened to Textbook Dialogues on repeat but they are so frkn boring, that it is more fun to me listening to the unscripted "noise" of a native. But If you say this wont get me any far, I will stop it. What did you do at the beginning? Were you worried about the difficulty level of your input at all?
I used anime in the earlier stages and would definitely recommend something on the easier side. Podcasts can be fine if it's to do with something you're already knowledgeable about but I think I would recommend grabbing your favourite TV show and convert it to mp3 to listen to, works super well if you use subs2srs to make anki decks for them too :)
I've just been searching up words first in japanese then sentance mine the definitions when any I plus one sentances come up, sometimes I'll search a definition of a word, and in that definition I look up another definition of a unknown word and take a sentance from their ( 2 definitions deep) will this get me their eventually ? I couldent really follow ur video on the method u proposed as I never heard of laddering and I got confused
For laddering you just add all the definitions you find for each word on the back of 1 card so that you can work your way back through the definitions to the original sentence when you go to review it. My argument was that this is a lot of info for one flashcard and to split each word you're trying to learn up into multiple cards instead and to also use more example sentences from content you are aware of to make it more comprehensible. So very similar to what you are doing, just getting those example sentences from TV or books as opposed to from the dictionary. Sorry if I explained it poorly in the video :S
@@BritVsJapan ahhh okay I understand now thanx I'm going to pursue the monolingual transition more than I have been thanx to ur video!
I'm currently reading a manga and I'm using J-E dictionary to understand the story. When I tried this method, my reading became a chore, is there better solution?
If it's a chore then wait a bit longer until it's a bit easier. I also wouldn't worry too much while actually reading, eventually you will want to switch to a J-J dictionary for reading but at first when you switch, just focus on getting anki setup for it :) But yeah don't feel pressured into having to do this now, if it feels too hard and it's putting you off reading and studying then by all means wait and try again in a month or two.
@@BritVsJapan Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for the advice. 👍
improve your mumbly sound level
Do you believe in an afterlife? Im not here to judge, just have a deep conversation! :)