This 12-series course presented in three stages (basic, intermediate, advanced) offers the famous iKnow Core 2000/6000 series in a new way. All the 6000 vocabulary words and example sentences are grouped by frequency and sorted by the 2001.Kanji.Odyssey kanji order for optimal learning. This allows you to learn native Japanese words where kanji are slowly introduced one at a time allowing you to see how they are pronounced (onyomi and kunyomi) in addition to groups words having connected themes.
Disable Memrise Timer - Due to half of the course being sample sentences tested, the use of a Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey scripts to disable the Memrise Timer is highly recommended. Download it here: http://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts/show/174879
Activated the Audio Course in settings. Please tell me how it goes and if I should set it back.
Edit 2: Changed testing of Sentences to be Audio (Japanese) prompt to Japanese text. This should be much, much easier, encourage active listening skills, and prepare students for the Japanese Drama Immersion courses that also test audio to Japanese text.
I added 10 duplicated of the first 10 levels so students can opt to skip it if they did it already. Levels 11-25 however are now only Audio to Japanese Text testing. Please leave feedback.
SGJL 05 - Level 16 - Item 1 is the word できる, but I find that I have a huge habit of typing it in as 出来る which it flags as a wrong answer. I know some words are more common as hiragana, but I feel like it should at least prompt you for a hiragana answer, or specify that it wants a hiragana answer in the translation. There’s a few other examples of this, (あなた, そば, etc) which vary in likelihood of hiragana, but ultimately it’s kind of arbitrary
If you’re on the browser version, there are notes for the word. There’s Part of speech which is obvious. There’s the type of Japanese word which says either Hiragana, Katakana, Okurigana (Kanji and kana together) or provides a number which dictates a kanji only word and how many characters (so 1 is one kanji, 2 is two kanji, etc). Finally there’s the RTK keyword which gives the keywords for the kanji characters. Now, that last note will also give keywords even if the word is written in kana cause there’s a kanji variant, just not being tested.
Hope that helps. The big notes to pay attention to is the word type and the keyword.
Ah, you know, I often refer to those attributes when I’m trying to narrow down the possible translations, but for some reason didn’t think about it for determining whether it wants hiragana or not. I kinda go into auto-pilot with the IME when I think the words are ‘easy’, so I don’t always look at those, but I’ll make an effort to and see how it goes.
One more thing though, in SGJL 07 (and possibly 10 and 12) when reviewing the sample sentences, it doesn’t show you the english translation like it does for SGJL 05. I think it’s just a matter of a small toggle since they show you the translation when you first learn the word. Just wanted to let you know, I often like to see if I can get the translations right while testing those.
Just another thought while reviewing some vocabulary… there’s quite a few examples of pretty similar verbs, (増える and 増やす, 開く and 開ける, 消す and 消える, etc, etc) that are sometimes hard to figure out based on the English translations. A lot of times the first translation is identical, and you have to think about whether or not the second definition implies whether or not it’s transitive or intransitive. So far this has been doable, but it is kind of a nuisance. Was wondering if you thought it’d be useful to simply just add tags to all the verbs (i.e. vi, vs, and する) to help differentiate these.
Also, heh, sorry for bombarding you with these replies all the time. I know you’re busy on other courses and will probably get to most of these concerns anyway, but since I’m going through the entire course front-to-back, I figured I’d point out my experiences and hopefully they’ll help in some way. That said, feel free to ignore any of this. Also, if you need any help with any grunt work, I’d be more than happy to help out.
You probably noticed I changed the English definition of verbs to add vt if it’s transitive and vi if it’s intransitive. I also add “To ~” or “To be ~” to the definitions to make it more obvious as well. The noun verbs like 勉強 however are left alone.
I pretty much did this will all of SGJL 05 and will do it to 07, 10 and 12 as well when I get to it. It’s good you point out any problems cause I might not notice being this is my second time around. There’s not too much grunt work with the vocabulary decks aside from uploading audio. The English definitions just get clarification edits now and again plus I’ll be editing all the verbs.
In SGJL 07 - Level 15, items 9 and 10 are both 自然, one translating to “nature” and the other to “natural”. This leads to some problems and guesswork when first learning the words. Luckily once they’re learned, all you have to do is type in 自然 for either definition, so it’s not course-breaking, but still worth bringing to attention.
When I get situations where there are the same kanji words, I add the answer to the “RTK Keyword” section. Before both said “oneself sort of thing”, now one has “nature, oneself sort of thing” and the other has “natural, oneself sort of thing”. I did similar things for 九 (きゅう, く) and 何 (なに, なん).
Before, I added a note to the kanji answer. However, that was unworkable when I switched the course to have answers typed in (you’d have to type in the note as well). This seemed the best work around as it’s only really important for kanji to english word tests. People on mobile though might need to just ignore one of them.
By the way, great progress on the course. I’m still getting through both Tae Kim and ADoBJG (SGJL 06). Are you starting to notice increase in recognition in outside materials like your games?
Oh for sure. Before doing this course, I did do the iKnow courses up to about 2,000 words and the equivalent of RtK for all the 常用漢字 so I did have a bit of familiarity from the get-go. I like Memrise’s algorithm though, I find myself retaining words better here than with iKnow, and I actually pay attention to the sentences here. My listening comprehension basically has gone from completely abhorrent to actually pretty good. Sometimes I still have to hear a sentence two or three times to dissect it properly, but before I usually just got stuck on the first word of every sentence.
I think my biggest improvement is definitely in grammar. The Tae Kim courses are really good, and because the course is split up between vocab and grammar, you actually start to notice grammar patterns in each section, and you get a natural feel for it. There is one qualm though, in that the Tae Kim courses weren’t necessarily meant to be drilled. When reviewing, since it shows you the English translation first, you naturally just look for the Japanese sentence by looking for vocab, and then see if the rest of the sentence matches up. This works well sometimes, especially in the Verb Tense sections, because you have a lot of similar sentences where only the grammar point changes, but later on every grammar point tends to have its own unique sentence, so you don’t really have to remember the grammar point in particular.
That said, I feel like by the time I finish the Beginner’s section, I’ll be more than ready for the JDI courses, which is exciting and a nice incentive to keep going.
In SGJL 07 - Level 45, item 18 translates “ice cream” to “アイスクリーム＜ｂｒ＞”, it’ll mark you as incorrect if you don’t type in the ‘＜ｂｒ＞’.
Another minor issue concerning item 1 (as well as similar words prior, I can look them up if you want) which is 持ってくる, it marks you as wrong if you write it as 持って来る, which is a habit early vocab lessons taught me concerning 連れて行く and 連れて来る. As far as I can tell, whether or not くる or いく is used is arbitrary, but it does seem like the lessons should either be consistent or allow both inputs.
This type of thing actually happens quite a bit now that I think of it. 引き出し in the same level will mark you as wrong if you write it as 引出し, 押し入れ as 押入れ, etc. Usually you only get these wrong once, because the IME will remember your preferred way of typing in things, but y’know, still.
Almost always, the ~いく, ~いる, ~くる are in kana form when used as grammar endings for other verbs. It’s not incorrect with kanji, just not as common. For teaching grammar, Tae Kim and ADoBJG notes this but sometimes using kanji to help get across what the grammar is trying to accomplish.
Yes, in addition there are also variants to how the word is formed and both can be correct.
Since I just gave you Contributor status, here’s what you can do: Under “word type” note use numbers for Kanji, h for Hiragana and k for Katakana. So 引き出し is “1,h,1,h” while 引出し is “2,h”. 持ってくる is “1,hhhh” while 連れて来る is “1,hh,1,h”. On words that you get wrong because of variants, just edit the “word type” note to add that clue/hint.
You could also do that to the Keywords (RTK), but that might get confusing. Personally, I’ve been leaning on the Keyword note to make sure I put in the correct choice.
Edit: By the way, sorry I’m so far behind you. I’m doing ADoBJG entries and Zettai Kareshi courses in addition to real world stuff (work and college classes). Feel free to ask for contributor status to make small edits to obvious typos or add clarifying notes. Hopefully I’m able to catch up.
Great job by the way. Hopefully it is still fun to do when you get on the second half of the Basic courses.
I like that solution, elegant enough for me! Once I finish the course I’ll go back and put in those details. Just a few quick questions though about how you want the course edited…
I think the only word type vocab words I need to change are the ones currently listed as “okurigana”. Would you like the format to simply be “1,h,1,h” for 引き出し or something like “okurigana (1,h,1,h)”? Also, do you want this same format for SGJL 05 for consistency?
SGJL 05 also had helpful markers at the end of the English translations for verbs (i.e. “vi” and “vt”), I could add those in too if you want.
Not sure if the changelog I had going on for the Tae Kim changes would be useful here since these are pretty flat general changes, but I could keep one for this series too if you like.
Also, don’t feel bad for ‘falling behind’, these courses are amazing and I’m just glad I can help wherever possible. If it makes you feel better, I’m going on vacation for a month in September, so there’s plenty of catch-up time there.
Keep the terms then add the extra note after “okurigana (1,h,1,h)”. The spreadsheet I used actually has the data, I just never uploaded it to Memrise. I will do that for the next series of courses though along with adding closed deleted sentences to notes.
What I did was downloaded “JGlossator” and used the dictionary entries to help add more terms to the English definition and add “to ~” or “to be ~”, and vt or vi for the verb entries. I intend to do it when I get to SGJL 07, but if you want to take a shot at it go for it. If in doubt though leave as is.
No need for a running change log. I’d suggest just keep a personal log and when you finish with the course post all your changes at once (except for obvious things like editing the verbs or adding more definition terms to entries as almost word will get that done). I’ll reference it when I go through myself as a double check.
So it appears that there’s no translations in any of the example sentence sections in the SGJL 10 and SGJL 12 - Core 2k/6k Vocabulary series. Hopefully it’s an easy fix, but if not or requires some grunt work, I’d be happy to help out.
I’ll check it out. Hopefully it can be fixed easily by reuploading the sentences in the database. If not, I’ll delete the entries then reupload them. No way in hell I or anyone else is doing a tedious line by line upload. Bad enough we have to do that for audio.
Edit: I just checked an the entries have English translations. SGJL 10 did not have them appear during the test so that’s fixed. How are you seeing the entries?
In SGJL 10 - Core 2k/6k Vocabulary Optimized Pt 3, the vocab lessons for 11, 19, and 49 each have only 19 vocab words instead of 20. I checked all the other courses, and this is the only one that has these strange discrepancies. It’s only three words, but figured I’d bring it to your attention.
Edit: So according to the audio files, item 1100 and 1104 are both 起きる, which is strange since the audio is slightly different, so I don’t know why there’d be duplicates, especially so close together. Considering how rare this is, I’m just gonna go ahead and declare this a non-issue.
It would appear that the vocabulary reviews in SGJL 10 - Core 2k/6k Vocabulary Optimized Pt 3 don’t require you to type in the correct answer like previous modules, but instead use multiple choice. Not sure if SGJL 12 does the same, will investigate.
Edit: SGJL 12 requires typing of vocab on reviews, seems like this problem is isolated to SJGL 10.
If it makes you feel better, I’m going on vacation for a month in September, so there’s plenty of catch-up time there.
