Manga reading verses novel/ light novel reading

All Languages
41

Me too! I got a lot of cheap and kind of beaten up books 2nd hand (Book off Paris and some local Japanese shop in Vienna), so I don’t feel bad about writing in them. I prefer to write inside the book as I also like to highlight stuff about grammar/kanji directly, but I think it could also easily work with a separate notebook.

The added bonus is that you can actually feel your progress when you open these books a few months later and realize you can now understand a bunch of the things you have highlighted!

9 Likes
42

On the Learn page, there’s a “New deck from text” option, as well as an “import from Anki” option. I’m pretty sure those are both accessible to everyone. I used the “New deck from text” option to import the exported words from Manga Kotoba

Manga Kotoba says:

Vocabulary lists are produced from manga images using comic-text-detector (text detection) and manga-ocr (OCR), via Mokuro.

Extracted text is run through Ichiran to split extracted sentences into individual words and expressions.

It’s not hard to find scans or epubs of many LNs. So you could either try just pasting that text straight into jpdb’s New Deck from Text (idrc if it splits words on its own), or running it through Ichiran first, I guess (I have no experience w/ Ichiran). Jpdb would at least be able to sort by frequency at that point. Idk if maybe Ichiran generates frequency… but if not, a frequency counter in python should probably be very do-able to code (or probably there are working ones out there already)

5 Likes
43

I ended up finding the import yesterday (it’s not Patreon gated for anyone who is wondering) and converted the first chapter from the sample of Silent Witch into a deck. I was able to paste the whole thing into the text box and it seems to have been happy enough to parse it. I imagine there has to be some sort of word limit on the import but it was more than the chapter. I’m waiting to see if there’s some good sales/points/coin back around new years so I haven’t bought the book yet, but so far it worked pretty well.

7 Likes
44

I do that, too, and agree, it makes reading really smooth.

Titles show up in poorly rendered romaji or a mix of romaji and roman words that are close to the original title and can be hard to find. The trick is to search for the original Japanese title, and I think you can use the * as a wild card so just put in part of the title and search. There’s a thread somewhere on WK with popular JPDB book links… let me know if you don’t find it and I’ll try again

you figured this out, but also, I haven’t yet found a character limit from pasting in huge swaths of text.

That will be read next by the IBC, my bet is Phryne will make a spreadsheet and you can copy out the word list from there into JPDB. I just copy the whole first (kanji) column in order of appearance and paste it into JPDB and it works well. It won’t have kana only words though, but those are easy to look up.

4 Likes
45

This works FAR better than I had imagined. Enough for me to get over my gripes and just use the site I think. I still wish there was a multi-select or some other way I can tell it I know multiple words on a page, but I’m getting to the point where really common words are coming up less and less for me.

I’m reading a LN right now and am about 5-10 pages ahead in jpdb than I am in the book. I can mostly just read the text once I go through. Occasionally I have some very big leeches and need to look up words, but it’s maybe 1-2 per page tops. It feels almost as smooth as reading books at my level. I also have a bunch of decks added for things that I’m planning in the near future so that it can help me gauge if it’s worth it to actually learn a word or if it’s fine to ditch it once I’ve read past it in the text.

I think reframing how I think about it, i.e. not as anki decks with a target of 95-100% learning, but as a tool to “prelookup” vocab words before I encounter them in the reading, has also been helpful for me.

I just went ahead and posted a whole book in it this morning to test and it didn’t complain. So… if there’s a limit it’s huge.

8 Likes
46

I found this:

There are only about 20 books on there so I wasn’t sure if there’s another, or if this one just isn’t that well maintained…?

2 Likes
47

Yayyy - glad you’re finding it helpful too!

For real - that would be so helpful!! Maybe I’ll suggest it in the discord, if they have a section for that

2 Likes
48

haha, I had gripes and succumbed as well :sweat_smile: I’m glad you found a way to work with it that is working for you!

yes, that’s it, you found it! I think it’s somehow a bit hard to find / easily forgotten so just not well maintained.

3 Likes
49

Question for jpdb folks: how many words do you have as Learning, at any given moment? And (more importantly?) how did you determine what a good amount was?

I have a tendency to open up way too many at once, and then get bogged down with reviews. My current deck (just started) has 209 words as Learning, 30 new cards per day, and 891 words left to go. Which would take me just under a month to get through the whole deck. (I’m probably gonna finish the book within the week though).

Trying to figure out the balance between feeling like I’m making enough progress, and not getting too overwhelmed

3 Likes
50

I run at a steady pace of 10 new words a day. This for me results in about 150-170 reviews a day on average (after several years at that pace), which is about as much time as I want to put in to it. I did more new words a day early on when the review load was still low, and cut back as it started to climb with repeats of older cards at higher levels.

I don’t look particularly at how many cards I have in the Learning state, but right now it is 179.

4 Likes
51

I tried running a deck alongside reading and it bothered me when the pace wouldn’t keep up. I did 20 new cards per day, but it still was a large backlog. In the end I overlapped it with a frequency filter and removed everything not overlapping. No idea if jpdb has a feature like that. I think you can sort by frequency, but that does not preserve the order of the word appearance I think.

5 Likes
52

Jpdb does have a corpus frequency filter (patron-only iirc), and also allows for sort by chronological, deck frequency, or corpus frequency. However I run the deck chronologically, and don’t want to filter out low frequency words (if something’s that irrelevant, I’d blacklist it).

A potential strategy that occured to me: aim initially for 95% coverage, even if that means doing heavy reviews. Once that’s reached, just decide how much time I want to spend on jpdb per day, and do that regardless of number of reviews or new cards

2 Likes
53
Caveat

I think I use jpdb a lot different than you’ve mentioned (I don’t have a % target to reach, because I don’t click everything as known if I’m just guessing it based on context or I know one meaning for it but not a lot of the others - but conversely I also don’t want to throw all unknown words into reviews. So for me, a book is challenging but doable at 50-60% known and feels very readable if the known score is 75%+) So quite possibly my strategy doesn’t apply to you at all. But it seems you’re looking for ideas to not get overwhelmed with reviews, and my strategy is specifically designed to minimise SRS to max 10-20 minutes per day (because I get bored of SRS quickly), so maybe there is something here to give you ideas. I learn at least as many words via lookups/exposure compared to srs.

The key value for JPDB to me is I get a list of unknown or lightly known words in order of chronology of the book. So the primary benefit to me is most lookups are done and relevant words I’d like to remember are a click away from becoming a review card. I often remember a word after a single “lookup” on the JPDB list as the word gets repeated in the book so often. Those words don’t become flashcards on JPDB, and they don’t get marked as known until they come up in another book and I still remember them.

How I determine a good amount of cards to learn

For the first part of your question, I don’t care so much about the metric “# cards in learning”. What is more practical to me is I know adding 3-5 cards words per day will keep my srs load relatively low (10-20 minutes per day), and if I have periods of 5-10 cards per day I’ll probably follow it with a period of 0-3 cards per day until my review time goes down.

For the second part of your question, at least as I interpreted it loosely - how I choose the cards I’m learning:
I look at how fast I’m reading the book on jpdb, and how many of the unknown highest frequency words (in that work) I can keep up with while I read if that makes sense. There’s no point in getting too far ahead (to me), because I want to see the context in the book I’m reading to decide if I even care about that word before I add it. And if I get too far behind, reading gets tougher. So I quickly figure out some compromise to add 3-8 cards per day that cover the 5-10+ frequency words in that book while I read as they come up.

As you can see, I’m choosing the words I’m adding to my learning stack, not just choosing x per day from the frequency list.
If you’re interested in how I’m choosing those words. For Anki I’ll only add a word to SRS if it seems a) useful b) I’ve already come across it a couple of times and forgotten it (so I know it’s not one I’ll pick up quickly, and I can tell it’s one that is relevant to what I personally read. For JPDB I generally keep to that, but I stretch that rule quite a bit and add words anyway even if they don’t fulfill those conditions but if they seem really useful for that book.

To counteract this giving me a huge load of reviews later for words I don’t care about, after finishing a book on JPDB I delete the book from my deck. Later if a bunch of words come up when I add a different book, I choose a) set to known if I saw it in the meantime and I remembered it b) delete it from my review history if I forgot it completely and it only appears 1-3 times in the book I’m about to read c) continue reviewing if it’s somewhere in between and seems useful.

5 Likes
54

Interesting. Our use cases are a bit too different for that to be effective for me - but cool to see how others use it.

One thing I hadn’t accounted for is difficulty of vocab. I’m finding Maria-sama ga Miteru – Prebuilt decks – jpdb 2 much easier than Tensei Oujo to Tensai Reijou no Mahou Kakumei – Prebuilt decks – jpdb 4, bc I can mark more thing as Good or Easy, cutting down on the number of reviews.

Anyway I’m realizing this is basically a me problem that comes down to a mix of self-restraint, time management, and difficulty of material. So I’ll just have to be conscious of that, as I go

4 Likes
55

I don’t know if I have an answer for you either, but one of the things I’ve done is load in decks from the next few bookclubs and solo books that I’m planning to read. When a word comes up and it’s 1x in my current deck and not in any other decks, it goes straight to blacklist. I can look up a word one time as I read and I don’t feel like there’s much value to learn that word. And then I have a sliding scale of how likely I am to blacklist based on how easy it seems that I will remember the word (usually based on kanji or if it’s an adverb–I’m terrible with those) plus how many times it comes up in a book I’m planning to read in the future.

My reviews are a bit too high for me right now, but I did also import a bunch of old Anki decks to try and get the burden of “I know all these words” as I’m previewing card down (and to get the percentage known in a deck to approach reality).

For me I don’t mind that much if my srs session is 20-30 minutes if most of the words are easy. When I’m struggling to remember every word I can’t stand 5 minutes, so I also have made use of the blacklist to dump cards on the way to becoming leeches until I see them in the text once or twice. Sometimes getting the context (or just figuring out which of the many definitions I need to remember) will make the card a lot easier to remember. In Anki I would suspend the card but I don’t see that option in the card menu… just that it’s a status to filter by. Is suspend a Patreon feature??

I think overall my philosophy in SRS at this point is to be really clear in how I’m using the tool. I am the poster child for years of Anki will not get you literate or fluent. I worry less about my retention numbers and number of news cards vs is the time spent in jpdb better than if I had been reading the book with a bunch of lookups? As long as the answer to that remains yes (and I don’t dread the review sessions), I don’t worry that much about my new cards. There’s also a small part of me that doubts my ADHD will even stick with my deck long enough for very old words to come due, so that’s later me’s problem :sweat_smile:

8 Likes
56

I think my answer to me is basically “keep at it, and don’t worry about the number (tho be more conservative if it’s sci-fi or fantasy). If it’s too much, just do whatever portion you feel like”.

Opposite use case here (and my reviews would balloon like crazy cuz of all the decks I’ve started and stopped) :sweat_smile: I’m only focused on a single book at a time.

I really hope Silent Witch will have a vocab list, so I can potentially make a jpdb deck out of it (tho I might just stick with easier decks anyway, since the reading pace is on the slower side)

Right, opposite for me. I’m more likely to learn common words via text repetition (though that has its limits). So learning the uncommon words via SRS greatly reduces friction. But for a multi-deck/long-term approach, I’d agree.

Yeah that’s an annoying onboarding thing. I usually do it by going through the vocab list when I’m bored, and don’t have the energy/motivation to do other stuff. Sometimes I even go through other decks’ lists for fun as a gift to my future self, to change things up a bit.

Similar here. I’ve dropped a deck bc of that b4

Yes!! Learning words in context is everything! :slight_smile: I view SRS as a tool to do that (bc if I already know the reading & sorta have the gyst, I can just focus on the context). For multi-definition cards I just guess what’s relevant, or pick whichever is easiest to remember. Gives me something to latch on to, once I encounter it in context. (You could also just do a search in the book for the word, to get a sense… But mild risk of spoilers)

It’s a weird, irrelevant technical state that you can ignore. I wish it had proper suspend like Anki tho!

That makes sense. For me, my goal is to have 0 lookups per page, in the thing I’m trading right now. For now 1-5 is acceptable, and I’ll start getting frustrated at 7+

I usually finish the book before the deck as well, so similar. マリみて 2 might end up being an exception though, bc I’m reading it much more intensively than I usually would (checking translation, highlighting errors or misses, rereading sentences until I get it correctly, etc). Consequently my reading speed has tanked - which I’d usually hate, but I’m enjoying going through it like this.

5 Likes
57

I’m also just doing one book at a time (or sometimes jumping between a book and the Dragon Quest deck if I’m far enough ahead in the book). I just have the other decks loaded to give me a sense of how much the words will come up in my TBRs to help me decide if I might want to focus on a 1x word that I would dump if it’s 10x in a future deck, for instance.

But I’m not picking up words from the other decks I have (and I also dump decks once I’m done with the book).

4 Likes
58

Ohhh that makes sense. The problem there for me is any deck I add will have previous words in it (even if I haven’t done that particular deck, bc they’ll have shown up in decks I have done). So I just add them temporarily to see my stats (words known, coverage), and then delete them. I do like seeing the “appears in” tho, when I have added them in the past.

That’s very clever of you tho!

4 Likes
59

That is clever, I like that a lot

What is your plan for your blacklist? Do you plan to review it later when you import new books just in case something blacklisted ends up being important later?

4 Likes
60

I typically take them out of blacklist when I’m done. I shove all non-wasei katakana words in the blacklist (I think I have an option set for this but I still see a lot of them :sweat_smile:), so when I finish a deck I usually do a quick peak for non katakana words to grab them before I drop the deck. It usually only takes a few minutes so I don’t mind.

4 Likes