Hello,
Today I have been wondering whether I should be doing my vocab reviews translating from English (default), or from Japanese.
My goal is comprehension from reading, mainly. Am I correct to think that translating from Japanese is more useful for my specific use case?
Thank you.
all I can say is that I’m strictly going Jp to En, because my midterm goal is also just comprehension rather than reproduction, and it’s how we learned Latin back in school - a language you really only ever read.
some people say it helps with retention, but I think the time spent having to learn both ways is better spent on just learning more and worrying about reproduction later down the line if that’s not your main goal.
1 Like
I do cloze with EN → JP because my goal is conversation, therefore I need to be able to recall rather to just recognize. Recognition comes naturally by interacting with Japanese content, whereas you don’t really get chances to practice recall often if you don’t live in Japan. So I did the opposite of jinsu2301 (who is perfectly right with his explanation) - and decided to essentially lose speed, but practice recollection from the start.
3 Likes
Thank you both. Very valid points.
From my experience outside of Japanese, reproduction is indeed more demanding than recognition, but I was wondering whether the proces really suits my specific needs.
Maybe do a week of each?
@jinsu2301, your mention of Latin brought back horrid memories of having to produce Latin text, rather than just translate from it 
I did grammar with the reading mode Japanese to English first. Now I’m doing the Cloze review to refine my written grammar. I think if you’re mostly looking for comprehension JP → EN is better, but for output EN → JP will help. However even for output I think it’s easier to learn comprehension first.
3 Likes