MORPHMAN

MorphMan is an Anki add-on that keeps track of what words you know and uses that to reorder your new cards into an optimal order for learning.

- Matt Vs Japan

Morphman Explanation

Please take the time to look at the MIA Morphman Guide.

Morphman is an amazing ANKI tool that has the ability to look at all the sentences you have studied in ANKI to find how many words (morphs) you know in your target language. It can then take this information and re-organize a sentence bank you have created to find you new i+1 / 1t sentences.

Once you have finished studying the Tango Books or Core decks to your desired level (usually after N4 or N3) it is recommended that you move on to sentence mining. Using Morphman, a large Sentence Bank, and a Frequency List can save you an amazing amount of time on Sentence Mining.

When installing Morphman, we at LLJ also highly suggest you install the UniDic Parsing Dictionary for Morphman as well.

Deep Dive

Deep Dive is a term that we here at LLJ came up with to describe the process of sentence mining a single source (show, book, movie) with morphman. NoCompo, one of LLJ's and Morphman's biggest contributers, has upgraded Morphman to make Deep Diving extremely easy and efficent.

The following will describe how to set up your first Deep Dive

1. Pick a show

For beginners it is suggested that you pick a show from the "Slice of Life" catagory for your first Deep Dive. You will probably be watching this show a few times so it is important that you really do like the material you will be studying. Some popular suggestions are: Shirokuma Cafe, Toradora, Himouto! Umaru-chan, Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai, or New Game. If you are not a fan of Slice of Life there are a few other shows we recommend: Death Note, Flying Witch, Naruto, or Pokemon. All of these shows have Subs2SRS decks built which can be found in the Subs2SRS Deck Database. From there install the deck into your Anki and place it in a Sentence Bank.

2. Get the Subtitles

You will need the subtitle files for the show you will be Deep Diving. You can either download them your self straight from Netflix using Subadub and a VPN that will place your network in Japan, or you can download them from Kitsunekko a website that has a large repository of subtitle files.

3. Set-Up Your Deep Dive

Once you have properly installed Morphman, UniDic, and have collected your matterials, it is time to set up your first Deep Dive with Morphman. First things first, make sure you Morphman is properly set up following the MIA Morphman Guide. With Anki open, to to Tools > Morphman > Readability Analyzer (or hit Ctrl+a) this will open the readability analyzer.

Under Input Directory select the folder where you substites for the show you will be Deep Diving are stored. Make sure there are no other files in that folder.

Under Morphamizer please make sure that Japanese is selected (unless that is not your target language).

In the Minimum Master Frequency and Target % is where you can customize your study experience the most. Target % is simply what percentage of you show you want to understand. Generally speaking we suggest that for your first dive you set this number between 90% and 95%. The higher the number the more time you will spend studying that show, also you might eventually run out of i+1 / 1t sentences. Eventually on later Dives you should increase this number up to 96% and 98% or more.

The Minimum Master Frequency section is used to limit your study to certain portion of a frequency list. Say you only want to focus on the most common 15k Japanese words. You would simply look at your frequency list, find the 15,000th word, and then copy and paste the amount of times that word shows up into this box (this is currently 256). For this section the lower the number you input the larger portion of the frequency list the system will use. If you input the number 0 it will allow any words even if you they aren't on the frequency list to be used. A word of caution about using this limiter, many shows have words that might be uncommon in Japanese, but are very common in that show. Knowning those words would still be very essential to understanding the show. Think shows like Naruto or Sailor Moon.

The next section you will need to input is Master Frequency List. You should have already installed UniDic so you should use a frequency list based of UniDic. We suggest the Netflix UniDic Frequency List w/o Names or w/Names, which is based off of all the subtitles files on Japanese Netflix, however you can use another if you like. Simply navigate your to the folder where this file is stored and select it.

The following two fields Known Morphs DB, and Output Directory should already be filled out automatically by Anki and Morphman. If they are not you will need to navigate your anki folders to find them and select them. You will want to select you known.db for the Known Morphs DB, and you should select your Database Folder for Output Directory.

You will notice there are 4 boxes on the side that are all checked: Readability Report, Word Report, Target Study Plan, and Frequency List. You can leave all of these checked.

Now all there is left to do is run the Analyzer. Click Analyze! in the top right corner. This will out put a large amount of data in the tabs below that you can look at. Checking the Study Plan Tab under the To Study Morphs and Cummulitive Morphs colums, you can see how many words you have left to learn for each episode and the entire show. Using this is a great way to guage how long a show will take you to Deep Dive and if it may be in or out of your reach for now.

4. Study!

At this point your deep dive should be all set up! all you will need to do is exit the Readability Analyzer and re-calc your Morphman Database by selecting it in Tools > Morpman > Recalc OR hitting Ctrl+m

From here you should be able to select your Sentence Bank and start your Deep Dive.

A few tips:

Tips and Tricks

When receiving a new Card hit "L" for alternatives
When you run into a Card with a word you already know hit "K" to tag it as a known morph
The MIA Dictionary Addon is an amazing tool you can use to quickly add definitions to your cards.