Hey all,

After slowly (very slowly) adding all the sentences from Genki 1 (A textbook I finished a year and a half ago!) to trinity I'm worn out and want some help transcribing them for the second book.

I've transcribed the sentences for the first chapter, so that should serve as an example for the things I'd like help with, namely the conversation, grammar and expression note sections.

I'm very eclectic so even though i've finished these textbooks i'd still like to have the sentences from them in review.

Anybody who has the book willing to help let me know here and i'll send you an invite to the google group, also I know there is the AJATT group but I can't get access since i don't own KO2001...yet

This is where two things will save you a TON of time.

1. OCR and a flatbed (or a decent digital camera). OCR runs about $190, but it's worth it in time savings. Hate to sound like a shill, but IRIS is the only OCR with an English interface that I could find that would do a decent job for that low of a price. At least it was the only one that would OCR Japanese text. (It makes mistakes, but you learn to catch them.)

2. The Genki Answer key. $15 at the Japan shop (for an 800 yen book! >_<). Overpriced, but more important than the textbook, IMO. Don't bother with the teacher's edition. It also has transcripts of a lot of the stuff on the CDs, if you like dialogues. I don't, so I skipped it.

You can usually just skip the example sentences in the textbook, and use the answers from the answer key instead. There's usually a set of sentences as answers for 95% of the grammar points covered in a chapter. I find 10 sentences on a point are more useful for remembering it that the one or two examples they give in the book. Also, I'd rather have the correct Japanese answers than bother with trying to guess.

If I'm totally desperate for examples, I'll look it up in another book (Dict. of Basic Japanese Grammar, et. al.) and grab what I can, but that's more the exception than the rule. I usually skipped the dialogues. I included them at first, but found them annoying over time because they didn't break down nicely into bite-sized morsels.

I can't help you much with this project, though. I don't have the spare time for it.

Here's a question I've been wondering. Sure you can do all of this scanning and ocr (Acrobat actually is a very good Japanese OCR, surprisingly), but will it really save time? You still have to understand the sentences and learn how the sentences work. Or do you guys just dump everything into anki and learn it as you go?

I appreciate the replies, I have to say there are parts of Genki i did skip, I skipped right over the "class excercise" parts which is probably the section for which the answers you mentioned rich_f are provided.

As for the OCR somewhat to what alyks said, I prefer the accuracy given by a "double checked human hand inputed text", try saying that one twice fast.

There has to be someone out there willing to help.

Sentence mining from basic level textbooks (or any textbooks for that matter) is a pointless exercise since the Japanese is rarely very natural (in an effort to make it easier to understand for a learner). I thought the whole point of sentence mining was to get "real" Japanese...

Jarvik7 Wrote:Sentence mining from basic level textbooks (or any textbooks for that matter) is a pointless exercise since the Japanese is rarely very natural (in an effort to make it easier to understand for a learner). I thought the whole point of sentence mining was to get "real" Japanese...

As alyks said "You still have to understand the sentences and learn how the sentences work", plus i'd really like to save some people time who come to these textbooks.