I've been away from the forums for a while, so forgive me if this has been talked about.

It's easy enough to get a list of JLPT words online and import them into Anki. I'm looking for some way to automate the sentence mining process. I spend a lot of time copying sentences from books and my dictionary, and it seems with all the databases and "corpuses" and dictionaries online that there should be a way to get electronic sentences based on a list of words. I tried excite.co.jp and yahoo.jp's dictionaries, but I didn't get any example sentences. Anyone know of anything?

Example sentences plugin for anki.

It's based on the tanaka corpus but it's better than nothing I suppose.

You could also use smart.fm to build word lists, then grab the example sentences they provide. Create that word list on smart.fm, then use Anki's smart.fm importer plug-in to import that list (and the sentences and often audio) directly into Anki.

Thanks, I'll check out smart.fm. Haven't used it yet.

I'm not sure the Tanaka corpus is the way to go. There is debate over whether sentences or words is a better way to study. Sentences give you a better feel for the use of the word, but you can blast through words more quickly. Due to the unreliable nature of Tanaka, it may actually be worse than nothing (assuming "nothing" means studying words instead of sentences). I thought about making a VBA script in excel that would import a few sentences from Tanaka, and then have my Japanese wife go through them for me, but it seemed like a lot of trouble.

I downloaded another corpus in MySQL form, along with the "corpus browser." But the corpus itself was all garbage characters and the browser didn't work.

Well, criminey. I had checked out smart.fm's lists for the first time, and it seems like if I just plowed through Ko2001 and Core, the ease of importing these into Anki would make up for the time lost of reviewing words I already know, and I would think the JLPT 2 words would be covered. Actually, I could import the lists into Anki, export them into excel and then make sure the JLPT2 words are in there.

FireDictionary is a useful tool, if you are building word lists in smart.fm:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3387

The developer is a user at smart.fm:

http://smart.fm/user_forum/56/topic/2766187

Basically, it allows you to pick up words as you browse, but it is designed for English learners, and doesn't do a good job of picking out japanese words from a japanese sentence, but you can work around it using the paste board. Once you have a list of words in smart.fm, you can use listbuilder to add sentences to your list.