As in, what are the first 50 or 100 sentences that I put into my SRS? I mean, I was playing gyakuten saiban and find them saying 証人 and 証言 a lot. Great, I look them up and think "cool", but I don't understand the sentences in the game yet, so I can't put them in. I just don't know what to actually put into the SRS after getting this input. Any help?

It depends on your skill. Are you playing a game in Japanese because you're at that level, or are you just playing around? Remember, never input a sentence you don't understand.

If you're more or less a complete beginner, you need to start with a source where sentences are extremely simple and come with descriptions so you understand what each part of a sentence means. The only place to find such sentences, is textbooks and similar learning material. Tae Kims guide at guidetojapanese.org is a good start. A book such as Genki or Minna no Nihongo contains sentences with translations as well.

What you need to aim for is i+1 sentences, that is, sentences which introduce only 1 new thing to you, be that a new word, a new peice of grammar or something else like that. If you have too many unknowns, it will be hard for you to rate your understanding in the SRS. If you have some sentences you want to learn yet don't fully understand, I guess you could ask people on this forum to explain them for you, but finding i+1 material is better.

You could also try adding a simple dictionary sentence using that word, instead of the source sentence, if you still don't understand the original sentence.

After reading through a couple grammar resources, I just threw sentences from よつばと in there. Anything that you read, like and understand. Then moved to misc other manga, and, as it happens, 逆転裁判, and on and on.
I've never personally included sentences from learning resources. But hey, no reason not to.

Just take sentences off Yahoo辞書 - they're pretty easy if you know your grammar. Your cards may or may not be difficult for the first month or so because the sentence you input might not be i+1, but you will get through it, and you'll have a decently sized vocabulary once you do.

You can move on to taking sentences directly once you're around ~700 (or whenever you feel like it, really).

Most of the time people here have chosen to go these routes:
RTK --> Tae-kim or Genki or UBJwhatever --> Dictionary sentences or KO2001 or SmartFM
Of course you can mix sentence sources...

I did Tae-kim when I was in your spot. Heres the tae-kim spreadsheet I usedexport to comma separated list and you can import it into anki)
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p...HsWw&hl=en
(more spreadsheets found here http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2326).

You kids have it so easy nowadays... you can use download --> shared deck, in anki and download the tae-kim sentences deck uploaded by nukemarine. This is much easier than having to do export/import stuff.

I'd reccommend Assimil Japanese With Ease. It has a book and CD, so you follow along the sentences with audio. It's then easy to input the sentences and audio into an SRS. It's very similar to KO2001, which I don't have, but seems to suit the same purpose based on what people have said around here. However, Assimil has the advantage of being designed as a course, so you get basic, useful sentences first, progressing to more complicated sentences. In the end, it covers 950 kanji, which is roughly the same as KO2001. Either-or really, they'll both get the job done.

I'd say Tae Kim as well. It's free and basic.

After that, you can probably start normal sentence mining. Nonpoint offers some advice elsewhere on building your own subs2srs corpus then activating sentences from those. Useful if you have a vocabulary list you want to learn, such as from your game.

Of course, there's vocabulary lists with sentences such as smart.fm and ko2001.

But yeah, Tae Kim should get you started in a good way.

If you decide to go the Tae Kim route, I wouldn't worry about getting Every. Single. Sentence. It gets boring after a while, and, IMO, you'll start learning more from other sources anyways. Just use Tae Kim to get a basic feel for the language, and then you could start sentence picking from dictionaries, manga, etc.

I'm still not too familiar with anki. I wanted however to start mining sentences, using Tae Kim's and Genki's. Oh, Genki has so much english in grammar I just want a simple explanation and example sentences (like in here: http://www.e-japanese.jp/grammar4.htm).

Btw, For someone hwo's in lesson 12 in Genki, how long do you think it takes to mine all these sentences (I'll add some made by me, using more vocabulary). So I can get to JLPT4.

I intend to use Khatzu's method to study all the JLPT's stuff, one at each time. Or shouldn't I?

I don't think you have to learn focused on the JLPT 4 and 3 material, if you work on understanding the basics of Japanese passing JLPT 4 will be a natural consequence regardless of the way you go.

I don't know about Genki (other's probably do and can comment on it), but Jae Kim's site worked fine for me. Took me about 2 weeks to learn the grammar for JLPT 4級, it's not a lot. JLPT ３級 grammar still falls in the same category of "stuff you'll learn anyway if you read and listen to Japanese" since it's used all the time.
JLPT ２級 is were you'll start to encounter somewhat less frequently used forms of speech and things that you'll see more in literature than spoken language, so it's good to focus on the grammar points in question (with the Kanzen Master book or something), because you may not encounter that grammar often enough to understand it in a test question.

As for vocabulary, as far as I'm aware there are two camps here, one just picks sentences from sources they like and accumulate vocabulary and grammar along the way (like Khatzu's approach) with the motto: "Do what you think is fun and learn from those sources."

Others (like me), follow a structured approach by learning vocabulary from frequency lists (Kanji Odyssey 2001, Core2000 etc), which is arguably more time efficient, but to some people not as much fun. Well, I enjoy it nevertheless.

I like having a task I can plug away at and see quantitative progress.

I'm collecting sentences from Genki, so far I only used from lesson 1 and 2, even though it was not necessary, because I already know that grammar. If you wanna see it just go to my website. I'll continue today. I downloaded Tae Kim's ane the thing I don't like is that it doens't have the kanji meaning or at least reading.

For my genki cards I put the japanese sentence first and the meaning in the back.

Tae ***** Kim I've just finished that and now I'm sentance mining from ハ一リ　ポ一タ一と秘密の部屋

Machine_Gun_Cat Wrote:Tae ***** Kim I've just finished that and now I'm sentance mining from ハ一リ　ポ一タ一と秘密の部屋

Just curious, have you already mined ハリーポッターと賢者の石?

What's the best way of making sure I have the right pronunciation for characters when I take a sentence from yahoo? When I try things often have multiple characters I don't know, and I'm not confident that I can get the readings right.

steelmole Wrote:What's the best way of making sure I have the right pronunciation for characters when I take a sentence from yahoo? When I try things often have multiple characters I don't know, and I'm not confident that I can get the readings right.

jisho.org shows you the hiragana for the words you input. As for the actual pronunciation (pitch), there's really nothing much to do about it. You're going to have to go by feeling and make sure you fix it later. I know of no online dictionary which actually shows pitch.

Tobberoth Wrote:I know of no online dictionary which actually shows pitch.

http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/

CarolinaCG Wrote:I downloaded Tae Kim's ane the thing I don't like is that it doens't have the kanji meaning or at least reading.

At least in the web version, if you mouse over the compound, it gives you reading and meaning.

iSoron Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:I know of no online dictionary which actually shows pitch.

http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/

How do you make use of it?
If I look up あめ it gives　あめ0 あめ1 あめ
But I don't know what it means.

SmartFM has audio for its sentences.

steelmole Wrote:As in, what are the first 50 or 100 sentences that I put into my SRS? I mean, I was playing gyakuten saiban and find them saying 証人 and 証言 a lot. Great, I look them up and think "cool", but I don't understand the sentences in the game yet, so I can't put them in. I just don't know what to actually put into the SRS after getting this input. Any help?

Also, don't be afraid to just add those compounds to your SRS regardless of having a sentence for them. You discovered them and thought they were cool so through those in the SRS so you'll know them forever. Later on, if you find a sentence with those compounds, you can delete your card with just the compound.

iSoron Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:I know of no online dictionary which actually shows pitch.

http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/

Yeah, they have an アクセント part, but it doesn't seem to work for me, the explanation doesn't cover the last number (for example, the zero after あま・い) and I've never found a single one written in bold (which is supposed to show where there is a high pitch).

I take it those numbers are supposed to show if it's 頭高型, 平板式 or 中高型 etc, but the explanation doesn't tell you which is which. Very odd.

Maybe this site will help reading pitch accent numbers.

http://sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/sp/lesson/j/doc/accent.html

So I'm guessing it goes like this:
あめ0 pitch on a particle following the word
あめ1 pitch on あ
あめ no pitch

I just started putting sentences into Anki today. I've been building up a lot of them over the last month or two, but they're probably too complex to start with. Instead, I've been going through my dictionary and books, getting simple sentences to start with. Then once I've got them down, I'll go with the l+1 way.

Tobberoth Wrote:Yeah, they have an アクセント part, but it doesn't seem to work for me, the explanation doesn't cover the last number (for example, the zero after あま・い) and I've never found a single one written in bold (which is supposed to show where there is a high pitch).

Here's the full explanation, from Daijirin's website:
http://daijirin.dual-d.net/pdf/accent.pdf

yukamina Wrote:So I'm guessing it goes like this:
あめ0 pitch on a particle following the word
あめ1 pitch on あ
あめ no pitch

That's almost it. But zero means that the word is flat (so the pitch does not drop after the word), and no number means that there's no pitch accent information available.