I'm a bit of a SRS-n00b, till a few minutes ago I didn't know what 'sentence mining' was. I saw it mentioned many times on this forum as a good study method and from what I understand it's basically copying sentences which you comprehend and turn them into a flashcard. But here's the thing I don't understand, while you're learning these sentences aren't you just 'learning' the same sentences over and over again and since you understand the sentences already, wouldn't it be better just to read new material and absorb more various things (not to mention the tedious job in making a flashcard out of them)? I know this perhaps doesn't hold true if you're let's say studying a specific grammar point, but other than that, I don't see why it wouldn't be better to just read new material either of the same kind or not.
Thoughts?

I think the point is that you take a sentence that you don't quite understand (known as the i+1 concept. You try and mine sentences that have only 1 thing that is new to you.).

That way you're constantly expanding your capabilities rather than treading water, and you use the SRS as a tool to make sure you don't forget your newfound knowledge.

My thoughts on the matter have evolved and changed over the last two years. What helped was re-reading antimoon, and in particular this article

http://www.antimoon.com/how/readhow.htm

The basic point is that when you're reading a book or watching TV for enjoyment, your brain is filling in the parts it doesn't understand. As you get better at a language, your brain gets better at doing this. The problem though is your skip or skim over the connecting bits that fills out the language. You read and listen ok, but as you're not good at the "bits" you sound like a caveman when you try to talk.

Now, you can do what the above article suggests and slow down your reading. You put the sentence into a perspective that can apply to you. You change the situation and see if it applies, etc. I consider this turning reading into a studying experience which can be draining.

Now, by putting such sentences into an SRS, you slow down your reading automatically. You decide "Hey, do I really know this sentence". Did the meaning words come across as intended in the sentence? You know what purpose the sentence held in the narrative (Who said to who, atmosphere it was said in, situation it was said it). Of course, after you spent time understanding that sentence (via dictionary or other look up method), will you keep that understanding a week or a month down the line? Hence why I put it in an SRS.

Now comes the complicated part: You can sentence mine for different reasons. The above is what I'm doing in order to 90% to 100% understand a TV show. The assumption then is this over time translates to being able to comprehend other TV shows. In addition, I get a bit more practice in how Japanese is used when talking to other Japanese people.

You can sentence mine for vocabulary. So you grab a sentence that uses a new word in a way you can understand, given a small or even no definition.

You can sentence mine for grammar. You see examples that use ~として in your favorite shows.

You can sentence mine for phrases. Want to know best time to say: あの野郎なめやがって then a show you've seen is best to mine for it.

Then there's how you're using the mined sentences. Are they recognition only, dictation in part or all, partial blocked out, etc.?

Yeah, so there's quite a bit that can be said about sentence mining. Hard to say what each of us are doing with it past the basics.

Well, as mentioned, the new sentences you mine are supposed to be new. But as for why you would flashcard them instead of just reading more new material, well...
That's a question I ask myself. I think the answer might be "You shouldn't." But instead, my answer is tentatively this:
If you read and listen a lot, you will inevitably encounter every word and grammatical construction so often that you get automatic refreshment of your knowledge. Unfortunately, most of us don't get exposure that often, or can't get exposure that often, because we still read so slowly, or we're too busy, or we're lazy, or etc. An SRS, for me, is essentially a supplement to alleviate that problem.
Say I just learned びり, or 躊躇, or whatever. Cool. They don't seem like they'd be uncommon, though in the case of the former I'm not sure how often I'd find a context where it'd pop up. In both cases, they're apparently not crazy common in the sort of stuff I read, because I've (at the point I learned them) read and listened to so much already without hearing/seeing them.
When will I see them again? If I read as much as I read in English, pretty soon, most likely. But I don't. It could be weeks or months. Actually, I've never seen the word びり used again in new material since I learned it (which was ages ago). But because I use an SRS as a substitute for natural exposure, I see it now and then.

I'm genuinely of the mind that if I just exposed myself a lot more I'd feel no need for an SRS at all (and in fact I did abandon it for awhile). But I don't, so I do.

Well, and I find secondary value in testing my ability to read (pronounce) the words.

You can learn by reading. You can learn by SRSing.
It is probably best to learn by reading AND SRSing.
Example:
1. Read
2. Mark things unknown to you
3. Put unknowns into an SRS. (in i+1 form, one card one unknown)

You need repetition to learn anything. If you just see something once you'll just forget it very soon (and this is a good thing, if our brains didn't do that we wouldn't be able to learn anything as we would be overwhelmed by useless information). Once you know something a bit better you can wait a bit longer before it needs to be refreshed or forgotten. That's the basic idea of the SRS.

Now when we are immersed naturally in a language we will see things again and again which allows us to remember them. But unfortunately, there is no guarantee that we'll see words again when we need to. So in practice, we will remember some things when we're lucky to encounter them again and forget others.

With a SRS, we remove the random component and make sure that will see those things again and that when we do they won't be lost among too many unknown new words. That's basically cheating with the probabilities so that we always win.

Now I agree that SRS is still dumb repetition of the exact same thing. Seeing words used in different contexts is much better and will solidify the knowledge more quickly. But at least we are sure that when we see that word again we won't have forgotten it by then.

As you get better and increase your ability to absorb a great quantity of native material in a short time the need for SRSing simple things will be gone, but it could still be useful for uncommon words and expressions.

Musashi Wrote:I'm a bit of a SRS-n00b, till a few minutes ago I didn't know what 'sentence mining' was. I saw it mentioned many times on this forum as a good study method and from what I understand it's basically copying sentences which you comprehend and turn them into a flashcard. But here's the thing I don't understand, while you're learning these sentences aren't you just 'learning' the same sentences over and over again and since you understand the sentences already, wouldn't it be better just to read new material and absorb more various things (not to mention the tedious job in making a flashcard out of them)? I know this perhaps doesn't hold true if you're let's say studying a specific grammar point, but other than that, I don't see why it wouldn't be better to just read new material either of the same kind or not.
Thoughts?

You've probably misunderstood what "only stuff you understand" means. It means that you should understand the sentence when you start having it in your SRS, not that you should understand it when you see it in your book. Let's say you read a book and you find a sentence which you understand the basics of, but there's a new word in it you haven't seen before. You look it up in a dictionary, go "Aha!" and then you put it in your SRS. That's how it SHOULD be. How it should NOT be: You look up the word in a dictionary, you do NOT go "Aha", instead, you go "Huh? That's not making much sense..." and you input it in your SRS.

So yeah, there should be new stuff in the sentence when you find it, the important thing is that you understand it before you start SRSing it. SRS makes sure you don't forget this new knowledge you acquired, it's not meant to teach you new things.