I'll post my questions here first and introduce myself at the bottom of the post :::

I have a specific question in regards to sentence mining. For example, finding a sentence via Jim Breen's dictionary or a manga or even the Smart.fm and/or Subs2SRS .anki files. My main inquiry is how I should format the inputted sentence into Anki... Should I have the front display the sentence written in full Kanji/kana then have the back display the sentence with furigana? Should no English appear? I've seen a "cloze method" mentioned a couple of times, should that be integrated here?

Furthermore, with .anki files that include audio (I recently downloaded the Death Note .anki file someone painstakingly put together, pardon me for not remembering where to place thanks where thanks are due) should I have the front be audio only then the back be the sentence in Kanji/kana?

Thanks!!

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Hello! This is my first post, but over the past few days I've been scouring these forums trying to bookmark, locate, and figure out different methods for learning/improving Japanese.

I took Japanese for two years in college but as many people seem to agree here, that hardly counts for anything (in fact, it doesn't). I am now studying abroad in Japan and although basic conversation is doable, I am very much aware my Japanese is just no good (nor is my English anymore it seems nowadays...)

I am only on Lesson 9 of RTK (frame 172) but I can proudly say my rate is increasing much more than from when I first started. (Can't thank this site enough for helping out with the SRS! Amazing) I can already see the benefits of this method when I walk around and easily identify kanji all over the place that I never noticed before.

Since coming to Japan and realizing my struggle to understand native speakers, I've been surged with great determination! Many forum topics here are very useful. I've already bookmarked many podcasts and cannot wait to begin listening to (and understanding) some of the short story audio files.

Nice to meet you and thank you for your advice/help!

Hey superliman

Although I can't offer any help, I am in exactly the same situation (minus being in Japan). I haven't started sentence mining yet because, to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what to do. So I will be interested to see how people respond.

Cheers

superliman Wrote:I'll post my questions here first and introduce myself at the bottom of the post :::

I have a specific question in regards to sentence mining. For example, finding a sentence via Jim Breen's dictionary or a manga or even the Smart.fm and/or Subs2SRS .anki files. My main inquiry is how I should format the inputted sentence into Anki... Should I have the front display the sentence written in full Kanji/kana then have the back display the sentence with furigana? Should no English appear? I've seen a "cloze method" mentioned a couple of times, should that be integrated here?

Furthermore, with .anki files that include audio (I recently downloaded the Death Note .anki file someone painstakingly put together, pardon me for not remembering where to place thanks where thanks are due) should I have the front be audio only then the back be the sentence in Kanji/kana?

Thanks!!

There's no one RIGHT way, but if you're doing All Japanese All The Time-style sentence mining, then your main goal is to understand the sentence as a whole. So, you put the sentence on the front (with full kanji/kana), and have the sentence with furigana on the back, *along with any word definitions and grammar explanations you need to understand the sentence*. I personally wouldn't get too worked up about using no English. The peril with doing all Japanese is that maybe you can't understand the definition and you need to look up MORE words, and I don't think that's fundamentally useful.

By the way, don't get your sentence examples from Jim Breen's dictionary! They have been known to be unreliable.

I would do audio cards as audio on the front, the transcription on the back, plus any word definitions and grammar explanations that you need.

If Jim Breen's sentences are bad (basic ones, which are the only ones I use, tend to seem fine), what's a better source that would do similar work; where you look up a word and find links to sentences.

I think the translations are suspect sometimes, but if I know other words and grammar parts, I can usually suss out what the translation actually is. I only add i+1 sentences, so it hasn't seemed to be much of a problem, and I'm not using very complicated sentences.

plumage Wrote:If Jim Breen's sentences are bad (basic ones, which are the only ones I use, tend to seem fine), what's a better source that would do similar work; where you look up a word and find links to sentences.

I think the translations are suspect sometimes, but if I know other words and grammar parts, I can usually suss out what the translation actually is. I only add i+1 sentences, so it hasn't seemed to be much of a problem, and I'm not using very complicated sentences.

The problem with Jim Breens sentences (Or the tanakus corpus) is that they are full of subtle errors. They are written by students and haven't been thoroughly checked. For better example sentences look at smartfm or the Yahoo's J-E Dictionary.

As bombpersons says, the Tanaka corpus is full of dubious sentences. Worse, it's not even a case of good Japanese with dubious translations -- his students were just tasked to come up with sentence pairs however they could, and sometimes they started with English and produced non-idiomatic (over-literal) Japanese. Some of the sentences are clearly machine translated. Some are attempts to translate song lyrics. Some are from bilingual books and don't quite match up right. There are 'wrong kanji' errors and other typos.

The documentation does warn you about this.

In relation to whether to have the reading and the English translation on the back, I would say unless you are 100% sure you understand the sentence without an English translation, then include it.

plumage Wrote:If Jim Breen's sentences are bad (basic ones, which are the only ones I use, tend to seem fine), what's a better source that would do similar work; where you look up a word and find links to sentences.

The sentence that made you look up that word in the first place. If you don't fully understand the source material and there are no example sentences in Yahoo Dictionary (which is quite rare) I'd just let it slip by. Don't worry, you will encounter the word again in a different context.

I'll give the Yahoo Dictionary a go, then.

This sort of sentence mining is useful when learning new words--sometimes I encounter them in places like Tae Kim (which I'm going through) or JLPT study lists, and it's good to put sentences in which use the words--if the sentences also utilize other words from my vocabulary in different grammatical contexts, i'll enter multiples, which strengthen other kanji I'm learning. That's doubleplusgood.

Aren't smart.fm sentences no different really from the wwwjdic sentences, in that they are compiled by students/users? Wouldn't they be subject to the same sorts of errors?

plumage Wrote:Aren't smart.fm sentences no different really from the wwwjdic sentences, in that they are compiled by students/users? Wouldn't they be subject to the same sorts of errors?

No, the 6000 sentences from the smart.fm Core Series are created and translated by professionals.

Thanks for the clarification, Sammy. I saw user names next to sentences that came up, so just assumed they were user-created.