It seems to me that cloze test decks you're looking for lack context. I don't recommend such "dead" sentences to a serious learner. If I were in your shoes, I'd make my own decks by manually putting sentences from native material I think are worth memorizing.
If you don't have enough time, maybe subs2srs would help because it can automate the process. It creates cards from movies, dramas, and whatnot so you can get sentences spoken by native speakers, snapshots/video clips, and subs in Japanese and English on your cards. I haven't done it myself, but it doesn't seem to be very difficult to make cards like what you described. The main subs2srs thread is on the Recent Topics list right there.
As far as I know, any kind of premade deck available on the internet is shallow in that they don't teach you nuances, usages, and other subtleties very well. I think it's the price you have to pay when you use that kind of learning material. Granted that some decks/sources of decks are better than others, you can't get away with it.
If passing JLPT1 is the goal, I believe someone more knowledgeable knows which ones would work better. If it's not important at all, I don't think you should worry about efficiency of your deck too much. At the end of the day, you have to deepen your understanding of each word/expression/grammar point more by a factor of a trillion through exposure to native material if you want to be fluent (whatever that means).
It seems to me that what you're worrying about is pretty much like the monolingual dictionary vs. bilingual dictionary argument. It doesn't matter. You're supposed to learn 1,000,000,000 times deeper knowledge than what you can learn from the first exposure to a word, phrase, expression, sentence, context, explanation and so on. Here's what I wrote in another thread about use of translation:
magamo Wrote:Should we use translation or monolingual dictionaries? It's like arguing which foot you should step forward with first when you run a marathon. It doesn't matter if you jump off your right foot or push off your left foot first. It's just a small first step you'll have forgotten. What you need to do is run 26 miles and 385 yards.
You need to be exposed to an incredibly huge amount of native material. Translations and explanations are really really really insignificant when compared with the rest of the 26 miles and 384 yards you should run to learn a word.
If you have a good systematic learning method to take advantage of translation for the first step, it's good to exploit English. Your second step will be smoother that way. If you're already used to use monolingual dictionaries and stuff, it's good to use them for the exact same reason. Either way, they're just small steps. Different strokes for different folks, and there is no such thing as the best use of an SRS.
Personally I use multiple monolingual dictionaries when I look up a new word. But they're just a second opinion. I don't believe them. I believe what I'm hearing/reading now. I believe what I have been exposed to. Most of the time my understanding is not accurate or simply wrong at first. But I can fix that as I consume native material. This fixing process is my definition of "learning." Reading entries in a dictionary is a tiny, insignificant part of learning I couldn't care less about.
Whether your deck can teach you better than other decks doesn't matter much. If you think certain kind of stuff works better than others, I think that's the stuff you need now. If nothing lives up to your expectation, maybe you're expecting too much from learning materials designed for learners. I don't know how fluent you want to be in Japanese, but if you're anything like me who wants to be really good at the target language, I don't think you don't need to care much about minor things. Of course, if you're not that serious about Japanese, then I think you should be very careful when choosing learning materials. But if you're a serious learner, it's the same kind of nonsense as "Don't learn Japanese from manga!"
Looking for better study materials tailored to specific students' needs are all well and good, but there doesn't seem to be a great deck or that kind of stuff that makes a huge difference. If anything, I'd like teachers and researchers to come up with various materials based on innovative and/or tried-and-trusted ideas.
By the way, you might think you can't have life if you go hardcore, but I don't think so. It's just you need to be serious. It's inevitable that jobs and other responsibilities get in the way. But if you don't prioritize language learning over your other hobbies etc., it's not surprising your progress is slower than you want it to be.
Edited: 2010-02-06, 7:22 pm
