I've just started trying to learn Japanese(I've learned the かな, and just started on the かんじ today. Only up to　三十.) and I have a couple questions.

The first question has to do with the SRS. While reading up on AJATT I was seeing that it may not be a bad idea to put the story on the front of the flash cards. So this made me think I should probably add the Kanji myself and make my own deck.

However I don't really understand how to do this. Right now I'm using Anki and if I try to add new cards I can put the keyword and the story on the front, but I have no idea how I'm supposed to put the Kanji on the back of the card. Even if I happen to know the reading for the Kanji (which is quite rare) If I type it in it appears very small as opposed to the downloadable decks, and that makes it less useful. So how would you go about inputting your own cards and making it actually useful.

The second thing has to do with actually being able to understand Japanese. It seems to me that after you finish RTK1 people often move on to something like sentence mining. But how in the world can you sentence mine when you don't know what any of the words mean? I can recognize and pronounce all of the かな but I have no way of actually knowing what any of the words mean... Unless of course it's katakana in which case I can usually figure it out. But I'm trying to understand how I can actually go about learning the words...

There's a list of the kanji in Heisig order in .doc format, when I was using anki I just followed this along. I'm sure someone will post a link, but if no one else can find it I'll upload it for you.

And I just left it the size it is, normal text size. Having it bigger didn't really seem like an advantage to me. Although now I avoid this by using this websites SRS (the study section is very useful with kanji).

All you have to do is use the Heisig deck and just add the story to the part where the keyword is in edit mode...

I use this site to copy/paste kanji if I can only think of the keyword: http://ziggr.com/heisig/

As for sentence mining when you don't know any of the words -- that's a very good question. This is one of the reasons I like textbooks/courses, because they bring you up to a point where I feel you can effectively sentence-mine.
But I really don't have much of an idea, to be honest. I'm looking forward to see what other people say, because I would like to use it for German, too.

Couple ideas on the second question. First, Japanese the Manga Way uses real examples from Manga with both word by word and interpretive translations along with explanations of grammar points. Perfect book for a beginner to use for sentence-mining, and no dry, unnatural textbook usage. Second, dictionaries are your friend. Look up the words in the sentences you want to mine, then make an attempt to "understand" the sentence. You don't have to "translate" it, just hold the meanings of the words in your head along with any context you can muster up to comprehend the meaning beneath the words. Finally, there's nothing at all wrong with using something like smart.fm, Tae Kim or other pre-translated decks to learn some basic vocabulary before going straight sentence-mining.

EDIT: I just can't shut up tonight, lol. Also, keep in mind that sentence mining doesn't literally mean full sentences, two-four word phrases/clauses are perfect and make doing the looking it up and figuring it out thing a lot easier.

Yeah I'm actually tempted to take some Japanese courses although they are not offered at my current school. But I may be going to a different school anyway, because the major I'm currently working on just isn't really all that interesting to me... So I may be able to take a few courses of Japanese in the future, but then again according to Heisig using any other method will only make his method less useful. Although you could just take a course in Japanese after you finish RTK1 then it could be beneficial... maybe?

kendo99 Wrote:Couple ideas on the second question. First, Japanese the Manga Way uses real examples from Manga with both word by word and interpretive translations along with explanations of grammar points. Perfect book for a beginner to use for sentence-mining, and no dry, unnatural textbook usage. Second, dictionaries are your friend. Look up the words in the sentences you want to mine, then make an attempt to "understand" the sentence. You don't have to "translate" it, just hold the meanings of the words in your head along with any context you can muster up to comprehend the meaning beneath the words. Finally, there's nothing at all wrong with using something like smart.fm, Tae Kim or other pre-translated decks to learn some basic vocabulary before going straight sentence-mining.

I took a look at that book Japanese the Manga Way and it looks really interesting. I may have to get it. On the topic of dictionaries which one would be good to start with. I've noticed that Khatzu seems to talk about sanseido a lot, but you can't really start with a J-J dictionary I wouldn't imagine...

For basic lookup I use Denshi Jisho, but don't trust the examples.

When I want something I can trust a little more I use:
http://ejje.weblio.jp/