is Jim Breen's website a good place to find sentences ? I heard it has many errors so I'd like to know what you guys think. Please I don't want to learn sentences only to discover that they are all wrong. Also if you know better places to get sentences please let me know, I prefer something with explanations in English like in Jim Breen's website, I tried yahoo dictionary but it doesn't seem to have translations and I don't want to translate them myself.

no one ? any advice is good advice

I don't think it's very good, but there are so many other good places to find sentences that it doesn't matter much. The key thing is to not get hung up on having a translation. Once you do that, you can use nearly anything you find in japanese. Dictionaries work, but the examples are very dry. http://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/ is a much more colorful source. I've just started trying twitter as well, we'll see how that goes.

p.s. Instead of a translation, I've been just adding the english definition of the one or two words I don't know as the card's reverse side, plus the reading of the whole sentence. (anki does that automatically) It makes it much easier to make the flashcards, so I make more.

I'm just beginning so using japanese only without at least some translation is error prone.
For example if I go to wiki and copy sentences from there how am I supposed to know exactly what each word means ?

Opinions differ on all this stuff, but my view on it is:

I make a flashcard when I want to learn something. When there's a word I want to learn or some chunk of grammar I want to learn. Sometimes I've pulled it out of real text, sometimes from a textbook, sometimes from a dictionary or twitter or whatever. But there's always a specific purpose for that card to be there.

I try to do the "n+1" thing for my cards, having only one thing on there that I don't know. So there's only really ever one word that I need to translate, and I get that from the dictionary. That's REALLY hard to come by when you're starting up though. Honestly, textbook sentences might be good here. Lot's of people think otherwise. But they let you build up a base amount of grammar and vocab that will help you understand language you find in the wild.

Perhaps the most important thing to do is just try stuff and see what works for you. None of us here (AFAIK) are language learning experts. My wife actually is, and she always tells me the stuff I do wouldn't work for everybody, since everybody learns differently.

I know what you mean... when your just starting out, having a translation along with accurate sentences will let you study and SRS with more confidence. Just make sure you break away from translations when you are ready to handle real Japanese.

Try this site: http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ it's usually got a few japanese sentence examples with english translations.

The thing I'm concerned the most about is having incorrect sentences or not finding the right meaning or explanation of something in a sentence, this will cause major problems because once an erroneous sentence "sinks in" it's hard to unlearn it.

loverkanji Wrote:The thing I'm concerned the most about is having incorrect sentences or not finding the right meaning or explanation of something in a sentence, this will cause major problems because once an erroneous sentence "sinks in" it's hard to unlearn it.

I totally agree with. It is much harder to unlearn something once you've hammered it into your brain.

JimBreen's a decent place for sentences. But I would NOT add them to my cards. There are 160k sentences and the majority of them are good, but many are not so good, and some are useless.

I made a list of easy to access sentence, here:
http://www.nihongocentral.com/where-to-find-sentences/

thanks, it's going to help me a lot

I suggest going through Tae Kim's Guide and Dict of Basic Japanese Grammar first; they include lots of sentences with translations, plus detailed explanations.

Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary (the Green Goddess) is also a great (non-free) resource. Here's an exemple entry.

I am actually rereading Tae Kim's Guide right now and adding sentences as i go.