Is there a good resource to get sentences from that the general RTK community likes to use?

Core 2000/6000 Theres a shared anki deck of it
Kore 6000 Its another anki sorted deck for ease of learning readings, its floating around here somewhere.
Kanji Odyssey 2001(KO2001) Another resource that many seem to mine from...

Those seem to be the main three discussed.

Core 6000 is good if you have some grammar background, but it's hard to recommend sources when we have no idea what level you're at.

If you get the Basic and Essential gramamr points listed on Tae Kim's site down, I think you could tackle the Core2k easily enough. I found the sentences in that built from very basic beginner and grew in grammatical difficulty. Every now and then there was maybe a curve ball in there that seemed out of place but generally it wasn't too bad. Once you hit the upper 4k though of the Core6k, the grammar starts to become a bit more difficult and the sentence structure becomes more what I see in daily use. The sentences in the upper 4k also grow in size as well (this was the most notable to me).

I haven't used Tae Kim, but that sounds about right from what I've seen of it. I started using Core 2000 after Genki I.

The main problem Core 2000 presents for absolute beginners is that there are some very odd English translations in there. These sentences were created by and translated by a Japanese company. The Japanese is perfect, but the English is awkward at times. Some of the cards' English translations are just flat out wrong. Here's an example off the top of my head.

家族に葉書を書いています。
I wrote a postcard to my family.

The correct translation should be "I am writing a postcard to my family." If you think you can see through minor translation oddities like this, have at it.

prink Wrote:家族に葉書を書いています。
I wrote a postcard to my family.

The correct translation should be "I am writing a postcard to my family." If you think you can see through minor translation oddities like this, have at it.

Is it really "writing" or is it "wrote." The -ている form is something that always causes me a bit of trouble because you can say translate it as having done something. I believe it comes down whether or not the state can be reset or not. I can't check the DBJG at the moment.

I have found some badly translated and flat out wrong sentences though. So I know what you mean.

Thanks all for the replies. I actually do know a good amount of Japanese, just not writing. I've been playing Japanese video games and watching anime for countless years, even finished all of pimsleur and things like that. I can hold a basic conversation with a Japanese person but cannot write at all. I'm just about to finish RTK and get into sentences and that's why I was asking.

I pushed off reading WAY too long, and now I want to get a full grasp on the language =)

If you were really hellbent on using the corePlus's extra cards past Core6k you could use a core6k that has working audio (from shared) and then import the other cards. If you open the corePlus card browser you can tell it to show you all cards tagged "edict" under the filter drop down. This is 17045 cards. There are still ~2000 cards missing that I'm not sure what they are tagged as. Those 'edict' cards basically only have a single word in Japanese and then the English definition on it, with a browser link to example sentences for the word. So its not really the best deck. The deck is also ~200mb; hence why only using a Core6k deck might be more preferable to that massive deck. If you do still decide to use the deck though. Make sure you go to your .anki folder every now and then and clear out the backup folder. Anki does not clear the folder and it basically creates a backup copy of each deck over time and doesn't bother to prune older ones. So imagine after a month with 20 backups of the corePlus deck....ya. Clear it occasionally.

Explanation on importing: Export the cards from the corePlus deck by selecting for the 'edict' tag. Create an exact copy model of the corePlus in your Core6k deck and import the exported deck.

once you're post-core6k, i like newsweek japan.
http://www.newsweekjapan.jp/
their articles are interesting, well written, and always have lots of great new vocab...

Remember that Core 6k are sentences used as examples for the word being taught, as such the grammar is simple. Tae Kim are sentences for the grammar point being taught, as such the vocabulary is simple. In both cases, the sentences are meant to stand alone.

Past that, the sentence method becomes using sentences to help you understand the whole of the material the sentence came from. Using dramas, that means each sentence is one block that builds up to the entire drama. Books or articles could be done the same way.

Hmmm. I'm trying to download the core 2000 list from Anki but when I open it I get this error:
"File is corrupt or not an Anki database."

I wonder what is going on =(

danatoth Wrote:Hmmm. I'm trying to download the core 2000 list from Anki but when I open it I get this error:
"File is corrupt or not an Anki database."

I wonder what is going on =(

Download the "Core 2000 and 6000 Vocabulary and Sentences" deck.
Open the card browser. Filter for "Core6000". Ctrl+A to select all the cards and suspend them. Now start reviewing ("In order added" its a study option), and you'll be reviewing the core2k. Then when you want to start 6k you can just unsuspend all the cards.

I downloaded the deck but whenever I try to open it I just keep getting this error: http://i.imgur.com/M0NMB.png
I even tried to open it with old versions of Anki...nothing seems to work