jordan3311 wrote:

As the subject says I am looking for a better place to get sentences for my srs. Recently I have been getting bored with the sentences that I am studying at lot of my decks are pre-made. I am trying the find some interesting stuff to get more sentences and vocab from. A lot of the pre-made decks are becoming a chore. I want to try made add my own sentences to see if that will help.

It really depends on where you're at with your Japanese, but your best bet is to find some texts that are around your level or slightly above, and use Rikaisama to capture vocab+sentences into a file that you can import into Anki.

I started out with the 童話 on http://hukumusume.com/douwa/betu/index.html (and still read them - the site is stuffed with great material). I also liked NHK News Web Easy (http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/).

There are any number of other places to find great raw material listed in this thread:

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7082

Most of those resources point to parallel text (audio+text), which is awesomesauce.

jordan3311 wrote:

My levels not that high I have finish genki 1 by myself thats about it. I have the second book but I have not read it just yet. I got some what bored with it. I feel that I have hit a wall and not sure where to go.

Personally, I would find native material that interests you and just power through it. Pick a manga, anime, drama, article, or what have you, and analyze it. (Obviously, if you go the TV route, you'll want something with Japanese subs.) Let the vocab and grammar you find drive your SRSing. That's been my basic approach for a while, and it's worked well. It will be pretty slow-going at first, but it'll get easier as time goes by.

You can also get your hands on some graded readers. Not sure how fun those are, though.

Last edited by gaiaslastlaugh (2012 October 07, 3:53 pm)

There is a topic on this site in which someone posted a collection of novels in text form. I cant remember the name of the post nor the author, but downloading that was one of the best decisions in a while. You can open the files in firefox, use rikai-sama to lookup words on the go and even add them to an anki deck with the press of a button. Whole sentences are easy too; just copy-paste. My Japanese improved tenfold when I started reading Zero no Tsukaima this way: I'm on book two and am really UNDERSTANDING it! If anyone wants the files, just ask (and tell me how to send them ) This way, you can SRS whole sentences straight off the books with minimal effort. However, I think its better to just read through a volume: you'll get so into it wont even seem like your reading Japanese!

Last edited by HououinKyouma (2012 October 10, 8:28 pm)

If its not the vocabulary that's holding you back, its probably the grammar. The only grammar book I read was Tai Kim; the rest I picked up from the Core Decks or real material. If you haven't studied any grammar, its going to be very hard to take a plunge into reading. However, Tai Kim doesn't cover everything, like the ず forms of verbs and such. For those, I just used google as I came across them. I like to think that reading does the most for you grammar than anything else: when you look up a sentence pattern or grammar point, you may forget it after a few days. However, its different when you read a hundred sentences with that grammar point. I'd recommend sticking with sentence cards etc from learning sources until you have a basic grasp of the language: for me it was 1000 sentences off core 2000. They seem boring and tedious (who wants to memorizes the days of the month anyway? I have manga to read!) but I think they are basic enough to ease you into the language. I remember having this illusion early on that I could just start reading Steins;Gate straight out of RTK... That didnt go well, especially because of the complex grammar. Core 2000 was a huge motivation boost because I GOT what the sentences were saying!