Need Advice for Unknown Words When Reading As Immersion

At my level I finally weaned myself from graded books and is now diving into NHK Web Easy articles.

So my question is, whenever I encounter an unknown word, should I just check the dictionary and move on hoping that quantity and repetition will fill in the gaps of my vocab or should I start making anki cards despite its clunkiness?

I kinda prefer the first one as it’s fun to just keep reading without much interruption while the second option is really a hassle and boring but maybe this is more efficient.

What do you guys think? Thanks in advance!

Edit: Btw, I also have the N5 Tango deck as vocabulary supplement but it is currently paused as I’m encountering Kanji that I haven’t encountered yet in WK.

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You could always go back and add them to anki after you’re done reading the article.

Personally, I would pick sentences that have like one thing in them that you don’t know that are going to be memorable. Copy paste the whole sentence into anki and bold your word. On the back put the definition of the word and even the whole translation of the sentence if you want.

Once you get to your desired amount of new anki cards for the day, you can go back to looking up unknown words and leaving it at that. You don’t have to look up every word if they’re too frequent, though.

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Thanks for the reply. My problem with copy/pasting NHK sentences directly to anki is that anki preserves the html links and I can’t find a convenient way to properly format the text. Any tips?

do you have an example article i could use? Maybe I can find something out for you.

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You can adjust the Anki settings so that it ignores the links in the pasted text. (Alternatively, you could leave the settings as-is and paste with shift key pressed, I think…)

Here is the relevant settings option (the last one) which lets you paste without special keys:

This is the general Anki preferences page.

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You could try Yomichan, it is great: FooSoft Productions - Yomichan
It can create cards automatically for the words you like, together with the context sentence and audio from the dictionary article.
It also makes reading very easy :slight_smile:

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That helps but the resulting furigana will be pasted beside the Kanji. How do you create furigana in anki?

@Vanilla Here’s a recent example: 仕事がなくなった技能実習生が法律で禁止された賭けをする The first sentence has links that will lead to a Japanese dictionary definition. Pasting this into anki will result in blue links appearing but will at least preserve the furigana.

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In Anki, you add furigana in square brackets after the kanji(s) you want to apply them to. E.g. your sentence would become

仕事[しごと]がなくなった 技能[ぎのう] 実習生[じっしゅうせい]が 法律[ほうりつ]で 禁止[きんし]された 賭[か]けをする

which gets displayed as

if you add the field to the card like this:

{{furigana:Your_Field_Name}}

If you use the “Japanese Support” add-on, you can generate the furigana automatically (actually that’s what I used above). But you can also add them by hand if you like. Just make sure there is a space before the group to which the furigana should apply, and you’re good to go.

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You WANT furigana? I would advise against using furigana for your flashcards since I imagine you’re trying to learn how to read.

You can have it on the back of the card to make sure you were able to read it fine, but sadly I couldn’t figure out a way to get rid of the links (but they don’t actually take you anywhere if you click them). What I would do is just remove the furigana by clicking 漢字の読み方をつける at the top and ctrl+shift+v pasting whatever you wanna use into anki to remove the links and stuff.

Thanks!! That really helps! Luckily I’ve also stumbled upon a template (from the N5 tango deck) that would allow me to paste and format the text as you’ve advised.

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You WANT furigana? I would advise against using furigana for your flashcards since I imagine you’re trying to learn how to read.

My learning style since Genki I is to memorize the readings whilst not being able to recall the Kanji. Once I encounter the Kanji in WK, I can piece them together and solidify it further. This will allow me to immerse earlier than waiting for my WK Kanji to catch up.

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I have Yomichan as my shift key dictionary but I can’t figure out how to make it paste sentences into anki (with Anki Connet). Thanks for the suggestion though.

To get rid of the blue links paste the sentence in to a search engine like google. Then copy it again.

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