I personally find reading books and taking words and sentences from them easier, and I don’t necessarily care 100% about efficiency. My main goals so far have been reading (possibly speaking down the line) and that’s about it. So I made the decision to start sentence mining from books (starting tomorrow when the books arrive.)
I should also mention that I got books at a level I’m comfortable with, like children’s books.
So in short, is sentence mining from books good and can anybody give me any guidance?
Thanks!!
I don’t see why not, besides the fact that reading is supposed to make you used to the words, so maybe mining them is not that useful.
But if you like having examples for how certain words/grammar is used, then seems like a good idea.
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Probably the best advice I can give you if you are going to learn from mining books is
- Use anki
- Use yomichan with https://reader.ttsu.app/
This means not buying physical books and converting digital to epub. I think if you do those things its good.
Hand looking up words and hand adding cards is going to be very slow by comparison.
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Children books tend to have the text as an image though (at least those for pre-schoolers).
I guess it depends on the level of OP.
Yeah, I guess it depends on what children’s books they bought, but if it’s something that can’t be extracted as text I would definitely reconsider.
I personally don’t think Japanese young children’s books are even particularly great for JP learners in the first place. I would just use jpdb.io and pick one of the easiest non children’s books that interest me personally.
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I never tried using them for learning. I’ve been only using them for their intended purpose (reading them to my own kids).
That being said, when I was learning (and mining words/sentences), typing down the sentence without looking really helped me internalize the sentence structure and remember words, so I’m not sure automation here is good anyway.
That being said, I agree that one should move past children book as soon as possible (getting bored out of your mind is not a good way to be in the mood for learning).
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While I’m doing mining right now, I think early on you’re better off just doing prebuilt decks that have sentences in them (like the core 2k) and then mining after. At this stage everything is new so everything is a sentence to be mined. Right now I could go an entire day without mining a thing. So it’s like “when it’s there it’s obvious I should mine it.”
Just my 2¢s.
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Plus reading is a natural SRS system. Just read more and just look things up if they hold back your understanding.
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Im sure it helped, but at a tradeoff. With automation, you can make the card with less break in your flow time wise, no ALT tabbing or needing to use a second monitor to make the card, it will set up the front of the card for you, the reading, definitions from multiple sources if you please, including Japanese ones, pitch accent it you want, audio, AND the sentence that you saw it in.
I don’t doubt that typing out a sentence helps you, but theres an opportunity cost to not using automation. Not to mention, you could just add all data but the sentence automatically and type that manually it you wanted.
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