This should help to better retain vocabulary on Anki – use example sentences as mnemonics. What I mean is that you should try to find short and memorable sentences such that the very sound or sight of the word brings the sentence to mind and makes it easier to recall the meaning of the word. (And I don’t mean putting the sentence on the front of the card, this would be too easy; you put the example sentence on the back, and if you see the sentence enough times it sticks in memory together with the word you are trying to learn).
For this to work a few conditions need to be satisfied: the sentence should be short enough to remember as a whole, it shouldn’t contain unfamiliar words (or unrecognizable grammatical forms), and the context of the sentence should be clear (in what kind of situation one would use such a sentence, and better still, if you remember the exact situation from which the sentence had been mined).
Now the problem is that when you sentence mine in the wild it’s not easy to find sentences that meet all these conditions (maybe with the exception of the last one) and I think what many people do is they add sentences which are too long and complicated and that makes them not as helpful as they could be. My solution is the following: using [immersionkit.com](https://immersionkit.com) to find appropriate example sentence. This is a very extensive database of mostly anime cards (and some tv drama) and the great thing about it is that all the sentences are arranged by an ascending degree of complexity. This makes it quite easy to find simple and short sentences that meet the above conditions, and it’s even easier because you can download directly the sentence as an Anki card.
Here’s a recent example from my deck:
word: 予感 (yokan – presentiment, premonition)
example sentence: 何か嫌な予感 (“I got a bad feeling about this”)
The way this works is that whenever I hear ‘yokan’ the phrase ‘嫌な予感’ pops into my mind, together with the anime cards (such as one of those [https://www.immersionkit.com/dictionary?keyword=%E4%BD%95%E3%81%8B%E5%AB%8C%E3%81%AA%E4%BA%88%E6%84%9F](https://www.immersionkit.com/dictionary?keyword=%E4%BD%95%E3%81%8B%E5%AB%8C%E3%81%AA%E4%BA%88%E6%84%9F)).
Another example, sometimes it’s harder to remember verbs in their dictionary form (because usually they are conjugated) so I find it helpful to add a sentence that, say, uses te or ta forms (for example, I have the verb 滑る and put a sentence with 滑った ( 手が滑った )).
As you can see, the shorter the sentence is, and the simpler it is grammatically, the better it works. So you should aim at adding sentences that are as simple as possible, but also such that they give you enough context to help recalling the word (such as “bad feeling” or “my hand slipped”).
by Fafner_88