Just set up Yomichan w/ Anki integration and feel dumb asking about sentence translation / mining

Following the guides provided here: [https://learnjapanese.moe/yomichan/](https://learnjapanese.moe/yomichan/) and [https://animecards.site/yomichansetup/](https://animecards.site/yomichansetup/)

I wanted to try my hand at immersion and mining and went through the steps to to set up Yomichan and link it up to Anki as well.

My dumb questions are that I know that if you hover over JPN text and hold down the shift key, it’ll translate individual terms / words. I started to read through a Light Novel and with the first sentence, I know that I can eventually figure it out if I parse through every single term but it’d be nice to “check” my work and quickly translate like the entire sentence or a couple of terms together, basically like copying and pasting to Google translate.

e.g. ゲーマー兄妹がファンタジー世界を征服するそうです

My guess is that Yomichan can’t do this and that I need to have Google Translate pulled up on a different tab to do this?

Also, I looked up how to mine sentence on Yomichan but I can’t seem to find a clear answer on this. With the integration with Anki, I can press the plus button to create cards of terms but what if I wanted to mine the sentence? I haven’t read ahead in the mining guide yet but it sounds like this might be more for anime / VNs but I’m not sure.

I just want an easy process to immerse / mine but the technology aspect (Yomichan / Anki, especially Anki) is sorta a big hurdle.

5 comments
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  2. >quickly translate like the entire sentence or a couple of terms together, basically like copying and pasting to Google translate.

    Yes you will need a translation tool/website. If you’re having that much trouble parsing the meaning of the sentence, you probably want to find easier material or study up on your grammar.

    >but what if I wanted to mine the sentence

    In Yomichan settings > Anki > Configure Anki Card Format, you can select “{sentence}” as the value. You can then format the card the way you like in Anki.

  3. I use ichi.moe (or jisho.org) to get the fuller gyst of the sentence. Otherwise, comparing it against an existing translation is your best option, imo (though still imperfect, depending on the translation). Google translate is iffy.

    For Yomichan, you can set one of the fields to sentence or selection, and then copy (Ctrl+c or equivalent) the sentence prior to adding on the word. Basically, it’s grabbing it from the last item on the clipboard. You may need to explicitly turn that on in the Yomichan settings, idrc.

  4. If you keep running into sentences that you can’t understand even after looking up their component words, then you should probably be working on your grammar and/or looking for something easier to read.

    Relying on translators is rarely a good idea. Even the good ones will constantly get things wrong, and it won’t always be in a way that’s immediately obvious to a learner.

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