I’ve been a user of JPDB off and on for awhile. I love the product, but i’ve recently tried to replace Anki with it again full-time, and i run into the issue i usually do, and that’s with the difficulty of the example sentences.
I have it set to i+1 sentences, but they seem abnormally hard. Almost every sentence requires me to paste it into deepl to even know what’s going on with it. Even then, trying to unpack and understand the translation often leaves me thinking “Huh? is this translation just broken or is the sentence some strange set phrase?”. Study progress is very slow and inefficient
My anki core 2k deck sample sentences are very comprehensible in contrast, and my studies are very quick and efficient. I usually do ~3 cards per minute every day with 5 new cards and around 50 reviews each day.
Anyone else notice the difficulty of the JPDB sample sentences? Is there a fix for this or is it just something i’m going to have to overcome?
Edit: To clarify, i usually know all or most of the words in the JPDB sentences, but the main difficulty is in the structure of the sentences. They are usually very weirdly constructed almost like maybe slang or set phrases, or they are complex sentences with multiple verb clauses.
3 comments
Could you give an example sentence? Most of them are not difficult from what I’ve encountered.
My only problem is the parse can be bad with specific cases like 本に with sentences like: その本には何が書いてあるの？and その本には何が書いてあるの？I do not use the +1 and given some of the example sentences using the words wrong, I would not use that function and focus primarily on the card and not the sentence unless you can parse it on your own.
Fair enough if you’re finding the example sentences difficult but I would say you shouldn’t be focusing too much on them.
I usually add my own sentences inside of the [custom definition](https://i.imgur.com/Lk4Hu6N.png) section if there’s a word I’m struggling with. I usually get them from [Weblio](https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/%E3%81%93%E3%82%8C), they include common phrases the word is used in too!
Most of them come from web novels, so they tend to use the full spectrum of common literary grammar. Some authors show off a little too much actually. It’ll get better if you read more, but honestly I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that random sentences will be helpful.
JPDB tries, but it’s really a vocabulary-card type of review.