I typed an entire vocabulary book

First of all, I cannot share it since it’s literally what you pay the book for.

The book: 「はじめての日本語能力試験 N2単語2500」

The original purpose was to make an Anki deck that fits my need. I chose this book because this series has very high quality recordings of words and sentences available on their official website, and they are already split individually into single word and sentence, perfect for flashcards.

My ideal card types are

* kanji + hint -> sound, meaning, sentence
* sound + hint -> kanji
* sentence sound -> sentence writing and meaning

## Methods

I typed into a google spreadsheet. One row per word, many columns. I found typing by column faster, so I went though each section 4 times (jp word, en meaning, jp sentence, en sentence). Exported in csv.

Japanese are kanji only. I have a script that adds furigana readings to the word. It is not perfect and I have to manually correct some of them as I study the deck. One example is that it would generate `書[か]き 留[とど]める` where as the correct reading is `書[か]き 留[と]める`. The reason is that since I want to only add furigana on the kanji but not the whole word, in my script I split the word to process `書き` and `留める` separately. And the latter by itself can be read in two ways. However the error rate is very low. I would deem the script an overall success.

In the end I feed the data together with audio to another script that generate the Anki deck using [genanki](https://github.com/kerrickstaley/genanki).

## My experience

I’ve definitely learned some new words through typing the entire book, especially the ones the repeated showed up in sentences. However that’s about it. The sentences in this book grammatically are extremely simple.

I don’t know if I would recommend this method. I’ve spent around 35 hours in making this. And it is only the first step towards learning them more conviniently in Anki. I do end up with some nice looking flashcards, though.

## Results

I’ve only made one card type for now: [front](https://i.imgur.com/w5ALPsc.jpg)/[back](https://i.imgur.com/zRO3rw0.jpg)