I often see people recommending new learners skip core flashcard decks and begin very early with vocab mining in native content. What are the benefits of this approach? One would assume that learning a good foundation of core vocab is really important.
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Nobody says to skip core decks entirely. It’s much better to build up a base of vocab before mining. The reason is that most people, when mining, follow the i+1 sentence framework (where there’s only one unknown component in a sentence, and that’s the word that you mine). Of course, you don’t have to follow this and you can mine every single word you come across, even as a complete beginner, but having the context of the sentence that comes with the unknown word can show you how the word works in the context of the sentence, helping you to remember it more easily, and since there is only one unknown component, you’re not going out of your way to strain your brain by learning more unknown components (stuff like i+2 and stuff). It is, however, extremely difficult to find I+1 sentences in the beginning, so it’s recommended to build a base of the most common vocab before doing so.
Only the most frequent ~2K words from any underlying source are typically also frequent in any other source (at most; 2K is already pushing it). Meaning: If you learn the most frequent 2K words from Netflix, most of them will also be useful when reading Manga and vice versa.
However, after the most frequent ~2K words it becomes really specific to the content you actually want to consume. For example, learning the most frequent ~6K words from newspapers (i.e. the Core 6K) will waste your time if you then mostly read manga. Sure, you will *eventually* need to know those words. But it can take years until you will actually encounter them.
Also, it helps with understanding the nuances of words when you see them in context. And some people just find it a lot easier to remember words if they have a personal context and a sample sentence they actually encountered in the wild.
It’s not, it’s just one of many weird gimmicks that get pushed here. You’ll notice this phrase ‘sentence mining’ is essentially unknown in any other language learning community.
I’ve studied several dead languages where I had to make my own Anki decks and it’s a massive slog.
Sometimes, I have the mining fatigue, and I just learn words from the Core 10k deck (I turned it into a sentence deck)
Whatever, those are words you’ll encounter, and if you want to be perfectly fluent one day, you’ll have to understand them all.
Mining is preferred because you have (probably) an emotional connection with the context around the sentence you mined, thus retention and actual comprehension of the meaning is better. Also, the japanese used is natural.
Mining is better, but using core deck won’t be detrimental to your learning. (at least to a certain point, because not sure a core 50k deck would be of any use)
But let’s be honest, if your goal is to speed run, core decks are a faster way. You could learn 30 core deck words a day. You wouldn’t be able to mine 30 quality cards per day (at least if you have a 9 to 6 like me)
Still, mining is better.
People often misunderstand that there are 3 parts to it. How language works, and it’s basically grammar, what specific word means, and a huge amount of practice for both. In case of grammar, practice trains the flow. People move from theoretical knowledge to practical ability like be able to understand complex sentences. There are specific steps we intuitively do for that. We can keep around 5-7-9 units of information in our short memory, while complex sentences or paragraph typically have 30-50-70 words. To not forger the beginning of the sentence before we even reach the middle of it, we constantly compress multiple words into single blocks. A simple example can be something like relative clauses and lengthy description like “person who was constantly stealing my puddings at work” combines into a single idea at specific place (like subject, person who does something or gets described). This might be hard to understand in native language, because we are extremely fluent in it, but once you start to learn foreign language you can notice how sluggish it becomes, because it’s not how we are used to do it. It might be a different word order and other things, like you can get distracted by translating unknown words. But the more you do it, the more effortless it becomes, no matter how many words you knows in the sentence.
In case of vocabulary you train indirect associations. A simple example can be “She ate my ###cream”. You can understand that it’s ice cream, because eating is associated with specific words like food and much less associated with something like a hat. This enhances our predictive ability and we c#n ev#n do so##t##ng l##e t#is, a#d s##ll ret##n o#r ab###ty to un##rs##d what is going on.
There is also practice related to specific tasks. Like in case of reading we talk about visual recognition, in case of listening we talk about our vocal recognition and in case of writing we talk about physical movements of our hand.
All are quite important, but in my opinion on different stages of our learning. First is our ability to use Japanese with any kind of aid like translation of unknown words, rewording and asking for a meaning in talk and so on. Then you expand both vocabulary and context where it’s used. If you learn context from the first day, you are kinda placing the cart before the horse. Not like it’s not important, but there are definitely much more important skills/knowledge at this point to acquire.
Using a premade deck is going to be significantly faster. I spend less time learning the words than it would take me to make the cards myself. If your goal is to someday become fluent, you’ll need a large vocabulary. Using the Core10k deck for this is completely fine. If you would like to learn more specialized vocabulary (e.g. vocabulary used in manga) as fast as possible, making your own deck might be better.
I wouldn’t say skip core decks but I would urge everyone to start mining as soon as they’re able to. I wish I had started it sooner personally
The reason is that sentence mining is usually done with material you’re either interested in or that is at least full of context that helps you remember organically; It’s much easier to remember a word in the context of something real that you’ve experienced rather than a stale flashcard that was premade
Because mining is fun and decks are boring.
Feel free to use decks if you want to, but don’t be surprised if you burn out and quit after half a year.