It seems like there are 2 ways of immersion when you’re at an intermediate level, the first is mining sentences with focus on the unkown words, or the second way, just looking up the meanings while immersing and depending on the repetition of the words in context and lookups to drill down the meanings. Basically just immersing, looking up, and continue immersing without sentence mining or anki.
The first method is widely recommended and on a base level it makes sense, you have to repeat the words in SRS to actually memorize them, but the downside is that you’re getting into the tedious process of sentence mining, especially when reading books or manga. With the second method you’re depending on the repetition of the words in the medium to memorize them, which might or might not happen, but it makes immersing a faster process without having to do a process in between.
I was wondering what others think about this? Do you prefer the first or the second method? Have you tried one and it’s working well for you? Any opinions or arguements against or for either?
10 comments
Following as I’m at this stage also.
However my understanding is that it is best to ONLY mine I+1 sentences, as that strikes a good balance between time spent immersing and gathering new words. Looking up and mining every new word will kill your enjoyment and drastically minimise your time immersing (I.e a 30min episode will take you 3hrs to get through)
I’m at N5 level, so I still use Tango’s Anki Decks and I’m not mining because cards would pile up very quickly;
I can’t WAIT to finish my decks and start mining. I barely retain anything from just lookups alone, while Anki manages to drill words into my mind whether I want it or not.
I do immersion while sentence mining but I wouldn’t do it if it was a slog. Fortunatelly, there are a bunch of tools like Yomichan out there that makes it way easier. Besides the added effort of adding cards to our SRS program we also have to consider the time it takes to go through the cards. If it doesn’t take to much time and doesn’t become bothersome then I’d recommend it.
Why not both?
Do more or less of either at different times to mix it up and not get bored or overwhelmed
There’s no such thing as a perfect learning methodology because the learner themselves changes over time as does their needs and wants
What’s more important is self assessment and experimentation
There was a time when I got pretty sick of Anki and I just wanted to have more time to read more stuff so I dropped Anki altogether (I don’t do core decks, only mine words from stuff I read). That went on for two months or so before I realized that I was starting to forget words way more quickly and my learning pace was grinding to a halt compared to back when I was still doing Anki. IMO Anki (and by extension mining) is very much worth it. The time you use learning words with Anki will be come back to you by allowing you to immerse in stuff you want more effortlessly. There are a lot of tools that can automate most of the mining process nowadays like Yomichan/AnkiConnect/ShareX, so make sure to use them.
Great question. If you’ve got the time, sentence mining can be an effective way to learn quickly.
Unfortunately, if you don’t have multiple hours to study each day, it’s probably not worth it—the time it takes to set up Anki and make cards will limit your input significantly, especially in the beginning when your vocab is limited.
The ideal option is to study premade vocab decks that are relevant to what you are inputting. I know [jpdb.io](https://jpdb.io) is trying to do just this, but I haven’t used it.
Sentence mining can also be a big drain on motivation, as cards take time to create and study. So be wary.
I’d recommend trying immersion and looking things up as you go before committing to sentence mining.
So far I read around 20+ books of varying levels of difficulty, both paperback and digital. Not sure which of the options you presented this corresponds to (probably the first option?) but the way I do it was just read books and add words to anki that you think will be interesting or useful, and look up the rest so you understand what you are reading but don’t add those.
you’ll also pick up some words for “free” by just reading a lot
the really important thing with anki is, don’t add like every word to it because you’ll have too many cards at once. I don’t like to do anki reviews for more than half hour (max) and ideally 25 min, I like to have more time reading or listening or speaking etc than living just in anki
Gonna shamelessly push my favourite immersion method in every thread again:
**SONGS. LIKE ANIME SONGS.**
It combines some of the best of both worlds:
-Unlike sentence mining, you don’t forget the word because you will repeatedly listen to the song and revise the word.
-Unlike flashcards, the word is used in context
-Revising the word takes little to no effort because it’s fun listening to songs you like
-It’s a song, not a story. You don’t have to understand every word, every sentence, for it to be very enjoyable.
DOWNSIDES
-Not good if your issue is memorising Kanji, *unless* you listen to songs while looking at lyrics. Good news is lyric-subbed videos are common, and some MVs even have embedded lyrics.
-Requires a minimum competency of around N4 for even the simplest of songs
I’m not at the level yet to just mine for vocab, I want to finish N3 vocab before I do.
Atm I try to mine 10 words a day + 10-15 from my vocab deck, once I mine 10 words I just immerse without worrying about mining.
I would do the same in the situation you’re talking about, mine X words a day and then just immerse and not worry about it.
I only do pre-made anki decks. Mining is too boring – I just read and look up words, if it comes up in every paragraph there’s no way Id forget it.