Sentence Mining


I discussed how I study Kanji in the previous post. Now I will describe how I go about sentence mining, another key activity in Immersion learning. 

Sentence Mining

Sentence mining is the meat and potatoes of immersion learning. I use anime with Japanese subtitles and text heavy video games as my main sources of sentence mining.  

Sentence mining involves making flashcards out of sentences from your immersion. This is called 'mining.' The best kind of sentences to mine are those that contain only one unknown element (word or grammar point).  Of course this is not a hard and fast rule but, sentences with more than one unknown element can become tedious to review in the initial stages.

Sentences with only one unknown element are generally called 'i+1' sentences in the immersion learning community,

The Process

There are many software tools and Anki add-ons that help streamline the process of sentence mining. Instead of explaining them individually, I am going to step through the process of mining a single sentence from an anime episode.

I use Potplayer to watch anime with Japanese subtitles. This video player is very customizable. The main reason I prefer it over players like VLC is because it allows for the subtitles to be copied as the video is playing. This makes the process of looking up words easier. Note that this only works with the .srt subtitle format.


When I find a sentence I want to make a flash card out of, I copy and paste it into Anki.




This is the card format that a very powerful Anki add-on known as Migaku Japanese generates. One of the most useful features of this add-on is the ability to auto-generate readings for each word in a given sentence and colour code it depending on its pitch accent.

Another add-on that I use on a regular basis is the Migaku Dictionary. It integrates a powerful dictionary into Anki itself. This allows you to look up words and transfer definitions to cards very easily. It can also search for native audio from Forvo.



This is how the card looks when it comes up for study.





I usually have native audio for the unknown word on the back of the card.

Other Software Tools

I also use sharex which is a multipurpose tool which can take screenshots and perform optical character recognition on them. This comes in very handy when reading from sources that do not allow for copying.


This post pretty much describes my general workflow with regard to sentence mining. In the next post I will explain how I go about  listening immersion.




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