You can cloze the kanji readings and individual word meanings, but how do you come to understand the meaning of the sentence? Can’t you learn the meaning and reading of every word and still not know what the sentence means?
Yes, that is entirely possible. That’s why you fall back to bilingual MCDs. If you don’t get it, don’t use it. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. If it’s too hard or boring, delete it.
Having said that, this ability to “punch above your weight” — to handle texts far beyond your current level, is also part of the power of MCDs. So if curiosity drives you to want to crack a dense text without waiting for your language level to increase to a point where it’s a cakewalk, then MCDs allow you to make a piecemeal, termites-in-wood, jab-into-submission attack on it, comprehending it bit by bit, until (if you stick around) eventually, you understand the whole.
Am doing that at the moment with some political terms in a Wikipedia article.
Every second word I don’t know — the English article is not really very close — but I know that I must be learning the Chinese phrases for a democratic president who has won his seat a second time and is currently sitting. I know there must be some neat phrases in English that express this (like representative, incumbent, re-elected, sitting president) – but my dictionaries aren’t listing them.
However, I don’t find the full-on termite approach much fun, so I went and downloaded dual subtitle (English + Chinese) for House of Cards episodes from shooter.cn. If the wikipedia article is like termites burrowing into hard wood, these subtitles are like chipboard. Sentence level translations, dramatic context and suddenly, learning the words for secretary of state, president-elect, legislation, inauguration… are just one word in an otherwise everyday sentence (delivered with style by Kevin Spacey – at least I get some benefit from English TV watching).
I find having a second, easier, sparsely clozed SRS card which contains the same words with much more context and makes the original, dense text much easier to digest. Praise be to the pre-chewed dialog of television.
I still don’t get that MCD stuff at all, I would like if somebody explain it in a more practical way
If you’ve read all seven articles[1], tried them out in your studies, and still don’t understand then you are the exact person that the MCD pack was made for.
[1] /10000-sentences-is-dead-long-live-mcds