Thanks for your reply and your site is awesome! I will definitely be adding (with your permission of course) those pics to my srs. 4000 sentences already? That is impressive. I usually do cut and paste sentences (mostly from the Yahoo dictionary).

I’ve kind of tried to stop worrying so much about the actually number of daily additions. The reason being, when I do take a day and go ballistic adding sentences, I’ve discovered that I’ll spend the next couple days in review so it all evens out.

I think a good number for me is about 5-15 sentences daily. I guess it all depends on one’s schedule. I have a full time job so obviously I can’t devote as much time as I’d like to sentence mining.

It would be cool as you’ve suggested for people to pool their SRS collections, but so far I’ve only been able to find Japanese-English examples and no J-J examples. If anyone finds a collection of J-J sentences and definitions, it would be great if it could be shared with everyone.

Also I started a sentence blog about signs:

itsajapanesesign.blogspot.com/

And Albion has started one also, about Japanese small print:

gochuui.blogspot.com/

Also Tae Kim has a lot of cut and paste ready sentences on his grammar site:

www.guidetojapanese.org/

Us SRSers need to help each other. If you have a source of sentences already typed up, put it on the web, we’ll link each other, noone need type in 10,000 sentences again. Get a blogger account, use a pre made template and throw that stuff on the web.

I’m not sure where you are in terms of studying grammar, but I found “Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication” to be a really good starting place for me in terms of knowing where to pick up the next day. I’d say it’s definitely not kanji intense though.
I have a book that lists the joyo kanji and then gives four or five words their appear in with their english translation. Each set of words covers the on/kun yomi. I tried to find it on amazon but I couldn’t. If you look for “kanji dictionary” on amazon there are a lot though. The kanji handbook might be good if you’re having a hard time finding words for the kanji (although I’d suspect you can just put the kanji in yahoo dictionary and find the same words since you don’t have to know the reading.)
That site looks pretty cool, thanks for sharing it.

Yeah, I see your point. The inclusion of all the RTK kanji in my SRS sentences was definitely something I wondered about, but really my issue was that random sentence picking just wasn’t working for me. I think the main problem (for me) with finding random stuff is there is really no start point or end point.

Now I’m going to go through each kanji one by one, find 2 or 3 of the most common words using that kanji, find an example sentence (Yahoo dic) of that word, enter it into the SRS and move on. Boring? Some might consider it so. But at least when I finish for a night I’ll know exactly where I need to pick up the next day. Plus I’ll be able to look ahead and make goals. For example I could tell myself, by such and such a day I want to be up to this kanji. I think that is what was slowing me down with the random sentence picking.

Of course that doesn’t mean I still won’t enter things from other sources as I come across them, I will. For example I came across this great site today that I wasn’t familiar with. It describes movies and shows in detail and also has many of the lines from the movies. The actual Japanese dubbed lines not the lines from the subtitles which is a rare cool thing. It’s kind of like the dramanote website but for movies. Here is the one from Batman Begins that I was reading today:

tyantyan.tea-nifty.com/tibi147/2007/08/post_e188.html

I’m at almost 8000 sentences, and I’d say that I definitely do not have all of the kanji from the first book in my SRS. I mean take for example, 翼, I only recently got it because of the B’z song – 永遠の翼 or something like that. I can’t say I’ve got 農 in my SRS either. I guess it depends on why you want to have all of those. To me, if the kanji don’t show up regularly on the stuff you’re trying to read it’s not that important if it’s not in your SRS because it’ll still be in your daily repetitions for kanji, and when it does come up, you’ll be like, ah now I know why it’s like this.

@圭子さん、
圭子はＡＪＡＴＴの仕方で英語の勉強してるのでしょうか。ならば、何かつまずいたことがありますか。今まで皆が日本語の経験から説明や相談などをしてるけど、（ま、勝元さんの場合は中国語から経験も入るけど）、日本人からの経験を読んだことがありません。

＠勝元さん、
日本で面白い経験などが聞きたいんだな。たとえば、日本のゴミを捨て方の経験。納豆でも食べられる？嫌いな食べ物ない？会話で単語間違ったこと全然ないの？ウコンのかわりにｳﾝｺを言っちゃったとか。

The problem I’m facing now is it has been around 6 months since then, but I only have about 450 sentences in my SRS. And it isn’t because I’m not AJATT, I am, but the random sentence mining method is just so time consuming. Even reading itself becomes a lengthy ordeal because I usually have to stop at least once a sentence to look up a word, then to add it to the SRS I’ll either type that sentence into it or find an example from the Yahoo dictionary and put it in. At the end of the day I’m lucky if I have added 10 sentences. Pulling sentences from dramas or movies is definitely my most preferred method, but it usually takes as much or more time to single one out and get it or an example of it into the SRS.

So…..since the real fun for me comes from increased comprehension, I figured if I could find a systematic way to do sentences, like the way we did RTK, my daily additions would increase drastically which in turn would speed up comprehension. Now as I’m going through each kanji starting back from the beginning, I just have to find the most common words or combos that incorporate that kanji. That Kanji Odyssey NukeMarine mentioned sounds good for this.

We’ll see how it pans out. I realize the dictionary/boredom thing is an issue, but since most of my sentences usually end up coming from Yahoo anyway I figure I might as well try it this way and see how much progress I can make. Thanks again for your feedback!

Sorry, quick off topic question about sentence mining. While doing my daily RTK reps today, I wondered – if I just randomly pull sentences from a variety of sources, how can I be sure that in the end I’ll have all of the RTK covered? In other words, when I get to 10,000 sentences will I have examples of all 3000+ kanji?

——————

Probably not, but that’s not too important either. What some at Reviewing the Kanji are doing is first using Kanji.Odyssey.2001 as a source of sentences for the first 1100 most common Kanji. After that, there’s a file from Tanuki Corp which has sample sentences (8000 of them!) covering all 1942 Jouyou Kanji in usage order.

What you’ll find as you begin doing All Japanese All The Time, is you are reading ALOT of Japanese. You find your rare kanji being put to use in various places. Often that means it’ll have Furigana attached. That combined with your base knowledge of that kanji and the contect of what you are reading means you’ll have a meaning and pronunciation for that word/kanji.

Yes, you can systematically learn the kanji (using the sentence method), but don’t get too hung up on it either. You’ll find your harry medium soon.

I’m doing sentence repetitions in the way you described. I’m not doing the RTK method, I’m using www.whiterabbitpress.com/catalog/index.html <—these flashcards. After quickly taking a glance at the individual kanji meaning and some example words (on average 3) and doing some quick writing practice, I use Yahoo!辞書 to get some example sentences containing my target words and throw them into the SRS.

Of course I’m entering many many kanji/words that I haven’t covered yet in those sentences. But this is where I let myself “cheat”. I use rikaichan for Firefox and while I’m reading those sentences, highlight anything I don’t know for the pronunciation and a general english idea of the word so I can understand the entire sentence quickly.

I’ve picked up a ton of words so far that I have not covered through the flashcards, and I’m confident that when I’m done with these cards (which are supposed to cover the first half of the daily use kanji) I’ll actually have most all of the daily use kanji memorized, or at least be damn near close.

Anyway, that’s what I use the SRS for, and I can say that its extremely effective for me, in the sense that even if I’m not memorizing 100% of my target words, I’m picking up many more words on the way that more than make up for it and don’t have to dumb down any of the sentences.

Hope this helps. Give it a go and see if it works for you.

Do remember that the contents of your SRS is not the extent of your Japanese knowledge. Maybe near the beginning it represents a large majority of your Japanese know-how, but eventually you reach a point where you pick up stuff without thinking about it/putting it in your SRS.

お願いします。

I’m also looking forward to the Youtube version 😉

Mark

Thanks for this, Khatzumoto!

So my idea is instead of always looking for random sentences, to go through RTK from the beginning and mine for sentences that include that kanji. If I find a couple examples for each kanji, then once I get through the first RTK1, I should have around 4000 sentences or so.

Has anyone else tried doing sentences this way? I’m hoping by doing sentences in this systematic way, I’ll increase my daily additions. When I do it the random look up way, I don’t seem to make as much progress as I want.

Nice!!!!!!

Keep on churning those podcasts out! And indeed, カッツ sounded like a 正真正銘の日本人!

I enjoyed listening.

I would say you sound more Japanese than American, when you speak English you sound British.