Although I am definitely digging the whole “environment” building parts of this site, I can’t see most people building up 10,000 SRS sentences without sticking a gun in their mouth on a bi-weekly basis … and having it go off during at least one of those episodes.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but how is that not just like … or worse than … (cough) studying in a class?

Don’t sweat the length of sentence. Just do this: BOLD term the kana and kanji portion of the sentence that is the word you’re testing. Next, DON’T WRITE OUT THE SENTENCE, just write out the word being tested. Yes, write out the sentence ONCE when you first review it. But after that, just worry about that one word the sentence is there as context to test you about. For those that did RTK, this is akin to Heisig saying you don’t have to write out the kanji endlessly on end to learn them, just once or twice properly can do it. In addition, if you fail a sentence, it’ll be only because of this one word (or concept) that’s being tested.

Now don’t misunderstand me. You still want to read the entire sentence. You still want to understand the entire sentence. But with the above, you stop failing a sentence cause of any dozen of words in it. You focus on that one word you added the sentence for in the first place.

In case you’re doing TTS, there’s hope here too. When you convert your sentence to audio, put a copy of the word at the front with spaces or commas (1 or 2 seconds worth) followed by the actual sentence. In your Anki (or other SRS), bold term your kana and kanji sentences. In your definition field put the J-J for that word only. You can add the J-E if you need to for that word and others, but ALWAYS put the J-J so it’s there when you need it.

Yeah, it’s the +1 thing all over again. But I was finding that CHORE (ok, boring task) of writing out the sentences again and again. I sweated whether to fail because I missed one of the words but not all. This takes it all away. That sentence is about that one word. Everything else is context (important, but not being tested). If I cannot pronounce that one word (via Kanji to pronunciation) or write that one word (via audio to kanji), then the card is missed. Missing other things, well, you have other cards that’ll test them soon enough.

Basically, longer sentences should not be an issue now.

I use the term “error” somewhat controversially here; in particular, I’m talking about the tendency towards very short sentences that some of the articles and success stories have, which sound unnatural as all get-out. It’s entirely possible that they’re written that way primarily to make it easier to read for beginning learners. If that isn’t the case, however, it seems to me quite possible that there’s some damage caused by focusing on short SRS entries at work here, assuming they’ve followed SuperMemo’s advice along the same nature.

www.feedmejapanese.com

rich_f,
you may be exactly right, I don’t know. I just preferred to ‘wait’ until I’m fluent before making decisions about these (after all) secondary things.
I thought Japanese might be an exception because I noticed that some stylistic conventions are different, at least in the book I’m reading. For example, the tense of the verbs is not always coherent. Usually the narration is in the past tense, but it often jumps into the present tense, for reasons I’ve yet to discover. But I’ve decided to just read on until those reasons become clear by themselves.

Besides, one may argue in the following way:
– I don’t want to write long sentences because they are hard to understand.
– I want to be fluent in Japanese and understand everything I read in Japanese
– Some Japanese people for some reasons (lack of style or something) use long sentences
– Therefore it may be useful to practice long sentences even though I don’t plan to use them myself.

That said, I think Khatz’s advice in this post is sound, and I’ve already started to avoid long and boring sentences. What I said above was just for the sake of dialectic.

As for longer being better? It’s never better when it comes to sentences, no matter the language. Read a JP newspaper article or two, and you’ll see that sentences are still pretty short for the most part. The basic rule of journalism is to write to the 4th grade level, because you want to sell papers to everyone. The whole idea is to get info to as many people as possible, as clearly as possible. You wouldn’t expect a 4th grader to read those horrible sentences, would you?

And people who use “utilize” in any written form really should be stabbed repeatedly with blunt, rusty scissors. (Especially bureaucrats.) 😛 It’s not the most egregious offender, but it’s up there.

I personally feel that this is the case.. it seems to happen to me at least.

On the other hand, I didn’t feel like discarding long Japanese sentences, because I know nothing about the style of written Japanese. It could be that long sentences, in Japan, are not such a bad thing. Maybe if you’re really fluent in the language, understanding them gets really easy, much easier than it would be in English or Italian.

These doubts have led me to the decision to avoid any thought about style until after I’m fluent.
What do you think? Does it make sense?