Sentence vs Word Mining

[rain owl]

Hi,
What is the difference between sentence and word mining and what is the difference between a sentence and a word card?

Right now my assumption is a word card is what JP1K does.
A sentence card would present me a sentence and I have to translate it - do I only put the sentence there or the word I’m learning and the sentence?

The latter has more context (as it HAS context), but as I see both recommended I’m wondering what’s the benefit of both.

How would I decide if I create a sentence or a word card out of something?

Up until recently I only had the word on the front.
Now I have the word and the according sentence (the latter without any furigana or additional help to force me read the sentence and kanji I should know) on the front and all „learning“ information on the back.

May it be an option to randomly show either word or sentence?

[humble forum]

https://youtu.be/GLfmKWhLhjk
This provides the explanation responsible for my understanding of the topic here.

please note this video is 1 yr old

[wooden tangle]

You shouldn't randomly change what's on the front of an Anki card. That's like having two different cards, mixing their review history together, and asking the algorithm to schedule the resulting mess.
It's actually better to have two separate cards if you want to practice both. This creates positive review interference, which is usually a good thing but Anki doesn't do a good job of using that advantage.

I really dislike Matt's argument from a year ago because he does sentence cards badly and then concludes that they aren't suitable for higher levels. His mistake is assuming that you should avoid mining the same word in several different sentences. That rule makes sense for your level (better to get a rough idea of more words) but advanced sentence mining is actually about finding useful overlaps. That's how you handle grammar patterns, idioms, difficult words using sentence cards.

I have a strong preference for sentence cards if I'm trying to build understanding. Vocabulary cards shine for learning pronunciation, and they might be good for remembering which kanji to use, but I haven't started that yet.

Vocabulary cards might also have an advantage for building basic vocabulary, or as the first thing you do with new vocabulary. They won't help you with the finer details of meaning and usage, but it's easier for people to learn how to review them quickly. (Sentence card review should also be quick, but that's harder to learn.)

I feel better recommending sentence cards for 2A because the best way to understand them is to try them. Once you know what sentence cards are useful for, and once you have a better idea of what it feels like to understand Japanese, you can experiment with vocab cards or other formats.

btw, trying to remember the exact translation of anything isn't necessary. It's good to get past that and to measure your understanding without needing any other language to measure it with. It's hard to force this shift, though, so don't be too hard on yourself. Just start by passing cards you can't remember a translation for.

Think of review time like this: you have some cards due. Your job is to sort them: easier to understand, harder to understand, why am I reviewing this? The last group you suspend or delete, the other two groups should have about a 4:1 ratio easy:hard. You can compare your cards to each other instead of comparing them to translation.