What are pros and cons of Vocabulary and Sentence cards?

[timid orchid]

Hi everyone, I recently started sentence mining after reaching a bit more than 1000 words in two months, I started watching Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san as it's a very beginner friendly show however there are still time where I'm a bit lost and my sentence mining is currently a mix of sentence cards and vocabulary cards because sometimes there is a sentence that I don't necessarily 100% understand (usually because of the verbs, I don't understand yet what the difference between the tenses (to live, to be living, to have been living, to have lived, etc...) or sometimes they are words in it that I don't want to learn but there is still one interesting words for me, when that's the case I make a vocabulary card so it's practically the same as doing the Core2k/6k deck or the JP1K.

However with my sentence cards (those where I understand everything) I feel like sometimes seeing the whole sentence sometimes helps me guess the words instead of remembering it and I'm a bit scared that it will give me a false impression of knowing the meaning and especially the reading while I don't, for exemple I mined a sentence to learn the word 静か (calm/silent) but the rest of the sentence contains something like only the two of us. So when I saw it I immediately guessed that yeah it was probably this word. I also have to add that I made the unknown word bold on my sentence cards and added sentence audio as I saw it done multiple times on YT but I feel like it's not a good way to make sentence cards so I'm thinking of removing both of them.

Am I doing something wrong here? Thanks in advance for your advice, I feel like I'm facing a wall right now...

[robust slate]

Here is one resource to check out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLfmKWhLhjk&ab_channel=MattvsJapan

In reality, fully understanding the difference between the two is hard to comprehend fully at a beginner level. At a basic level in my experiance,

sentence cards = Higher retention and better single context understanding at the cost of challenged recall (meaning recognizing the word in additional contexts)

word cards = Higher challenged recall in immersion (recognizing the word in new contexts in your immersion) but comes at the cost of higher barrier to entry in recall in the SRS (meaning you'll have lower retention rate in the SRS and less contextual understanding of the word, to an extent)

to summarize in english, at a basic level (although not a hard and fast rule and more complex than this)

sentence cards = more clear understanding in narrow context, but can feel unrecognizable outside that context

word cars = more recognition in a wider range of context, but the actual meaning of the word is more fuzzy and generally harder to make stick cause you dont even have a single context you feel super comfortable with and clear.

So part of the answer is preference, part of the answer is what are you using the SRS for.

If you are unsure, i recommend starting with sentence cards after JP1k when you start sentence mining

[timid orchid]

Thank you very much, I think I'll stick to vocabulary for words that have a clear meaning and make sentence cards for words that have a more vague and context based meaning

[elder vigil]

I have multiple sentence cards for some words, I use sentence bank for that. What's your opinion on that?

[robust slate]

I'm not a fan of having multiple sentences for a single word at the same time. I feel it just puts you in a situation where you think the SRS is where you learn words, it's not. The SRS just kind of gets the word familiar in your head and getrs you familiar with a context then immersion should be working towards mastery. You want the SRS, in my opinion, to be max benefit with minimal time. For me, that means

1. Having each word in there one time as the main focus word
2. Removing leaches (cards that just wont stick. you can add them again later)
3. Removing cards that FEEL solidified, and then adding them back again later if you were wrong

for me this is where i have found the most success with the SRS. I've found the SRS to be cumbersome and less effective when I try and use it to master words by adding a bunch of different versions of the same word at the same time, don't remove leeches because i want to "brute force a word and have a completionism mindset and wont let things go".

If i come across a use for a word that is SOOOO different it almost seems like a new word in that context, then I might add it, but that's rare. beyond that, i sitck to a single card just to get the word familiar, then rely on immersion to master it.

be careful about getting stuck in the trap of thinking the SRS is where the magic happens, be careful about getting stuck in the trap of thinking "forgetting is bad" and be careful about bloating your deck so much, slowly over time, that it removes from immersion time

[vagrant elk]

100% agree.
As Brett said, there are definitely some words in JP that have different definitions depending on context/how they’re being used, so for those you could maybe have a few different sentences (one for each use case), but I would only make those types of “semi duplicate” cards if, when you’re immersing, you come across a word where the meaning you know doesn’t make any sense in that context, you look it up and see the alternative definition, and this alt definition makes the sentence comprehensible. That way you’re attaching this secondary meaning to a self mined card and it’ll have better retention.

Iirc yomichan has a setting turned on by default that will stop you from mining the same word twice into the same deck. I would 100% recommend leaving this on (or turning it on if it’s not for some reason) to prevent yourself from mining the same word over and over.

To emphasize Brett’s point about Anki vs actual immersion, I recently had a few words that showed up in the JP1K deck (eg kirei) that I had never actually learned the kanji for, and after like 3 days of pressing “again” on those cards they showed up in the 小説 I started reading and now, a few days later, I feel like I’m already close to acquiring them (if I haven’t already)