Sentence Structure/Form Sets

Study Subjects
#1

Making your own sets if you’re able to is a great way to help your learning process, since you can personalize them to your own experiences and learning style. A useful type of deck to make in particular are sets based off your daily experiences with the language. Usually, I just take the words or set phrases by themselves to study, along with grabbing the whole example sentence. However, something that I was thinking about doing is making a set based around personally interesting sentences or ways that certain phrases are formed.

For example, an interesting sentence I found is from a teacher, saying: “金曜日は先生のリンクから授業に行ってください” (On Friday, please use Sensei’s link to go to the lesson). I would grab this sentence and turn it into a simple flashcard here on Kitsun.

It’s not that any of these words are new to me. Instead, it’s that the particular construction “先生のリンクから.” While I can understand it in the context of the sentence, it’s not a construction I would have likely made myself. However, as long as I keep it in my head, it should become something that I can incorporate into my own speech. Obviously, a good way to review it is to look at it every so often, which SRS tools like Kitsun are perfect for.

However, I’m interested in what people think about this idea, and whether others do similar things. I’m pretty sure it’s a common thing to do, but if anyone also has any helpful tips for studying in that way, it’s always appreciated.

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#2

So what you’re proposing is for Kitsun to have a sort of a sentence bank like tatoeba.org?

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#3

I think it’s a good idea as long as you have reliable translations. Maybe you just need the right layout (maybe hinekidori’s Sentence Reading Recognition could work good…or an example to build from). And if it’s from media, maybe Sub2Kitsun is just best?

These are tricky to publish given the translation part. Even something like JTest4you who posted a ton of sentences, is still a donation setup so not sure here. If it’s YT videos in a S2K format, is there any issue publishing these type of decks (not that I trust YT’s auto-translation, would have to be something else).

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#4

I’d like to toy around with the idea of having sentence banks (for Japanese to start with). With the reader parsing entire books it wouldn’t be too difficult to generate a database full of sentences per vocabulary word. The main problem here would be the quality of those sentences (not too short, not too simple, not too advanced) and how “easy” they are for the user.

Ideally you’d want a system to present you with +1 sentences, but even then it can still contain grammar that you don’t know (since Kitsun knows nothing about your grammar knowledge).

Perhaps the easiest is to just let the user choose from all example sentences available for the vocab they are making a card for.

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#5

Yes and no? There’s plenty of example sentences to read, like in the 10k set. Pretty much I’m talking about two kind of sets here:

  1. A collocation set (that could be published) based off of sentences you’ve heard / lists.
  2. A private set that is made of sentences that stick out to you personally because it uses something in a way that you didn’t expect, especially grammar. TBC I’m not talking about a grammar that is new to you, but instead grammar being used in a way you didn’t pick up on when you learned it.

All of these are interesting ideas though.