So I recently got myself wondering about what was the best way to add new flashcards to my Anki deck. I used to be a fervent user of the "mining" method (creating cards out of the content you consume). However, I think I might have found out a more efficient method but, as I still appreciate mining a lot, I do my best to do both.
Basically, this method consists in creating Anki cards from the vocab lists on the website "jpdb.io". For those of you who might not know about it, it is a website that allows you to check all of the vocab that is used in a particular book. Then, you can study the vocab that is featured in the said book by order of frequency within that book (besides it remembers the vocab you already know so you won't have to go over いる every time you start a new vocab list). I think it is a fantastic tool cause it kind of allows you to mine from a book while not actually reading the book. Cause when you are reading, you might not want to interrupt your flow by looking up a word and then creating a flashcard. Sure, you can still use Yomitan to help you out with the process but even if it is for a few seconds, it still disrupts the reading flow and you have no clue whether this new word you are looking up is going to be among the top 1000 most frequent words in this novel or if it's just gonna appear once.
Yet, I still feel like traditional mining (whether it is through Yomitan or manually) still has its perks cause, in comparison to jpdb that has some pretty random example sentences (that are sometimes false by the way), mining allows you to have a concrete example of a particular word being used. Thus, the way I'm going about things right now is that I both use jpdb to get around 90% coverage of the books I'm reading + I mine each word that I feel like I already come accross once without understanding them. I think that this method is kind of nice as it allows me to read without having to interrupt that much however its main flaw is that if you don't want to spend too much time in the "creating flashcards part" you kind of have to copy paste new words somewhere and create the flashcards later (which means you don't have the context sentence, unless you're reading on a medium that allows you to copy paste stuff directly from the book). As I believe that context sentences are essential to remember words on the long term, I must say I'm considering to move on to using only jpdb at some point.
How do you guys feel about this new sort of mining technique ? If you have never read any book in Japanese yet, I would definitely recommend it as it allows you to skip the very tedious part of creating flashcards every time you encounter a new word ( although be careful with some of the example sentences on jpdb, even though the erroneous ones are mostly those concerning obscure words).
by GibonDuGigroin