Sentence mining is saving words or phrases from target-language content for later review. Videos, shows, or movies are especially powerful for mining because you learn words in context from content you enjoy, often with audio and images for more engaging reviews.
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Sentence mining is saving words or phrases from target-language content for later review. Videos, shows, or movies are especially powerful for mining because you learn words in context from content you enjoy, often with audio and images for more engaging reviews.
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Sentence mining is a very powerful technique for understanding more of the language and learning more vocabulary. Once you get everything set up and learn the workflow, it might become your favorite activity.
Sentence mining (reading plus listening) is the best way to find new vocabulary to learn in the beginner and early intermediate stages. It's a fantastic form of interactive immersion, which should make up the majority of your learning time. It's great for learning new words, reviewing ones you've already learned, and practicing understanding sentences and following a story.
Interactive immersion in general can be intense and difficult. It might feel like your brain is melting. This is normal! But you should be prepared for it. Don't plan to do interactive immersion when you're exhausted after a long day. Find when you have the most learning energy and do it then.
Once you've done that, here's how to do the technique:
Whenever you see an interesting word or can't understand a sentence, pause the video and look up a few words. If the sentence has more than 3–4 words you don't know, feel free to move on. The goal isn't to understand every sentence. You want to focus on the low hanging fruit.
The lower your level in the language, the more you'll pause. That's okay. It might take you 5× the length of the content to actually get through it. But you're learning, that's the point.
Anyway, whenever you come across a sentence that has only 1 or 2 new words in it, this is a great time to mine! You don't want to mine sentences that have 5–6 new things in them. That sentence is too complicated for now. You'll be able to understand it with time.
When you've found a good sentence, use the tool to mine the sentence! This usually involves selecting the sentence and pressing a button or using a keyboard shortcut. Great job! You just mined a sentence.
Many sentence mining tools have "auto-pause" features, which automatically pauses after each subtitle line, giving you time to look up words. We recommend you use this since it forces you to focus more on understanding, rather than just zoning out and watching the pretty colors go by.
It's also a good idea to rewatch a scene or a few lines after you successfully understand, since that gives your brain a good chance to really understand it, in real time.
The core "loop" of sentence mining is this:
After your sentence mining session, you'll have a bunch of new flashcards to study! You should study these during your normal flashcard review time, ideally a day or two after you mined them, so they're still a little fresh in your mind.
You'll first need to set up tools in order to sentence mine.
Tip: It's very easy to mine a TON of cards! Way more than you need or can study at the time. For this reason, we recommend removing or deleting cards that you don't need. For example, if you're reviewing new words and you realize that one of the words is very niche or the card is a bit broken, delete that card! If that word is important, it'll come up again and you can mine it then.
Same goes for if you have too many new cards. If you realize that you're not reviewing new cards you recently made (since you created a large backlog), feel free to delete some of the older ones. It's better to review the words that are more relevant to the content you're currently immersing in.