The Cross Profile Search add-on sound great, I was always wondering about how to handle neatly sentence banks without the downsides of having so many cards in your profile. That add-on really sounds like a godsend haha.
I personally couldn't see myself regularly using a workflow like yours at my current level, with the "new words to create cards for" backlog and so on. It is *the* main reason I soft-dropped Japanese years ago after passing the N3, but that's mainly because I didn't have a broad enough vocabulary and close to 0 experience with immersion. Having to go through the slow process of creating cards for things I had very little comprehension of meant that immersion felt more like active studying, so I didn't look forward to it very much. Finding JPDB (~4 months ago) saved me from that and allowed me to befriend Japanese again!
I get that this is a non-issue for you having already learned a tooon of vocab, since you can do Anki on the side and immerse anyways, allowing you to create just the cards you want and anytime you want to. I am considering switching to Anki again if ever reach a large amount of vocab, but I'm still not sure if I'll do that (except maybe for grammar, I want to start doing some active grammar study through Anki in the near future) since JPDB works well for me and I don't really have too many major gripes (I do have a few small ones though haha). And it allows me to focus my fairly limited free time in fun immersion rather than spending time on card creation which I don't enjoy doing. But I'm happy that you have found a workflow that suits you and that you enjoy, and grateful that you posted about it in such detail ^^
Question: for new words, if you find a good candidate in your sentence bank, do you just use that card? i.e. you don't manually create a card if you find a good example in the sentence bank, right? (I guess you still add the definition as you see fit)
JPDB is so good at saving time and just getting you right into it! Especially if you have limited time already. Fiddling with something new can feel like such a chore then. I also had these cycles of dropping Japanese and picking it back up, so whatever gets you into it is the best!
Yeah I rarely manually create cards anymore. If I do, it's still doesn't feel too manual because I use Anki Connect which just plugs in all the information for me. It's fun having the same exact card I saw in the wild first (like I'm currently reading Mushoku vol 7 and I have the audiobook anki deck, so I can just find the sentence in my bank and add it to my mining deck), but I also really enjoy when I see a word in my book and then find it used in a different piece of media. I then get two connections for it! Weirdly before the breader, I think I had a similar flow in JPDB. I'd go through the wordlist after reading and manually forq stuff, often adding my own custom sentence. I guess there's just some things I have a hard time letting go of!
Hopefully that answered your question! I enjoy hearing about the tools that you use and the way they make you excited about Japanese again! It can be so hard to find the thing that works, so hang on to it until you outgrow it! I can definitely see myself having a completely different workflow a year from now, so I wanted to snapshot this moment in time for myself ^^
I can't believe you're at 2.5k already. That's incredible!! Thanks for sharing the intricacies of your workflow, always very fun to get a peek behind the curtain.
Thanks for sharing your current Anki workflow!
The Cross Profile Search add-on sound great, I was always wondering about how to handle neatly sentence banks without the downsides of having so many cards in your profile. That add-on really sounds like a godsend haha.
I personally couldn't see myself regularly using a workflow like yours at my current level, with the "new words to create cards for" backlog and so on. It is *the* main reason I soft-dropped Japanese years ago after passing the N3, but that's mainly because I didn't have a broad enough vocabulary and close to 0 experience with immersion. Having to go through the slow process of creating cards for things I had very little comprehension of meant that immersion felt more like active studying, so I didn't look forward to it very much. Finding JPDB (~4 months ago) saved me from that and allowed me to befriend Japanese again!
I get that this is a non-issue for you having already learned a tooon of vocab, since you can do Anki on the side and immerse anyways, allowing you to create just the cards you want and anytime you want to. I am considering switching to Anki again if ever reach a large amount of vocab, but I'm still not sure if I'll do that (except maybe for grammar, I want to start doing some active grammar study through Anki in the near future) since JPDB works well for me and I don't really have too many major gripes (I do have a few small ones though haha). And it allows me to focus my fairly limited free time in fun immersion rather than spending time on card creation which I don't enjoy doing. But I'm happy that you have found a workflow that suits you and that you enjoy, and grateful that you posted about it in such detail ^^
Question: for new words, if you find a good candidate in your sentence bank, do you just use that card? i.e. you don't manually create a card if you find a good example in the sentence bank, right? (I guess you still add the definition as you see fit)
JPDB is so good at saving time and just getting you right into it! Especially if you have limited time already. Fiddling with something new can feel like such a chore then. I also had these cycles of dropping Japanese and picking it back up, so whatever gets you into it is the best!
Yeah I rarely manually create cards anymore. If I do, it's still doesn't feel too manual because I use Anki Connect which just plugs in all the information for me. It's fun having the same exact card I saw in the wild first (like I'm currently reading Mushoku vol 7 and I have the audiobook anki deck, so I can just find the sentence in my bank and add it to my mining deck), but I also really enjoy when I see a word in my book and then find it used in a different piece of media. I then get two connections for it! Weirdly before the breader, I think I had a similar flow in JPDB. I'd go through the wordlist after reading and manually forq stuff, often adding my own custom sentence. I guess there's just some things I have a hard time letting go of!
Hopefully that answered your question! I enjoy hearing about the tools that you use and the way they make you excited about Japanese again! It can be so hard to find the thing that works, so hang on to it until you outgrow it! I can definitely see myself having a completely different workflow a year from now, so I wanted to snapshot this moment in time for myself ^^
I can't believe you're at 2.5k already. That's incredible!! Thanks for sharing the intricacies of your workflow, always very fun to get a peek behind the curtain.