Yeah, that’s a benefit I meant to mention, the fact that the sentences come with audio. However, lack of audio for hand-made decks is fine if you follow the other half of AJATT, that is, listening to lots and lots of Japanese as well. There’s no way I’ll be able to do that as hard core as Khatzumoto did it but I’m definitely trying to listen to more Japanese audio of late. To be honest, I actually don’t like the audio for the sentences included with Core 6k: since they’re reading them off a script, lots of the sentences tend to sound the same, kind of unnatural (especially by one of the female voices). I have the audio turned off for my Core 6k, also partly because it gets irritating hearing the same sentences over and over again (or cut-off sentences when I answer a card before the audio finishes).

…It sounds like I’m trying to convince you to stop using the Core 6k sentences but I really don’t mean to XD I’m just trying to say why I’d rather not use them. Adding all the sentences myself is definitely going to be a chore though…

What you’re doing with kanji is pretty much how AJATT describes it, from what I’ve seen (though MCDs aren’t *solely* isolating kanji).

Edit: Sorry for the essay, oops >.<

Nice to hear from you jkl :)

I think ordering only really matters if you’re using a big set of pre-made sentence cards (like with Core 6k). If you’re building a deck from scratch – as I intend to do – you have total control over the difficulty of the sentences since you are the one picking them i.e. you specifically pick ones that are just the right amount of difficult, not too easy, not too hard.

There are a few other benefits to making a deck yourself, at least from what I gather from reading through chunks of AJATT: you can choose sentences that are interesting or from material that interests you (knowing the context of the sentence can help with memory); sentences don’t have to be full sentences like in Core 6k, they can be expressions or short phrases or clauses; the process of manually adding the sentence makes you remember it more easily; you need to actually read/listen to native material to get the sentences, which is beneficial in itself; you can format the cards in any way you want, including having J->J cards.

Back around the time I first made this thread, I actually tried using a sentence deck made from Core 6k. I found that a lot of the sentences for words that I already knew were boring and I ended up trying to delete so many – I knew it was going to take a while to do, so I eventually lost motivation and gave up on the idea of sentences completely for the time being. When you have tons of sentences like「AはBです」or「Aが好きです」, there’s really no point in reviewing them XD Admittedly, the sentences do start getting a little more complex as you go on, but at the time a large chunk were garbage.

I definitely wouldn’t mind having a pre-made deck of sentences but there probably won’t be one that’s great for everyone. I even recently had a look at AJATT’s own “My First Sentence Pack” and that didn’t look too great: many of the sentences were repeats of others but with maybe だ changed to です (or similar minor changes).

That plugin looks pretty interesting. It seems similar to how LingQ.com works, if you’ve ever used it: as you read texts, you mark words that you know, and then when you look for new texts, it shows you how many words are in it that you haven’t marked as known (as a rough judge of difficulty). Doesn’t work *too* well for Japanese though, the lack of spaces causing difficulties with parsing of words.

I think I’m definitely going to start making a sentence deck now, even though I’ve not finished Core 6k. It’ll take a while to get enough sentence cards such that reviewing both decks will take up too much time; I might even have finished Core 6k before I get to that point :D

Ever thought of doing the “Massive Context [Cloze] Deletion” stuff that AJATT talks about these days? Apparently 10,000 sentences “is dead” and MCD is so much better, but I think I’d rather do sentences :P