What is sentence mining? Why should Anki cards include the original sentence, picture and audio?

"Sentence mining" (often just "mining") is the most common habit among people learning a language through immersion: while consuming content you'd watch or read anyway, whenever you meet a word worth remembering, you turn it — together with the sentence it appeared in — into a spaced-repetition card. The card holds more than "word = definition": it also has the original sentence, the scene at that moment, and the character's voice saying the line.

This page is about the method. For tapping out your first card in Fushi see How do I mine cards while watching anime?; for what each field of the card template holds see The Lapis card template.

How is sentence mining different from studying a word list? ​

A ready-made word list (or premade Anki deck) means someone else picks the words for you: the list is ordered by an exam syllabus or by frequency, and you work down it. Sentence mining means you pick the words, and they're the words you just bumped into in real content.

It's not either/or. Starting with a premade deck works well — the immersion guide recommends a basic vocabulary deck and a basic grammar deck first — but sooner or later you finish it, or it drifts further and further from what you actually watch. At that point the content you consume is the best word list there is:

• These are words you'll really see again. The show, author or genre you're into has its own vocabulary habits, so words mined from it come back often.
• Memory gets a hook. "That word I heard from that character in that scene of that episode" sticks far better than "word #437 on the list".
• The difficulty is right by default. You mine the word that just tripped you up — not one that's too easy, not one far beyond you.

Why include the original sentence? ​

A single definition rarely captures a word. Tone, collocations and grammatical role change from sentence to sentence; the dictionary tells you roughly what the word means, the sentence shows you how it's used right here.

Cards with the original sentence have practical advantages:

• Context during review. If the word doesn't come back to you, a glance at the sentence often does it — that's not cheating, real reading always has context.
• Grammar and collocations come along for free. Particles, conjugations and set phrases are reviewed together with the sentence.
• Near-synonyms stay apart. Two words with similar definitions, each pinned to its own sentence, are much harder to confuse.

So choosing the sentence matters more than choosing the word. A rough but useful rule: the sentence has exactly one word you don't know (sometimes called an "i+1 sentence", see What is comprehensible input?). A sentence you only half understand is hard to learn even as a card — skip it. A sentence that's one word short of making sense already explains most of that word through its context, and makes the best card.

Why add the picture and the original audio? ​

Every cue beyond the text is an extra memory hook, and each one has its own job:

• Original audio (sentence audio): what you hear is a native speaker saying the line naturally in that situation — intonation, speed, connected speech. Listening to it after flipping ties reading and listening practice to the same card. Separate word audio confirms the standard pronunciation; sentence audio shows how the word sounds in real speech.
• Picture (screenshot or animation): one screenshot takes you straight back to the scene, faster than a definition can; a facial expression, gesture or object often explains the word on its own.
• Source: the card records which work and which moment it came from, so you can find the scene again.

Collecting all this by hand is tedious — screenshot, cut audio, copy the sentence, paste it all into Anki: several minutes per card. Whether you keep mining depends largely on whether your tools can squash those steps into a single tap.

How do I sentence-mine in Fushi? ​

Fushi is designed to squash all of the above into two steps — tap the word, tap the plus:

1. Watch or read something you like: videos, EPUB novels, manga, audiobooks and web pages all work; on Windows you can also hook text from visual novels.
2. Tap words you don't know: subtitles and body text are tappable and open the dictionary popup; tap words inside the definitions to keep looking things up.
3. Tap the plus on words worth keeping: Fushi writes the headword, reading, definitions, original sentence (target word in bold), sentence audio, screenshot or animation, word audio, pitch accent, frequency and source into Anki in one go.

A few details that make mining smoother:

• A line spread over several subtitles: multi-select them in the player's "Subtitle list" before mining, and the sentence and audio cover the whole span.
• Screenshot or animation: under Settings → Card creation → Card media, "Video card image" offers "Screenshot at mining", "Screenshot at subtitle start", "Animated GIF (subtitle clip)" and "Video clip with sound".
• Sentence audio cut too tight: adjust "Audio padding before sentence" and "Audio padding after sentence" on the same page.
• Mining while Anki isn't open: turn on "Batch mining" — cards are stored on the device first and sent to Anki later in one go.
• Mined it twice: when you tap the plus on a word that's already been mined, Fushi tells you the card is already in Anki and lets you view it, overwrite it, or add a duplicate.

Common sentence-mining mistakes ​

• Mining everything. The bottleneck is never making cards — it's reviewing them. Every new card comes back several times over the following weeks; the more you mine, the faster the backlog grows. Mine a few cards every day rather than a hundred one day and then dreading Anki. How many per day makes sense: How many new cards a day?
• Watching in order to mine. You watch to enjoy the content and get lots of input; mining is a side effect. If you stop on every line and can't follow the plot at all, the content is too hard — or you should look up less.
• Mining sentences you don't understand at all. Those cards only earn you "Again" after "Again". Skip them; once your level improves, the same words will show up again in sentences that make more sense.
• Overloading the front. With audio or a picture on the front you're no longer practising "can I recall this word when I see it". Fushi's default Lapis front holds only the word and its sentence; picture and audio are on the back. The reasoning is in How do I use Anki?
• Mining without watching or reading. Cards are a support; what actually makes you acquire the language is the sheer volume of input. Mining exists so you recognise the word next time it shows up in content — not to replace watching and listening.