Does Sentence Mining Actually Work?

Yes, sentence mining is one of the best ways to learn new words. The main reason it works so well is context. When you learn a word from a scene you actually remember, it sticks much better than just reading it in a list. The only problem is that making the cards by hand can be really slow, which is why we built SubSmith to handle the technical parts for you.

Why it works

• Words tied to real scenes are much easier to remember — a finding supported by Tulving & Thomson's encoding specificity principle (1973).
• If you only learn one new word per sentence, you can understand almost everything you hear.
• Hearing how a native speaker actually says the word helps it stick in your brain.
• It's easier to stay motivated when you're learning from shows and podcasts you actually like.

The burnout problem

Making cards by hand usually takes a few minutes for every single one. You have to pause the video, find the text, look up the word, and then somehow get it into Anki. Most people get tired of this after a few hundred cards. The method works great, it's just the manual process that's the problem.

A better way to do it

SubSmith lets you make a card in about 10 seconds. You just click a word and it sends the sentence, the audio, and the definition straight to Anki for you.

Full guide: The guide to sentence mining

To skip the manual audio recording step entirely, see how automated audio slicing for Anki works.