What is sentence mining?
Building your flashcards from the real sentences you meet, so every card carries the context you learned it in.
Sentence mining is the practice of collecting whole sentences from the real content you read or watch, each one containing a word or structure you want to learn, and turning them into flashcards for spaced-repetition review. Instead of memorising words in isolation, you keep every word in the sentence where you actually met it, so the context comes along for free.
How sentence mining works
The loop is simple:
- While reading or watching, you hit a word or phrase you do not know but want to remember.
- You capture the whole sentence it appeared in, along with the target word and its meaning.
- You turn that into a flashcard, often a cloze card, where the target word is blanked out of the sentence for you to recall.
- The card goes into a spaced-repetition system, which brings it back for review right before you would forget it.
You can mine from almost anything: novels, news, song lyrics, video subtitles, or a message from a friend. And it is not only vocabulary. A sentence that shows an unfamiliar grammatical pattern (a case ending, a tricky word order, a fixed phrase) makes just as good a card as a single new word. One widely used guideline is the one-target principle: mine sentences in which the word you are learning is the only unknown. That keeps each card at i+1, comprehensible except for the single item you are trying to acquire, so recall is about that one word rather than a tangle of several. Sentence mining is one of the two engines of learning a language by reading, alongside extensive reading itself.
Why mined cards beat generic decks
Pre-made decks are convenient, and for the first few thousand high-frequency words they are a fine shortcut. But cards you mine yourself have three advantages a generic deck cannot match:
- Personal context. You remember where you saw the word, what was happening in the story, and how it felt to work out the meaning. That episodic hook makes retention noticeably stronger than a bare word-to-translation pair.
- Relevance. The words you meet while reading things you care about are, by definition, the words that come up in the material you want to read. Your own reading is a personalised frequency list.
- Real usage. A sentence shows you how a word actually behaves, its grammar, its collocations, its register, not just a dictionary gloss that may not fit the next place you meet it.
None of this means pre-made decks are bad. They are the right tool for the high-frequency core, where words are so common that context adds little. Mining earns its keep once you move past that core into the particular vocabulary of the things you actually read.
Doing it with Anki
Anki is the most popular home for mined cards. A common setup is a cloze note type, where you paste the sentence and blank the target word, optionally with the translation or a short definition on the back. Two habits keep it sustainable: keep one unknown per card (the one-target principle again), and do not over-mine, because every card you add is a review you owe your future self, so be selective about what is worth keeping. Some people prefer a basic front-and-back card with the word on one side; both work, but a cloze keeps the sentence in view, which is the whole point of mining. Our getting started with Anki guide walks through installing Anki and building the habit from scratch.
How a reader like Lector streamlines it
The friction in classic sentence mining is the manual copy-paste: switch to the book or video, copy the sentence, switch to Anki, make the card, then find your place again. A reading tool folds those steps into the act of reading. In Lector you click a word while reading and it is saved together with the sentence you found it in; that sentence becomes a cloze card you can drill later, and you can export the lot to Anki through AnkiConnect. Reading generates your study material, and studying it reinforces what you read, a virtuous cycle described in full on the methodology page. If you would rather begin from a ready-made base before mining your own, learning the most common words first from a frequency deck covers the common core, and then mining takes over for everything specific to what you read.
Frequently asked
For words beyond the common core, usually yes. Mined cards carry personal context and come from material you actually read, which aids both memory and relevance. Pre-made frequency decks are still the faster way to cover the first few thousand words, so most learners use both: a starter deck early, mining as they read.
Fewer than you think. Because every card becomes a recurring review, adding too many quickly buries you. A sustainable pace for most people is a handful to a couple of dozen a day; if your reviews are piling up, mine less and read more.
A sentence you understand except for the single word or structure you are learning (the one-target principle), short enough to read at a glance, drawn from real content, and ideally memorable. Blank the target in a cloze card so you practise recalling it in context.