hey japanese learners i'm matt and i'm
going to show you how to make srs
sentence cards to improve your japanese
vocabulary
now you probably already know how to
make sentence cards and you have been to
a certain extent but i'm just going to
show you how i do it because after
tinkering with things for a while i
found a way that's pretty efficient and
hopefully you'll be able to take
something away from it so before we
start you're going to need a few things
first of all obviously you're going to
need an srs i use anki at the moment
nice and free and then you're also going
to need this text editing software
notepad plus plus which i talked about
in the last video which if you haven't
already seen i highly recommend watching
because it's kind of a prerequisite to
this video and last and possibly most
importantly you're going to need this
dictionary program called colbury now it
might be a little bit of a hassle to get
it set up but i'm just going to show you
how amazing this software is for
learning japanese so basically how it
works is there are these dictionary
files called epwings and then the
colbury software lets you search
multiple f-wing files at one time so
what that really means is for any one
word you look up you'll get five or six
different definitions and since using a
japanese a japanese dictionary can be
quite difficult at the beginning a
chance to see one word described
multiple ways can really make it easier
to understand what it really means so in
order to get this set up first you're
going to need to download the colgary
software which is free and i've linked
in the description it's really light
software you don't even have to install
it just make sure you save it somewhere
on your computer where it won't get lost
next you're going to have to download
the actual dictionary files the epwings
so just go to the mediafire link in the
description and download
dictionaries.torrent
if you've never used torrents before
don't worry just go to google and
download a basic torrent client your
computer won't break or anything i
promise these files are from like the
early 90s so i don't even think it's
possible to pay for them if you wanted
to that will probably take a while to
download because it's over 10 gigabytes
but that's because there's over 50
different dictionaries later you can go
back and delete any of the ones that you
never use and it won't take up as much
space once the program has finished
downloading you probably just want to
put them in the same folders quality and
then you go ahead and open up the colby
program press this button that looks
like a stack of books
and then press this folder and search
for where the dictionary files are
stored on your computer then press kenza
so then right here is the list of all
the dictionaries as you can see there
are quite a few so you want to put the
ones that you use most often at the top
because the order
right here is the order that the
definitions will be shown
these are my top 6 right here if you
want you can pause the video and make
yours look like mine or feel free to
experiment for yourself also you might
want to uncheck right here any of the
ones you think you will never use
because that will make the program run
faster when you're searching now that
your dictionary is all good and set up
there's one more thing we have to set up
in notepad plus plus now as you can see
i have many tabs open and besides the
first few the rest are all alozor bunko
style books like i talked about in the
last video and the reason why i have all
these tabs open is because sometimes you
find a word like when you're watching
anime and you don't have the original
sentence for it but since we're making
sentence cards you need a whole sentence
before you can make a flash card for it
so what you can do in notepad plus plus
is you can search all the different
books you have open for one specific
word which most of the time will give
you the sentence that you need so then
up in front of all those other books
there's three tabs you always want to
keep open
the first one is the list of all the new
words you found that you want to make
cards for the second one is kind of your
workspace that you're going to use to
turn the new words into flashcards the
last one is just a backup of all the
cards that you've made so far this one
isn't totally necessary but it can come
in handy every once in a while because
when you search for a sentence like i
said before you'll also search this file
so now you're all ready to go
all you do is take a word or sentence
from your list paste it onto your
workspace and then search the dictionary
for whatever word you're looking up read
through the definitions and find
whatever one makes the most sense and
copy it onto your workspace if there's
any words in the definition that you
don't understand quality makes it really
easy to search for those too now this is
going to happen a lot when you first
start using a japanese japanese
dictionary so having all the definitions
right here in one place where you can
see makes it a lot easier to understand
so then once you finally got everything
figured out then you just go back and
start the process over again and then
you repeat this until you made all the
cards you want for that day
then you just open up your srs and you
copy and paste everything into it and
don't forget to copy and paste
everything into the backup tab too now
the one thing i should warn you about is
because like i said before these
dictionary files are actually pretty old
they're not going to have any new words
so if you're looking up a word that you
think might have been created within the
last 15 years like internet sling or
something probably your best bet is just
to google it
and there you have it i've been doing
this process myself for about three
years now and i just broke 10 000 cards
the other day it might seem a little
tedious at first but after a while it
actually starts to get pretty fun and i
can tell you firsthand if you put in the
hours you will see results that's all
for me if you got any questions leave
them in the comments