"Hard" or "Good" with Reading Reviews

Bunpro
#1

This might be a dumb question, but after some poking around on the forums I’ve decided to try switching to Reading reviews from Fill-In to see if that works better for me.

What I’m not sure about is when I should mark a review as “Hard” or “Good”? Should I understand the whole example sentence to mark something as “Good”, or is it sufficient to just understand the word the review is for? If I know the word, but don’t fully understand the rest of the sentence, does that make it “Hard”? There’s a lot of vocabulary in the sentences that I’ve never seen before and there’s many sentences for each word, so each “review” would be reviewing non-relevant (to the specific review) words.

I know it’s probably more of a subjective thing, but any input would be appreciated.

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#2

The short answer is, do what works best for you.

On my end, for words in the lower levels understanding the word by itself is enough. But as I get into seasoned and above, I aim for the entire sentence. And I also try to listen to the sentence before reading it, to make sure I’m able to identify these new vocab items in listening comprehension as well as reading.

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#3

Passing a sentence I don’t understand doesn’t sit right with me personally, but most people seem to be fine with it so long as they knew the specific word that’s being tested. I think both ways are a means to the same end 🤷

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#4

Honestly for me it depends on the sentence. Some are short and manageable and others are absurdly long and a lot of it won’t even be directly relevant to the word. In those cases knowing the word itself and maybe the grammar around that word will be enough for me. Agree with another poster above that my expectation goes up as it rises in SRS level. At first just remembering the word itself with no context is a nice win, but then later I want to make sure I understand the nuance and can understand it in sentences.

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#5

One thing that’s worth noting is there’s a big difference between grammar and vocab reviews in this regard. Grammar example sentences are all the same level of the point being tested (an n4 grammar point’s example sentences are all n4 level), however vocab example sentences increase in difficulty so the final few sentences of an n4 vocab point might be n2/n1 difficulty.

So strictly grading based on the whole sentence might get overwhelming for vocab reviews in particular

#6

Oh that’s very good to know.

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#7

Good point actually. For grammar I absolutely want to understand the sentences, whereas for vocab it sort of “depends”.