Hello,
the deck I’m using in Anki to learn vocabulary, Core 2k/6k, has up to 5999 words. But is it not too much? How many words do I need to know for sentence mining to not feel like a tedious homework from hell?
Although the Core 2k/6k seems to have good order of the words, wasn’t it built based on the frequency in newspapers? But I do not want to immerse with newspapers. Should I instead do Bunpro for vocabulary? By the way I already use Bunpro for grammar.
I would say you can start sentence mining after completing N4.
I was fully confortable reading mangas and listening to podcasts after reaching N4.
It’s very subjective so this might vary from one person to another, but reading something that is not scaled to your current level is brutal and makes you lose motivation pretty quickly.
Bunpro have a lot of graded reading section, it’s a great tool.
Other than that you can try easy to read mangas such as ‘karakai jyouzu takagi san’
I’ve wasted a whole year trying to decipher news article from Todaii.
I initially don’t enjoy reading newspapers in my native language so why making it japanese whould make it more enjoyable ? it was not.
Try to immerse in content you ENJOY it’s very important to not lose motivation.
Even if it’s niche I’m sure you can find youtube videos related to your hobby, you can look for content related to your hobby in japanese youtube and mine using language reactor + yomitan.
If you already like watching anime and reading mangas then the source of immersion is limitless, if you’re interested I made a reddit post on my mining setup for anime and dramas.
Animelon is a great website with a lot of animes that comes in dual subtitles, you can adjust if you want to display furigana, romaji, and english subtitles, and you can directly mine the vocab from the website using yomitan.
I have tried immersing to get used to mining words from sentences. This are the fields that will be used in the deck for the mined sentences:
[Front]
Sentence → the target word is yellow colored.
Target Word → the target word
[Back]
Hiragana → the target word in Hiragana
Meaning → the meaning I found on jisho.org for the word. If the word has multiple meanings, I only choose the one that fits the sentence.
And yes, Animelon is great. What is Yomitan?
yomitan is a tool that allows you to create an anki card using one click while reading content on your browser (works on subtitles, OCRs, any text that you can select basically).
this completely reduce the time you spend to fill an anki card to just one clic.
It’s like migaku but for free
Please read this reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1ijf49q/my_ultimate_animenetflix_mining_set_up/
It gives you the best resources to help you set up yomitan for your mining deck.
Try the Kaishi 1.5k deck. It only contains 1500 words which are more in line on what you will see in anime, mangas and novels.
When should you start immersing? In my opinion the sooner the better if you can parse some basic sentences. However, imho immersion still goes hand in hand with learning more vocab & grammar unless you are really advanced (N2/N1), so I’d allocate a good chunk of time for that.
I’d say Japanese learners can never be “ready” to immerse. The first material will be difficult to parse anyway because it’s intended for native speakers. Starting earlier gives you a learning boost because then you will need to deal with parsing Japanese beyond textbook examples. I suggest starting with something considered easy (check jpdb or learn natively for some recommendations).
Even if you’d know ~6k words and might read some novels on the ~N3 level (so it would definitly match your level), you will run into some rare words or idioms which you never heard before. That’s why it’s recommended to use yomitan to quickly look things up.
Like 3 will be enough if you start with something like Todoku and use Yomitan or LingQ)
Immersion is quite a vague term so it depends 
Edit: I read it once again and the question was about sentence mining. So I would say I would start sentence mining from the day 1 after learning alphabets 
i would say 2000 ish is a good number for things not to feel like a total chore (will still be a chore, but not as bad). when you get to 6000, thats actually a good amount and you will probably feel like you know a good amount of the language.
as for the newspaper thing, i wouldnt worry too much about it. i just looked at the core 6000, and almost all the words look pretty damn common. like especially for the first 2000, no matter what you immerse in, youre gonna need to know words like “person”. obviously near the end you can get some more newspapery words, but even those are mostly gonna be useful. i would stick with anki for the add-ons and card making ability so that you can make your own cards easily
The order is fine. You’ll need some help understanding casual speech.
So I hate mining. What’s more important is that you do both. Once I had 1000 words I immersing. I watched 初めてお使い- old enough, but most things felt impossible. I did change my system settings to Japanese.
With 2000 words I started enjoying anime and manga. It messes with my grove to stop to look a word up. I’d rather keep going. I played some games in Japanese too.
So you can keep your 5999 anki deck, and watch anime too. That’s what I did.