How do you do sentence mining?
You do sentence mining in four steps: find a sentence you almost understand in something real, turn it into a flashcard with the meaning and native audio, review it with spaced repetition, and do a few new ones every day. The whole skill is picking sentences at the right level and keeping the habit.
- Find an i+1 sentence. Read or listen to something a little above you and stop where you know everything except one word or one bit of grammar. One gap, not five.
- Build the card. Sentence on the front, meaning on the back, and native audio if you can, so you train your ear and not just your eye.
- Review with spaced repetition. Feed the card to a scheduler that brings it back just before you'd forget. This is the step that turns a sentence into memory.
- Keep going, daily. A few new sentences a day beats a hundred in one sitting. The habit is the method.
Done by hand, the classic stack is Anki plus a pop-up dictionary. It works, but it costs you a couple of minutes of building per card, which is where most people give up. If that friction is what stops you, the fix is an app that builds the cards for you.
The four steps take ten seconds to explain and a year to keep up by hand. The trick that made it stick for me was cutting step two, the card-building, out of my day entirely.