Generating Sentences from your vocabulary
Ok,
background:
I am new to Japanese (half way to JLPT4). I am going to a beginners class and working with the 'Genki' textbooks. I am running a mac, so i have access to the inbuilt dictionary (Japanese to English). I also use 'Tagaini Jisho', a dictionary that i think is good for beginners. The other piece of software that I use is Mnemosyne. I also tried Anki, but I found Mnem. to be more stable.
I realised the other day that I respond really well to reading examples - it helps me remember the vocab and learn the Kanji.
problem:
I don't have many sources that I can get sentences from. Sure their are lots of sources on the net, but as I only have a small vocab, their are inevitably littered with words i don't know: so its value is lost on me.
So what would be great is if there was a piece of software, that given a vocabulary would pump out sentences that contain those words (and only those words). Something that could hook into something like mnemosyne so that I would only have to maintain my vocab in one place. The software would have to be pretty smart. It would need to understand the syntax and rules of the Japanese Language and how to congegate words. It would also need metadata for each word. Lets take the word 'to eat' as an example.
たべる （食べる）
The metadata that I would imagine that it would need to know:
- verb
- ru-verb (congregation fro long, て forms and short past, short present negative etc... )
- transitive verb
- ichidan verb (not sure what this even means yet)
- and i guess a whole heap more.
question:
is there anything that does this already. Some quick googling dug these up:
- http://www.whitetown.com/sentence/
- https://www.calico.org/a-247-Generate%20A%20Natural%20Language%20Sentenc...
But it is not exactly what i am after.
Any ideas? - or maybe I will have to write it myself :(
cheers,
pockets
.
Greetings, First, there is
Greetings,
First, there is no such software. As I read your request, it sounds like you are looking for a Japanese AI. There is no way I can imagine software being smart enough to generate correct sentences often enough that it would be useful, nevermind the fact that as a learner you would not be able to judge whether the output was useful or garbage. Japanese, like English, is full of idioms and exceptions, and graduate level understanding of Japanese would be required to write software as you are proposing.
There are, however, a great many Japanese-English dictionaries that are full of example sentences. As you pointed out, you are not at the level where you can make good use of those yet. So instead, I would simply enter sentences you do understand that come up in class as your examples. Sure, in the beginning, there won't be too many. But, when you're starting out, memorizing a lot of vocabulary isn't all that helpful anyway. What's important is to nail the grammar
The best source for example sentences is a quality textbook. The second best source is a native Japanese speaker with a Japanese teaching license. Entering other sources in a program like Mnemosyne is probably more dangerous than helpful.
Regards,
Kaeru