Sentence cards with one new word

A sentence card shows a whole sentence in the language you’re learning, where you know every word but one. You read it, work out the new word from the rest, and check. Learners often call these “i+1” or “1T” sentences: everything you already know, plus one.

Why one new word

When you understand nearly everything in a sentence, the one new word has all the context it needs. You can work out roughly what it means, see how it’s used, and pick up the grammar around it at the same time. The words you already know get practice too.

Research on reading backs up the idea of “nearly everything”. To understand a text without help, and to pick up new words from it, readers need to know about 95 to 98 percent of its words (Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010). A short sentence with one new word keeps you close to that level, with the rest of the sentence carrying the meaning.

The exact percentages come from small studies, and later work hasn’t pinned them down precisely. The name “i+1” comes from Stephen Krashen’s theory of language learning, which is famous but hard to test. We use it as a handy label. The idea itself rests on the reading research above.

When to start with sentences

Sentence cards need enough known words to build sentences from. Most learners start with single words, especially words you can picture, then move to sentences once they have a solid base of common words. Starting too early means every sentence has several unknown words, and they stop being easy to read.

Making good sentence cards

1. Only one new word. If you have to look up two, the card is too hard. Split it or swap a word.
2. Short and everyday. Something you might say or hear this week.
3. The new word matters. In Mi gato odia el arroz (my cat hates rice), you can’t follow the sentence without odia, so you have to work it out. A new word you could skip, like an extra muy, is easy to read straight past.
4. Show the meaning on the back, and the whole sentence’s translation.
5. Hear it. Audio for the whole sentence helps the rhythm and pronunciation stick.

Finding sentences like this is the hard part. Learners using Anki often “mine” them from shows and books (sentence mining), which works well once you can read a little.

How Flashfriend does it

Flashfriend starts you on picture words. Once you know enough of them well, sentence cards begin, and each one is written for you from the words you already know, plus the next useful one. Every sentence has audio, and grammar points come in the same way, one new pattern at a time. You’re tested on each sentence card just before you’d forget it, like every other card.

If you mine sentences from what you read or watch, Flashfriend Pro takes them straight from Yomitan and asbplayer. See all the memory techniques behind every card.