How to Continue…

Jlab offers two approaches to follow after you finished the beginner’s course: Either you do sentence mining on your own. If you use the jlab tools, this is completely free, but requires some efforts and strong dedication. Or you get one of the follow-up decks. In this case, I do the sentence mining for you, which saves you lots of time.

Option 1: Sentence mining on your own

The beginner’s course prepares you for mining sentences from anime and dorama on your own. There are various options for this, but if you use the jlab anki addon and subs2srs decks, this path is completely free. Have a look at my (outdated) guide. The required decks are community-created and hosted by the project.

Advantages: It’s free, you determine both the speed and the content yourself, jlab offers decent tooling for this by means of the anki addon. The usability is not apple-grade, but I’ve used this myself for several years.

Disadvantages: No guidance, you will face very difficult material, it’s easy to get demotivated, the content is not fine-tuned for effortless learning.

Option 2: Use the jlab intermediate decks

These are paid decks listed here. They continue in a similar fashion as the beginner’s course, with two differences: First, they are built around video recommendations and help you to quickly understand YouTube-videos and selected episodes of anime. Second, the decks have word booster cards that teach a new word with multiple, different sentences. For each word, you will have 2-3 different sentences at optimal spacing to quickly improve your listening comprehension.

Advantages: Superfast, effortless learning with cards perfectly adjusted to quickly improve your listening comprehension, quickly unlocks content on YouTube even though you don’t now many words yet, saves you time.

Disadvantages: Fixed content, very high effort for me to create, this means slow update speed.