I just started sentence mining for Mandarin and was wondering how to grade cards.

On each card, I have the sentence with the unknown word highlighted. The unknown word also appears at the top of the card before the sentence, giving me a chance to read it on its own. Do I pass the card if I can recognize the unknown word on its own or if I just have an understanding what the sentence is saying?

Sometimes I have no idea what the word is, since I can’t read the character, but after reading the sentence I can usually guess what the character is. My brain sort of auto fills the sentence with the unknown word as I’m reading it out. I’m guessing because my listening comprehension is a lot better than my reading. Plus, I probably also subconsciously remember the TV show or book I pulled the sentence from.

So if I pass the card based on whether or not I understand the sentence, then my reviews are lot easier and less stressful, but I don’t really feel like I’m learning how to recognize the new characters. I’ve tried grading based on whether I can recognize the word before reading the sentence, but that makes my reviews a lot slower and more painful. It feels a lot more like brute force grinding.

How should I be grading my sentence mining cards? Will I actually learn how to recognize the new characters if I grade based on “sentence comprehension” alone?