Well, I'm pretty happy with my current study of Japanese. Instead of making each of my notes into one card, I am now splitting them into 3 cards. This slows things down, but reduces the strain of things. If the cards are easier, the number of new cards can go up, and the overall comprehension of the underlying notes is increased (as it should be with 3 times the number of cards). This is not actually much slower than doing fewer hard cards.
With Japanese, for each feature, an English speaker learner needs to connect several things together:
1. How the Japanese sounds.
2. What it means.
3 What furigana looks like.
4 What the Kanji looks like
5. How to write it.
6 How to enter it into a phone or computer.
The same thing is true for other languages too, but for others, especially languages with Latin based writing, many of these aspects are trivial.
Nothing connected to the Japanese writing system is trivial for a user of a Latin based system. It is beautiful, but it is horrible for a learner who does not come from another language that uses Chinese characters. It takes a lot of time.
Language learners are impatient, but I really think that for most mortals, taking one's time is the best approach.
For me, I am moving through about 10 new notes a day with Kanji. I have a half of the JouYou kanji to go. I'm studying how to write them as well as how to recognize them. Slow, steady progress. Another few months...
I'm also doing two different courses that use subs2srs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AvgqVGHP8A cards to teach Japanese grammar and vocabulary. The first, the Jlab grammar course (which also includes a bunch of vocab)
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782. I am several hundred cards into this class, and I find that I need a lot of review and rereading to have points stick. One of the most important parts of Japanese is the use of particles which attach to words in a sentence and signal the role of the word in the sentence. It takes me several exposures before this starts to make sense. I have edited the course to that I have three cards for each note:
1. an audio, screenshot, and writing to meaning card
2. a writing and screenshot to audio and meaning card
3 an audio and screenshot to writing and meaning card
There is a lot of overlap between this deck and the next deck in vocabulary. There are many good cards in this deck. I'm doing 7 new notes from this deck a day.
The next deck is a big bunch of decks mushed together, from Jo Mako, that cover both grammar and vocabulary.
https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/home?authuser=0. One of the interesting things about Jo Mako's is their concentration on using anki and morphman for efficient vocabulary learning. It helps with the old problem. The old question, "What vocabulary list do I have to learn to understand everything I want to understand in my L2?" There is a finite list of vocabulary items, but unfortunately, the list that I need to learn is different than the list that you need to learn unless we want to learn. Morphman helps one to take a corpus of text and identify what sentences you need to learn to understand the entire text at a given level of comprehension.
So you want to learn all of the sentences in a subs2srs deck for an anime you want to understand, take morphman and feed into it a set of anki decks you already know and feed into it the deck that you want to learn. It will pick the sentences that you need to learn to reach the level you want to reach. It has many options and there are many things you can do with it.
With Jo Makos decks, one attempts to get ready to start running morphman on decks. Jo Mako's decks include a pretty straightforward couple of grammar decks, which I like because the explanantions are very good. The other parts are a couple of vocabulary decks that were built with morphman. If you stick to a limited genre of language, say anime, you don't really need that big a vocabulary deck to get a lot of comprehension. On dark days, I think that there is no point in ever studying vocabulary except for learning lists that connect to a specific piece of language that you want to understand. The numbers are interesting. Jo seems to prove that by learning only around 650 words, one can have the same level of comprehension of anime that one has after completing either Genki 1 and 2 (a common beginning level college textbook) or Tango N5 and N4 (the lowest two levels of a common Japanese certification course). These courses are not focused on learning only Anime vocabulary, so this isn't surprising, but Jo Mako's idea that your Japanese course should be focused on exactly what it is that you are trying to learn sounds reasonable. If you want to learn how to understand anime, you should study anime vocabulary.
Part of my interest in Jo Mako's approach is a growing realization about what my goals are for Japanese.
First, what I don't want to do -- I don't want to move to Japan. Japan is a very admirable country, but I don't want to live there. I don't like most anime very much. I don't like most manga very much. Not surprising, I am not the demographic they are aimed at.
But I am passionately interested in the whole historical and science fiction genre of anime, manga and some video games. There is, for me at least, a huge body of interesting things to read and watch. My goal in Japanese is to get so that I can enjoy this body of work without having Japanese get in my way. It would be fun to visit Japan sometimes.
Of course there is nothing profound on what I like about Japan, but thinking about what I actually want to do with Japanese helped me to let go of some of the ways I was studying Japanese.
