Yeah. Sadly that was the position that felt the least like a cliffhanger, and I didn’t want y’all to read 30+ pages in one week. But feel free to read ahead anyway!
Also, spoiler tags, please 
What I do in Anki
I have two things going in Anki:
- A Core2k deck.
- A personal Anki deck where I add any vocab I come across that I either want to be able to use in conversation or that I just really like.
Every day at the end of the day I review everything that’s ready from those two decks, and sometimes when I have free time I learn new ones from the decks.
How I handle new vocab from media I read
So… what about all the other new vocab that I come across in manga and the like? I decided early on that I don’t want to add all of it to Anki because then reading would feel like work with additional tasks. I wouldn’t just be done with reading, but I’d also have to remember to add all the words to Anki, creating a huge backlog of vocab to learn. I want reading to be a joyful thing that I can do any time and as much as I want, so I’m definitely not gonna add work on top of it.
So if I’m not adding them to Anki, do I learn anything from the media I read? Surprisingly yes! It just takes a lot of times coming across a word. I’m also getting better at the process of reading Japanese (i.e. faster with better understanding and having an easier time parsing long sentences). I’m sure learning all those words via Anki would be more “effective”, but I would rather just read more instead since that’s actually fun.
Making lookups easy
Not putting stuff into Anki means that I have to look up words often before I learn them. Because that’s annoying to do manually, I also making lookups as easy as possible for me. That means:
Either reading novels on an e-ink reader with dictionary support (e.g. Kindle), or converting novels to epub and reading them in the browser via https://reader.ttsu.app with Yomitan (mouse-over dictionary add-on for browsers) installed:
Converting manga into images and reading them in the browser via mokuro (which makes Japanese text in images selectable via OCR) with Yomitan installed:
