A good, all-round self-study routine?

My current routine is as follows:

Reading:
I make sure to read at least two pages (in practice it usually ends up being at least four and sometimes I get super carried away and spend hours reading) from a Japanese novel each day. Since I started reading about a year ago my “speed” has increased from about 5 pages/hour to about 8-10… still very slow compared to English or Swedish :slight_smile:

Kanji:
Every non-WK kanji I encounter I add to anki and learn using my own mnemonics at a rate of maybe 10 a week. (I have a significant backlog, but I take them in frequency order). Since finishing WK a year and a half ago I’ve probably learned about 500 new ones this way, so I feel that I’m making pretty decent progress, albeit not at WK speeds :slight_smile:

Vocab:
Every word I look up I also add to anki. I prioritize the ones that contain kanji I’ve just learned and I study about 5 new a day.

Listening:

  1. I’m creating clozed deletion (fill-in-the-blank) cards from various sources (drama with subs etc). The format is that I listen to a sentence and then I try to type the blanked out part based on what I hear. I use my own kind-of-subs2srs-alike method. I sort these using the morphman plugin for anki, so that each contain at most one new word.
  2. I also practice individual words with a sound file on the front side and def + spoken context sentence (often taken from part 1) on the back side.
  3. I like watching Japanese Let’s Plays (実況プレイ). I find this to be pretty relaxing since with the right game I can have a good time no matter how much or little I understand. It’s also nice to revisit old ones and see that you can actually understand more each time.

Speaking
I have three lessons every two weeks scheduled on italki. I’ve been doing this for about a year now and the progress is slow, but I’m definitely more comfortable speaking now, even though my grammar and vocab isn’t perfect.