Last year when studying to take JLPT N4 I did a lot of old fashioned taking hand written notes in an exercise book. Now I’m thinking of studying for N3 and was thinking that writing notes for grammar points and vocab I haven’t seen in WK on flash cards would be more efficient and help memorize some of that material better. (There are still a couple of things from N4 I occasionally forget.)
But after seeing the recently “Mistakes you made when first learning Japanese thread” recently posted, I’m starting to think that maybe I should work out how to use ANKI and put those notes in there instead.
Should I keep making notes in my exercise book and then transfer those into ANKI later?
I think you are better off using something else like HouHou or Anki which uses SRS. Unless the act of you writing it out makes you remember a lot better, SRS will give you better retention per time put in. If you don’t feel like it is helping you any, you can always stop, but you should experiment with your learning. Find what works best for you as early on as you can.
Houhou looks like it might be good for vocabulary, but what about grammar?
I used bunpro a bit for revision, but I found it didn’t exactly align with the grammar points I was studying.
I’ve been using Anki and other SRS systems for nearly twenty years, so I think they are worth the effort to learn well, and stick with. I am a big believer in hand-writing as well, so I make sure that I hand-write out my answers sometimes, rather than type them in. I would figure out the easiest possible way to use Anki at first. It might even be by taking quick screen-shots of the things that you need to learn to remember. I also use cloze deletions a lot. They are easy to use, and you generate a bunch of easy cards at once.
I would read the supermemo 20 rules of learning before you start putting your own cards together, and then keep looking at those rules occasionally.
Still, there only so many hours a day for studying, and only so many things that a person can take on.
imabi, tae kim, and kanzen master are worth looking into. You can put grammar points and/or example sentences from them in Anki, but that wouldn’t work with HouHou. My personal approach is to just look stuff up as I come across it. For the things I may have a harder time remembering, I add them to an anki deck. Again, experiment and find what you like best, but I would definitely recommend practicing grammar points with example sentences too. Learning verb stem+ながら = while (verb) is a lot less useful than seeing that same point used in a few different sentences along side the explanation imo.