I’m currently using JP-JP cards when at all possible. I’ve been stuck in this beginner-intermediate stage for years, and this seems to be helping me because it’s forcing my brain to describe words in Japanese and make additional Japanese associations with words.
here’s an example card
姿 ｜ reading: すがた | meaning: 人の体の格好
Some of my cards are example sentences, and they do take forever to write out, so I find shorter noun phrases to be useful. But, when using sentences I’m using the context to add additional words and learning words from definitions I’m typing out. One of my recent words was 溶ける (which I kind of knew but didn’t quite recognize in the wild) and I learned the phrase えきじょうになる from it. I’m doing 5 of these cards a day. I find the more cards I have this way, the more cumbersome it becomes, so I might retire the cards a bit sooner than I would otherwise.
All the words I’m adding to the deck are from native materials, mostly songs at the moment.
Besides, the sentences check my particle usage which is awful and it is reemphasizing some pretty foundational grammar stuff at the momenct.
I occasionally run into words where the definition is out of my Japanese competency, and then I usually use something from the source where I found it and some English context.
So, for an update from my earlier post, I actually deleted my handmade Anki vocab deck of 731 cards! Now I have two main vocab decks…
Anime cards (like in that link) with Japanese→Japanese definitions.
A Japanese → English deck of words commonly used in Japanese definitions. (That way I’m not hunting three entries deep for a word that I understand.)
Anime cards were a giant pain in the ass to set up, but the final product been worth the hassle. Despite the name, I don’t just harvest words from anime. I try to pull from live-action TV shows and video games. I’d like to work in more books and manga, but then I have to auto-generate the Japanese audio and the same few automated voices get boring quickly.
My favorite part of this scheme is that the picture allows me to let go of a precise English word and just try to imagine the concept. It’s closer to how I’d actually think of the word in a conversation. Even though I’m not focusing on speaking right now, I think this approach will help there too.
I’ve been enjoying using Migaku MPV for making anime sentence cards in Anki. Combined with the Immerse with Migaku browser extension to make 1T sentences (those with only one unknown word) stand out, it’s massively streamlined the process for me.
Having anime cards with full sentence audio makes my manga cards seem rather, well, quiet in comparison. I’m planning on slowly adding word readings via Migaku over time, so I have something audio on them, even if not the whole sentence.
So far, the only flashcards I’m using (other than WaniKani/KaniWani) are to pre-learn words before reading a Japanese text (in this case, the textbook Minna no Nihongo lol). My Anki deck just has the information from the textbook’s vocab list, plus an audio file that I pulled via Yomichan. The purpose of the deck isn’t to fully teach me the words, just to make it easier for me to understand them when I see them in context. Having audio files attached to the cards helps me remember things like pitch accent and also helps with my listening comprehension, which is something that I tend to be poor at even in English haha. I tend toward flash cards with less information on them because I want them to be a starting point for my studying and not the endpoint. I think the only way that I’ll actually learn the nuanced meaning of the words is by seeing them in the wild on many different occasions over time, and not by studying dictionary definitions or the same isolated sentences again and again. That said, I’m not very far into my Japanese learning journey, so that might change in the future, but I’m wary of becoming too dependent on SRS, and am trying to keep my focus on working toward engaging with native materials instead.