Ha it’s nice to see there are other people into this. It was actually one of the things that made me want to learn Japanese. I also like Japanese anime, music and games but I started watching NJPW at WK9 and really wanted to be able to understand what they were saying. I had a nice moment watching this year’s WK when Okada was thanking everyone at the end and I realized I could understand the general gist of what he was saying.
Things I do
Wanikani - Every day whenever I have time, I always try to make sure my reviews are at zero before I go to bed.
ANKI - I have a few decks I use. Genki: this is just all the vocab from Genki that I add as i do each chapter. Random Words I find myself: This is literally what it says, if i’m watching an anime or reading an article or talking to my language exchange partners and don’t know a word then I have the Yomichan browser extension that adds anki cards for me (I’d advice people look this up because it saves so much time being able to create a card with one click.) and then I have the core 10k deck that I got off this forum somewhere. I forget their username (sorry) but someone here created anki decks in the Wanikani style. Every word has a few cards; ENG to JP, JP to ENG, Audio only, Example sentence, Example sentence audio only. I’ve only been doing this a few weeks so a lot of the words so far I already know but it has made it clear how far behind my listening skills are as a huge chunk of my reviews each day are the Audio sentences because everything else I pass pretty easily.
Kaniwani - I’m not good at doing this on a regular basis. I WANT to do it every day but i’m usually so burnt out by everything else this tend’s to get neglected.
Memrise - I have this entirely for the Genki grammar courses because when I first started I struggled with conjugation and this was a good way to be forced to drill them. I now know I could set this up elsewhere but I have over a year of SRS built up so I just keep doing it through Memrise.
Bunpro - Fairly recent discovery but I like that it let’s me see where the gaps in my knowledge are. When I finish a Genki chapter I go hunting for the grammar point in Bunpro. I find reviews don’t build up too quickly so this is something I don’t worry about doing every day if I run out of time.
Genki - I try to do a chapter every 2 weeks but I don’t keep a strict schedule on this because some chapter’s are easier than others and it also depends on how much time I spend doing my reviews. Usual routine for Genki is add all vocab for the next chapter into Anki and wait a few days, then read the chapter and write down notes for all grammar points in my personal notepad, add the grammar points in memrise and bunpro to review later and then when I can consistently pass those reviews go back and do the chapter questions.
Other than that everything else I do is just casual stuff with no routine. Reading NHK easy news articles, watching anime, listening to music, there’s a youtuber called Japanese ammo that I watch sometimes and she does good lesson’s to compliment what’s taught in Genki, let’s plays: no subtitles obviously so this isn’t so much about being able to understand them more than just having some casual Japanese to listen to in the background. I also talk to a few people on the Hellotalk app my phone when I have time and I have a language partner from Tokyo on Skype.
I do have a question for people actually. I’m finding as I progress the SRS burnout gets worse as the amount of reviews goes up slowly. By the time I’m finished with my WK/BP/Anki/KW/MR I’m not finding a lot of time to learn new things like I used to. The problem is I find the SRS really useful so I don’t really want to drop any of it but it feels like it takes up 90% of my time. Has anyone else had similar problems and what did you do about it?