i’ll be using a new thread to write down my progress. i didn’t really know what i was trying to do so i felt like restarting. i just want to add a little more structure…
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Welcome!
Wow, I’m really surprised with that guide. 
I’ve seen a lot of people mentioning anime, VNs and japanese games as their main motivation to learn japanese… the guide seems to be the anwser someone with exactly those same interests came up with regarding how to build a smooth workflow to make all that into SRS material.
I think you could check Voracious too, that and some of the same Anki add-ons used in the guide was what I was using, and I think it was quite easy to use, providing context audio and screenshot from the show while watching.
I don’t know if this guide is in the resources thread, but I’m sure It should be 
Welcome fellow logger
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Last year, back before I started WaniKani, I worked through a volume of a (slice-of-life) manga that has no furigana. Since I bought it digital, I was able to use software to read the kanji for me, but it was still a long and grueling (but fun) task. (You absolutely have the right words there.)
This year, maybe five to eight levels into WaniKani, I attempted starting the second volume, but just casually reading. I was mostly lost, except for recalling scenes I’d seen in the anime a year and a half prior. More recently, around level 15 or 16, I picked volume two up and found I can read a lot of the kanji on the pages where I’d left off. At this point (working my way through level 17), I should recognize about half the unique kanji, and 75% of the overall kanji in volume one.
I don’t know where you will be with kanji within a year’s time, but if you get as far as I did in one year (I’m very slow at learning new kanji and vocabulary), you should be able to recognize more than half of what you encounter by the end of 2020. (The exception to that will be things like spell names, treasure names, etc.)
Is 「とんがり帽子のアトリエ」more or less medieval fantasy?
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that’s awesome that you can read so much of a manga! before i bought 地獄楽, i read some of it online and it took me a few hours to get through just the first 20 pages… there was so much vocabulary plus i try my best to use a monolingual dictionary so if there is a word in the definition i didn’t know, i would look that one up and so on.
and yes, とんがり帽子のアトリエ is sort of a medieval fantasy. the setting is a world where magic exists but the average person can’t get their hands on it. “magic flows through the world, making life plentiful for us. an indispensable, convenient miracle. how does it work? i don’t know. only witches know how to use magic. ordinary folk can only receive the blessing of magic. they can’t become witches.”
basically, the main character is an “ordinary folk” who wishes she could become a witch. her first experience with magic was when a suspicious character gave her a picture book, pen and boots that lit up in her wake. in the present, a witch comes to her shop for smoke-colored cloth. a couple of the children in her village broke a winged chariot outside and the witch offered to fix it. because ordinary folk aren’t allowed to witness the process of magic, he wanted to fix it in isolation so he asked her to stand outside and guard the door. the troublemakers who broke the chariot wanted to see what he was doing so they climbed to the roof of the house the main character couldn’t stop them so she joined them instead. the children peeked through a window but gave up because there was a curtain blocking their view. the main character stumbled across a latter on the roof that gave a better view of what the witch was doing. she saw him drawing, drawing magic!
once he finished, she pretends like she was guarding the door the whole time. later that night, she attempted to recreate what the witch had done. she used the pen (which turned out to be a wand), ink and picture book she received from the shady character and began scribbling circles and patterns. she didn’t know what she was drawing but she knew it was magic. fast forward, the witch catches her in the act and flies her out into the open night. her mother notices something had occurred and went outside to investigate. a glyph that the main character drew was left on the ground and her mother stepped on it, causing the magic to go off and her mother to be completely frozen in crystal.
his duty as a witch is to erase a normal persons memory when they get an experience of practicing magic. the witch decides to against this rule and keeps her memory intact. they agree that they will keep what had happened a secret and train her in magic so that she can reverse what she had done.
that is just the intro and it goes a lot deeper than that. she has to deal with discrimination for not growing up a witch, ridicule from other witches in the witch communities, interactions from the the higher up witches, the suspicious person from the past, etc. i think there are 36 translated chapters so if you can’t wait till you become proficient at reading japanese, i highly recommend it. sorry if this was more than you asked for…
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This both why I want to start using a monolingual dictionary and why I haven’t yet used one. I don’t want to have to look up words to understand the words that are in the description of what I’m trying to find the meaning of. If I could find an app with an offline dictionary (especially if it includes a dictionary meant for kids), I’d definitely buy it and give it a try.
It sounds very interesting, and I’ll keep it in mind. I’ve actually fallen way behind on reading English-translated manga this past year, so I shouldn’t take on anything new yet, but I’ve added this one to my wish list on Kobo so I have it in mind. I love medieval fantasy, and I love material with magic and various forms of witches (even if they stray from traditional a bit). Just add in a dragon or two, and I’m sold. Thanks for mentioning the series! I’ll have to watch for when/if it concludes (as I prefer to read completed series, unless it’s slice of life).
The guide was interesting. I’ve been doing something similar for much of the same reasons (sentence on back with only word on front since I don’t learn well from only sentence, spoken sentence to save time etc).
Not sure what he has against morphman though, since he just said he might clarify later. Once you’ve got a ton of cards created it makes sense to me to sort them in some sort of sensible order…
Also I would argue that by deleting the leeches one does gain something quite important, namely the time to learn probably at least ten other words. These things add up time-wise, so you’re essentially deciding to learn a lot fewer words overall just to honor the order in which you learn them.
Anyway, cool that someone else does it too. Also might look into his methods next time I’m on a card creating binge.
you don’t have to use a monolingual right away. maybe when you are done with wanikani? i can’t really tell you when to start but a really simple monolingual dictionary is デイリーコンサイス国語辞典 on sanseido. it uses the least amount of words but at the cost of the definitions being less detailed. for example, the definition of 貧血 from デイリーコンサイス国語辞典 says, 「血液が減り、めまいなどを起こすこと。」, while the 大辞林 dictionary gives this definition. i found that the prior definition is all that i needed in order to understand the context it was being used in. 
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i’ve noticed that when i’m reading or listening to japanese, most of everything i’ve learned in genki have stuck and have become things my brain doesn’t translate. i can’t say the same for what i’ve read in the dictionary of japanese grammar books. maybe it’s because right after i finished a lesson, i completed the exercises in a workbook. i don’t know how make that possible with what i’m learning in the dojg books. i am using flashcards to review the dojg grammar points but it isn’t staying in my head like it did after doing practice problems.
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Nice, a fellow dictionary reader. Reading dictionaries is a fun activity to do if you have the time and patience to go through the whole thing, but it is a reference book. If you absorb and retain information better from doing exercises, you can maybe take the example sentences in the dictionaries and write them out on flashcards, but remove the grammar point used for that sentence to make it fill-in-the-blank. There are also a decent number of grammar workbooks available that’re independent of textbooks.
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and i retained a lot of the basic grammar book. mostly because it broadened the usages of the ones i already knew. but going through intermediate and advanced, everything is so new to me and hard to keep up.
you are right, it is just a reference book! when i see くせに or っぱなし out in the wild, i should go back and check, not get angry at myself for forgetting! 
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