Joined: Aug 2011
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I think it's a perfectly fine study method. The voiced lines are nice for giving you a real sense of the pronunciation of words, but I'm not sure what the ratio is out there of unvoiced/partly voiced/fully voiced VNs. Fully voiced would be ideal in the early stages. Partly voiced is fine later on, because authors tend to use the same terms repeatedly, so you'll usually get to hear all the new words sooner or later.
My experience with VN's is limited to a few that I got from Steam, and not using any tools other than keeping a dictionary app open on my cell phone. My impression, however, is that VN's are the same level of challenge as any other prose. I don't really find a big difference between reading VN's, LN's or any form of 小説. That's not to say there aren't easier and harder works - but 'ease' isn't correlated with the formats.
I wouldn't make any principle of sticking exclusively to VN's. A lot of Manga can be relatively easy to read - although characters that speak in dialect also pose some of the most difficult reading challenges you'll encounter. Try to pick manga with lots of standard japanese dialogue, and not many narration boxes.
There will be at least a token kansai or okinawan character in almost every manga though. Even ones set in other worlds use those dialects to represent regional speech.
Whatever work you're reading, I think it's worth adding vocabulary from it into Anki. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'after that', but I would try to add words to Anki as you go. You'll continue to encounter the same vocabulary throughout a longer work in itself, and also when reading works by the same author or in the same genre.
You don't have to add every single word you encounter, of course, but there's no better words to add to your vocabulary cards than the ones you actually encounter in the material you like to read. Frequency lists are kind of useless after the first few thousand words.
Joined: Aug 2013
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I started doing something like this after I finished core6k and reached ~N3 level grammar. It was still quite hard with tons of unknown vocab but the quick lookups with ITH + Aggregator and how easy it was to add cards to Anki afterwards made it less painful than the alternatives. I don't really add every single word to Anki though, only if I find it enough times to bother me or I think it will be useful moving forward.
If you haven't read any native materials yet I think it's better to get your feet wet with some easy manga like Yotsuba instead and then move on to the "easy" slice of life VNs. Something like Hanahira which to me was somewhat boring but I haven't really found anything simpler in terms of grammar/vocab.
Joined: Feb 2014
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vn's are great for practice, but they tend to be way to hard for beginners. I'd recommend doing something like core 6k and reading a few easy light novels and web news first!
Joined: Nov 2015
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I am in same situation.
However from my experience, I can say, that learning vocabulary is completely useless idea. You need thousands of words in kanji and phonetic form to understand text.
What you really need is to learn katakana and hiragana scripts, you need both of them
and you will also need Japanese grammar. Unfortunately it will be not typical grammar, but some obscure mix of slang depending on what manga you are reading.
I noticed that it is waste of time to learn verbs besides most basic ones like
"mitte"-look , "matte"- wait and other that come in form of command
But it is very usefull to learn words that express emotions and some common nouns.
Joined: Nov 2015
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I want to use Stein's Gate and Fate/stay visual novels as a study tool for japanese.
Does there exist raw Japanese and also translated scripts for the whole games? I would like to be able to study away from the computer and also use it as reading practice.
