What I would recommend is pre-learning the vocabulary for the particular story you plan to read and then read it. If you plan to watch an anime episode, pre-learn the vocabulary for that. Same thing for songs that you might want to listen to. If the word is kanji in the story, learn the kanji version. If it's hiragana, learn the hiragana version. If the story is long, maybe chunk it into several pages at a time.
I just started to do things this way, and it's much more enjoyable than learning words from a frequency list that you may or may not run into for a long while. It's much more enjoyable and effective to learn a word and then read it in the context of a full work immediately.
There are many ways to create a custom vocab list. What I've been doing is using the text glossing function of jdic and clicking ignore repeated words. Then I'll paste the output into a text editor and clean up the text for input into anki. If you know regex, you can clean up a list fairly quickly. I wrote a quick and dirty python script that automates that whole process but it only works on a mac at the moment. If you have a mac and know something about python, I can send it to you.
I just started to do things this way, and it's much more enjoyable than learning words from a frequency list that you may or may not run into for a long while. It's much more enjoyable and effective to learn a word and then read it in the context of a full work immediately.
There are many ways to create a custom vocab list. What I've been doing is using the text glossing function of jdic and clicking ignore repeated words. Then I'll paste the output into a text editor and clean up the text for input into anki. If you know regex, you can clean up a list fairly quickly. I wrote a quick and dirty python script that automates that whole process but it only works on a mac at the moment. If you have a mac and know something about python, I can send it to you.