I'm sorry if a question like this has asked before (or rather, it has, and been answered) but I am a bit conflicted about what to do next in my studies. I finished RTK 1 last summer and used this method (picture -> reading, kanji -> reading + picture, picture + reading -> kanji (if applicable)) to learn about a few hundred common words (as the other few were things like numbers and strange location nouns, which I omitted when I couldn't find a good translation). I started Genki and added new words as they appeared with the same format and used the method described here (which creates 3-4 cards per sentence: fill in the blank, fill in the blank for another example sentence, create a sentence with this word, and spell the word (if applicable)) for more abstract words and sometimes grammar concepts. For particles, I used fill in the particle:


I'm currently in chapter 6 of Genki and do the exercises out loud in the textbook and write down the answers for the workbook (and check them in the answer key). So, the question is: what do I do now? My progress at the moment seems a bit slow and the grammar sentences with 4 cards a piece take like 10 minutes a piece to make, and they don't even seem to fit right or be extremely effective. I have seen a few "core" decks for vocab, it seems (Core5000, Core10k i + 1, and that 2000 deck) but the book I read (Fluent Forever) claims you HAVE to make your own cards. Also, there seems to be a deck specifically for Genki but that also breaks the "make your own cards and use pictures" rule from the above book.

So, am I just approaching this wrong, should I forget the suggestions of the general book I read on learning languages, or is there something I'm missing?

Well we all have different histories of learning, and I never did what you did, but it's important to trust your feelings regarding to what you are doing. IMHO if something feels inefficient and is starting to demotivate you, something is wrong, more so with stuff like Genki which is basic. Also I understand making a production and a recognition card, but a spelling and a definition one? Seems like overkill. So if I were you I'd either change that or try to go for premade decks for awhile and see how it goes (first the Genki one and later core). You can always return to making cards later on if you feel like it (though for vocabulary I would advise against it-- time used making 10 000 cards could be better spent elsewhere, but for grammar/sentences making your cards is probably useful).

EratiK Wrote:Well we all have different histories of learning, and I never did what you did, but it's important to trust your feelings regarding to what you are doing. IMHO if something feels inefficient and is starting to demotivate you, something is wrong, more so with stuff like Genki which is basic. Also I understand making a production and a recognition card, but a spelling and a definition one? Seems like overkill. So if I were you I'd either change that or try to go for premade decks for awhile and see how it goes (first the Genki one and later core). You can always return to making cards later on if you feel like it (though for vocabulary I would advise against it-- time used making 10 000 cards could be better spent elsewhere, but for grammar/sentences making your cards is probably useful).

It's not like I'm not understanding things, it's just that the progress is terribly slow due to the time it takes to create cards. I have a few questions though:
- How would I remember which Kanji are in a word without a spelling card (which tend to be the easiest)?
- By pre-made Genki deck do you just mean a recognition and production Jap <-> English deck like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2743658753?
- Which core deck would you suggest?
- How would you suggest studying grammar? Just do the exercises in Genki and forget Anki for Grammar until that's done?

I would use the premade Genki deck to save you the gruelling task of making so many cards and I would stop writing any exercises. Writing is 100% the least useful, least fun and lowest priority part of language learning. You don't need to write until you can speak and you can't speak until you can listen, so also spend some time watching Japanese dramas. Watching something fun at the end of a study session can be very rewarding and its even better when you know its helping your Japanese! But don't use English subtitles, that kills the benefits.

Helena4 Wrote:I would use the premade Genki deck to save you the gruelling task of making so many cards and I would stop writing any exercises. Writing is 100% the least useful, least fun and lowest priority part of language learning. You don't need to write until you can speak and you can't speak until you can listen, so also spend some time watching Japanese dramas. Watching something fun at the end of a study session can be very rewarding and its even better when you know its hell ng your Japanese! But don't use English subtitles, that kills the benefits.

Would you suggest using a spelling card with those or not? And, concerning drama, how can I understand anything if I'm still at elementary level, especially since my reading comprehension even at this level is much better than listening.

Edit: Just tried it a little with Japanese subtitles and I can kind of understand half the stuff based on kanji meaning, words I already know, and context. Not sure how helpful that is though if I'm just relying on Heisig keywords and ignoring the grammar points, guessing.

Do you have Japanese support installed in anki? https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3918629684 If you make a "Reading" feild in your cards, it will automatically create readings for you if the Genki deck doesn't have that (I didn't use Genki I used other books so I don't know). What you should do when doing the card is read it aloud, then think about the meaning. You must read it correctly and understand it to mark the card as good. I don't see why you need spelling cards. That guide you're using looks pretty cool, but it is really not worth the time making basic decks like that on your own, when you want to be passing through beginner stages quickly.

As for dramas, listening is all about how much of it you do. The reason your listening is inferior is because you don't listen. The reason I reccomend dramas rather than podcasts or even anime is because you have all sorts of visual clues that will help you enjoy the drama even if there is lots of dialogue going over your head. You must focus on understanding the plot rather than all of the dialogue. What this excercise is doing for you though, is getting you used to native speech (trust me, no matter how little you understand of the dramas, once you sit down to do a listening test after a lot of this, you'll be laughing at how slow and forced it is), getting you to recognise all the sounds you're hearing in speech and forcing you to learn to extract words you know from speech, rather than having speed or accent etc confuse you. Choose dramas that are comedies that are quite visual. You can also try family dramas and romance but stay away from legal/medical/detective etc. All those really require finessed understanding of vocab. Most importantly, choose what you think you'll enjoy. And you don't have to watch a long episode all in one sitting if it's daunting, but if you've chosen right you usually want to.

I started watching dramas earlier on than you are in your learning, so I'll share the first few dramas I watched:

Kazoku game. Info: http://mydramalist.com/6068-kazoku-game-2013 Downloads (I used these, they're fine): http://doramax264.com/18645/kazoku-game-j-drama-2013/
Family genre. This was confusing, but it definitely felt like it was meant to be, rather than it was just my language skills. It was very dramatic and the main character showed himself through his crazy actions more than speech so I enjoyed it. I also learnt words. The first jdrama I watched without subs and the second ever jdrama I watched.

Hana Yori Dango Info:http://mydramalist.com/2983-hana-yori-dango-2005 Downloads (ditto): http://doramax264.com/614/hana-yori-dango/
Romcom. Was never confused by this because it was very visual and all the characters were melodramatic, meaning I always understood how they felt etc. Very funny and very dramatic. I usually recommend this as a first drama.

Yakou Kanransha. Info: http://mydramalist.com/6004-yakou-kanransha Downloads (ditto): http://doramax264.com/17595/yakou-kanransha/
A family mystery. This was calmer than the other 2 and possibly more reliant on dialogue, but the language was not very different from the family type language in Kazoku Game, and it was still easy to understand visually. Not funny; really gripping mystery.

The only problem you may run into is that Genki focuses on polite speech I beleive, which is not what you ever use with family and friends so will rarely come up in these dramas. Have a look at Tae Kim's guide to solidify casual speech: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar Other than that, just remember that you can't get good at listening without listening to as many hours as possible, and you might as well do that the fun way - with dramas.

stephenmac7 Wrote:Not sure how helpful that is though if I'm just relying on Heisig keywords and ignoring the grammar points, guessing.

Very helpful. It's not a grammar excercise, it's listening practice. You can't get good at listening without listening and I don't see why you wouldn't when it's the most fun out of all your skills to practice and the most useful (speaking arguably is more useful but relies on listening). I used Japanese subtitles a bit, but only for one drama. Bearing in ming that I didn't do an RTK first thing so I barely new any Kanji at the time. I sort of liked it, mostly so I could jot vocab down to look up later but I don't know whether thinking about the kanji might distract you from really listening... Anyone tried that?

Helena4 Wrote:I would use the premade Genki deck to save you the gruelling task of making so many cards and I would stop writing any exercises. Writing is 100% the least useful, least fun and lowest priority part of language learning. You don't need to write until you can speak and you can't speak until you can listen, so also spend some time watching Japanese dramas. Watching something fun at the end of a study session can be very rewarding and its even better when you know its hell ng your Japanese! But don't use English subtitles, that kills the benefits.

I disagree with most of those. In my experience I've found that writing helps memorization, and it's also a good production-related exercise, a bit like vocalization (in the beginning I used to say out-loud all I read and wrote). Not sure why you are according priority to listening in that respect, to me it's a different skill, and probably the hardest to get (because of the natural speed of speech). Also recommend to watch dramas with J-subs as a beginner seems unrealistic, no way anyone has the grammar or the vocab or the kanji to do that (that would be at least at the end of Genki and with core 2000 under the belt). Comprehensible input should be 70-90 % if I recall, anything less is painful and time that could be used more wisely.

stephenmac7 Wrote:It's not like I'm not understanding things, it's just that the progress is terribly slow due to the time it takes to create cards. I have a few questions though:
- How would I remember which Kanji are in a word without a spelling card (which tend to be the easiest)?
- By pre-made Genki deck do you just mean a recognition and production Jap <-> English deck like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2743658753?
- Which core deck would you suggest?
- How would you suggest studying grammar? Just do the exercises in Genki and forget Anki for Grammar until that's done?

- You can add the spelling to the answer of recognition cards (by spelling we mean the furigana, right?)
- I meant one that saves you the time of what you are doing.
- I don't know, mine is one with production and recognition notes, and a cool format. I can't remember why I didn't take the most popular one. I also have three for each core. The important thing for core 2000 and 6000 is to get the audio working.
- Honestly grammar is the most difficult thing to study with Anki. At a basic level what is really important is to understand how a grammar point works and to see it used in a lot of contexts (exposure). That's why for example with the DOBJG deck, a lot of people just read the sentence, try to remember which point is used where, understand the sentence and move on. Later on you can other stuff (check out Erlog's grammar deck for that).

EratiK Wrote:I disagree with most of those. In my experience I've found that writing helps memorization, and it's also a good production-related exercise, a bit like vocalization (in the beginning I used to say out-loud all I read and wrote). Not sure why you are according priority to listening in that respect, to me it's a different skill, and probably the hardest to get (because of the natural speed of speech). Also recommend to watch dramas with J-subs as a beginner seems unrealistic, no way anyone has the grammar or the vocab or the kanji to do that (that would be at least at the end of Genki and with core 2000 under the belt). Comprehensible input should be 70-90 % if I recall, anything less is painful and time that could be used more wisely.

Oh yeah, writing definitely helps with memorisation, especially with kanji (not as much with other things), but it can really slow you down, so I was just responding to the OP saying he wanted to speed up. And I read everything aloud too! I also like shadowing speech in videos. All of that works wonders for loosening you up and producing great pronunciation results. I also like singing and rapping for that - super fun. Anwyay, I wasn't saying listening was going to teach you grammar, yes it is a separate skill, but you have to order these skills in priority of what is most useful to you. Writing is least important to most learners. Speaking is the most desired by most learners, and in my opinion, you aren't going to get very far speaking if you cannot understand the person talking to you, therefore speaking is somewhat reliant on listening, and therefore listening is high priority.

In regards to listening being the hardest I have a few points.

1) You should not learn what is easiest, but what is most useful to you. Any academic or athlete or musician will tell you that you get nowhere by ignoring the things that are hard. If listening is hard, you should be eager to work more on it than anything else, not say it's not helpful because it's hard.

2) It depends what you see as "hard". Reading requires a lot of concentration, and a lot of knowledge of kanji readings, so can be gruelling to work on. Writing requires even more concentration, imagination, and turning passive vocab into active vocab. Speaking also involves imagination and activation of vocab at the same time as speedy thinking, and listening skill. Listening requires moderate concentration, is full of clues like tone of voice and (in dramas and visual media) facial expression etc. and does not require that you know the reading of a word you have never come across before for you to access it, allowing you to learn from context. It's only downside is that you have to think fast. And how do you get used to speed? You listen as much as possible until your brain starts to naturally keep up. Spending time and repeating things does not require any extra concentration or skill, therefore, training listening is arguably the easiest thing to do.


Also, I wouldn't recommend this to a complete beginner, no, but OP has a good footing in Genki and has done RTK 1, so he does have the kanji to do that and a nice start on the grammar and vocab. Low level 90% comprehensible input is always very artificial and so I think it is best to have a mixture of comprehensible input like JapanesePod101 and native audio in the form of videos , which are much more comprehensible than you'd expect once you add in the visual clues and the option on J-subs (which will help anyone who's done RTK like OP) as long as you don't pick a show full of technical language, or a show that relies on detailed understanding of the speech for the viewer to understand the plot, at this level. Why is it good to listen to native input despite the comprehensible input rule? Because you need to listen as much as possible to native audio to get used to the speed and develop the skills to extract vocab from natural audio. Once again, I argue with your definition of a word; this time it's "painful". It depends how you approach watching a jdrama whether you see it as "painful" or not. If you approach it determined that you will understand the dialogue you will be stressing constantly, winding back constantly, and focusing on what you don't understand rather than what you do. If you go into it determined to understand and enjoy the plot and you've chosen a drama that isn't complex then you will begin to piece together the plot using what you DO know (good positive attitude reduces "painfulness") and all the visual, tonal and subtitle clues and will be sucked in by the plot and motivated to watch more. And as you watch more you can only get better.

Also, the time could be used less wisely. You could be watching English TV.

EratiK Wrote:- You can add the spelling to the answer of recognition cards (by spelling we mean the furigana, right?)
- I meant one that saves you the time of what you are doing.
- I don't know, mine is one with production and recognition notes, and a cool format. I can't remember why I didn't take the most popular one. I also have three for each core. The important thing for core 2000 and 6000 is to get the audio working.
- Honestly grammar is the most difficult thing to study with Anki. At a basic level what is really important is to understand how a grammar point works and to see it used in a lot of contexts (exposure). That's why for example with the DOBJG deck, a lot of people just read the sentence, try to remember which point is used where, understand the sentence and move on. Later on you can other stuff (check out Erlog's grammar deck for that).

- By spelling I meant kanji. I thought it to learn Japanese vocab, you had to learn recognition, reading, and how to write it [Ex "airplane": should be able understand meaning of 飛行機, should know it's pronounced ひこうき (and, as an added bonus know which sounds go with which character as in 飛[ひ]行[こう]機[き]), and be able to remember it's written 飛行機 (spelling)]
- Okay, thanks!
- By production and recognition you mean word -> meaning (recognition) and meaning -> reading (production), right? Or is it meaning -> kanji + reading?
- Would you recommend trying to SRS the Genki stuff or are the exercises enough?

Quick note: I enjoy doing the exercises. Filling out conjugation tables is at least more fun than Anki reviews as they are now.

I also forgot OP asked for core deck reccomedations. I reccomend you continue with Genki 2 to get all the basic grammar down and do the core 2000. I reccomend not using nukemarines optimised 10k because it seemed like a lot of production with not enough recognition, plys 10k is too much. I myself never finished core 2000 so don't feel obliged I just think 6000 is too much, because core uses very little grammar which is limiting, so you want to start using other sources when you are at that level. The core 5000 is actually recommended for lower intermediate students so that's out of the question for an immediate option. Once you've done that (this is what I've done since dropping out of core 2000), using the reading add on for anki with built in dictionary and auto anki card making, yomichan and the drama transcripts you can find on dramanote.com, and any interesting reading material online, mine your own sentences to put into anki from things that you want to understand. Make sure there's only 1-2 unkowns in every sentence and do your reviews every day and revel in slowly understanding stuff that's interesting and relevant to you. Then finally you can supplement this with core 5000 (suspend all the cards that teach vocab you already know, since there are lots of basic vocab cards there - they're just complex sntences).

How exactly does sentence mining work? Are they cloze deletions or something else?

If you look at yomichan, it takes a lot of the thinking out of sentence mining that's why I use it. You just need to create fields for the word, the sentence, the words reading, and the words meaning. I also add to this a field that is not used by yomichan itself - the sentence reading, which can be filled in in bulk by the Japanese support add on for anki.

On the front of my cards is the sentence and underneath it is the word from that sentence that I don't know, in bold. On the back is the sentence reading and below it the word again, with its reading next to it and meaning underneath. To study this I read the sentence aloud, then I read the word aloud on its own and then try to recall the words meaning. I must get the word reading and meaning right to mark the card as good. Once I've done all the cards for an episode of a drama I rip the audio from the drama and relisten to it on the bus when I have nothing better to do to solidify the vocab aurally. I don't see the need to use anki for production. I write a diary in Japanese every day for that. Though i do that for the sake of a test that involves lots of writing, not that i negate my earlier ppint that writing os the least useful practice. For me I use anki to quickly take up vocab, so my cards are very recognition based.

Okay, thanks for the information. I'll use yomichan when I find something to read (probably after learning a bit more grammar). Looks really cool.

Also, I can't quite decide which 2k deck to use. Is it the "kore" from cangy (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5091) or maybe another from the Anki Shared Deck page? Sorry for asking so many stupid questions.

Yep, I definitely reccomend having more grammar and a bit of core before going for yomichan. I managed to make 300 cards from one episode on a drama the first time I did it, so I think if I'd had just a little more patients with doing at least 1000 of core first I would have had a more reasonable amount of cards. Though by the 4th episode I only made 120 cards and itvcontinue d to go down into double figures, showing how effective yomichan can be in boosted understanding of native material.

I'll try and find my favourite core deck tomorrow morning. Its late where I am and I'm going to sleep now, good night

Obligatory subs2srs recommendation - if you want to make your own cards with pictures (and vastly more importantly - audio) there really isn't a better way.
But of course, anyone telling you that you HAVE to make your own cards (or do anything, really) is projecting and can be safely ignored. Do whatever you think sounds like a good idea - whatever it is, it's probably worked for someone.

So I'm a big advocate of making your own cards... within reason. However I don't see any reason not to do the Genki premade deck and maybe one of the smaller Cores (I did Core 3k... on iknow.jp back in the day so it wasn't inherited into my Anki deck but still.) Obviously everything in Genki is important if you're using the Genki texts, and the first 3k of any core/kore or any other 'most common' type decks is going to be useful all around. After that depends on your interests and is where self-made cards start to become powerful (or getting one of the bigger decks and unsuspending as you encounter words in the wild, that's also an option.)

It takes me about two minutes to create each 'note', most of which generate two cards - kana->meaning and kanji->reading/meaning. I'm strict on meaning with kana->meaning and liberal with it on kanji->reading/meaning which is mostly a reading test for me.. .as long as I'm 'in the ball park' on meaning I'll pass it, but reading of course must be exact (and I require myself to type in the answer to be absolutely certain that I have every long vs. short vowel and little-っ in the right place. Also effects pure spelling things like づ vs. ず).

Any-way, I use rikai-sama (an extended version of Rikai-chan), 'copy' an example sentence into the clipboard, highlight the word and do the auto-import thing. It takes a few seconds of editing each entry to make it nice for my format, but with a simpler format you could be all set immediately after importing. Highly recommend it if you continue making your own cards.

There -are- cards that take me 10 minutes to make... or more accurately, 10 minutes to find an example sentence for when I don't like the ones in the first dictionary I try. Those are by far the exception and I'd go crazy if every card took me ten minutes, so I'm not surprised you're frustrated with it.

As for listening, make sure to make use of Erin's Challenge https://www.erin.ne.jp/ and the Genki companion CD. Working with well-understood sentences helps with hearing each mora correctly, but true flowing listening comprehension only comes from practice with longer pieces. Japanese subtitled shows are good, but try some shows with no subs (or rewatching with no subs later). Live-action is easier to follow than anime (when you can see the face of the speaker at least), and slice-of-life or romcom is easier than shows with a lot of technical terms... but it's also important to watch something you enjoy (you have to really like something to keep motivated to watch while only half understanding it!) I didn't have any trouble with police procedural dramas with Japanese subtitles, tbh. A lot of the technical terms you can gloss over.... ～薬 ... some kind of chemical. ～体 some kind of body, probably a corpse given the genre. ～銃 some kind of gun. 爆～ some kind of explosive.
Medical procedurals might not lend them to such easy glosses, not sure since I'm not very interested in them. Anyway if you have one genre you like above others you'll pick up the key phrases quickly enough, they do repeat within a show and between shows.

Anyway, that's my additions to the good advice that you've already received in this thread. 頑張ってください！

Throwing in my experiences:

Core decks / Vocabulary
Doing a Core deck is easier than anything else for pure vocab acquisition; however, it can be extremely boring if you don't like learning words for the sake of it. Despite the problems with Core (overly simple example sentences, it's kinda boring, it's frequency list is a tad outdated and mostly from newsprint), it's the most efficient way to add vocabulary cards. I'm using the this Core 10k deck (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/702754122); I can't remember if I changed the card layout or not, but I can say that I don't use production cards.
At your level, if you think they're enjoyable, production cards could be useful, but I've always leaned heavily towards recognition practice to get the groundwork (trust me though, you won't get anywhere with production if you don't practice).
As a testimonial of sorts: this is my primary means of vocabulary acquisition at the moment and, with only 6k, I've done quite well on the N2 and (a bit less) N1 vocabulary knowledge questions (but not so much on the application questions).
Of course, I can't really say how to practice production, since I'm not that good at it myself... Tutoring has been a big help, though, if you have room in your budget.

Big Note: the more versions of a card you make in Anki, the more tedious and time consuming it becomes (if I did more than one card per note in Anki today, I would have had over 250 due cards, and that's not even a hard day). At most, you should have a recognition card and a production card. As previously mentioned, I'm not the one to ask about production, but for recognition, I have the word and an example sentence on the front of the card and the audio (when I use it) and translations on the back. There's not much reason to make separate vocabulary cards for reading and listening.
The time you save on Anki reviews can be used on something else, like reading or listening. Anki's good for reinforcing individual points, but it's not meant to be used on everything.
Also, to directly answer your questions for once, there is no reason to make your own vocabulary cards if there's something already available that suits your needs: I hate spending the time to make complete cards in Anki by hand, so I don't. All the time spent putting the information into Anki isn't worth it, in my opinion. This doesn't count as much for things like subs2srs or sentence mining, of course (though mostly because it's unlikely that there's a good shared deck that fits your needs in that case), just vocab.

Grammar
I'm honestly not that good with grammar (anything more than a couple of sentences spent on one idea makes my head spin), so I'm going to tell you what not to do: read through grammar guides without doing anything to reinforce things.
Since you're working through the Genki books and doing the exercises, you're already doing more than I did. After you finish Genki (or before, if you really want to, though I wouldn't recommend it), you can use IMABI (http://www.imabi.net/); it's a bit technical, and there are occasional English grammar and spelling errors, but it's a wonderfully extensive resource with plenty of example sentences. There's also the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series, which is an extensive resource for grammar points (obviously); they are reference books rather than lesson books, but they are incredibly useful for looking up grammar points you see out in the wild; they're a bit expensive, though.

Listening
subs2srs is great; if you like any anime or dramas, then you can (try to) find Japanese subs for them and use them with this program to automatically create cards for each line of a subtitle file. I'm using them for listening practice with Mushishi at the moment.
Of course, you also have the CDs that came with your book, and there's JapanesePod101 (though I'm not crazy about most of the material); there's also news casts you can watch on NHK's website (or several others), though news reports are even faster than normal speech sometimes. All of these have some kind of accompanying text (though news reports probably won't come with subtitles or transcripts), so you can make sure of what you're hearing.

Hopefully I answered something in an understandable way; it can be hard to get a straight answer here when it comes to questions about methodology, but that's just because there's so many ways to go about it and no one can agree on the 'best way'.

sholum Wrote:Of course, I can't really say how to practice production, since I'm not that good at it myself...

Language exchange is the best way to practice production. The Lang-8 website facilitates this very well, or you can find an e-mail or skype partner. If you're interested in production I recommend lang-8 highly - though it has its problems, it has the advantage that you can post any time and someone will always answer.

I never practice 'production' flashcards. It's way to hard to make good cards for it. For example, if I get 中 as a question and think the answer is 'center' then of course it's okay if the answer on the back is 'middle'. I know it carries both meanings and it's fine. But if I get 'center' in the question, the answer might be 中... or 中心... or 央... and that's a very simple case. You can say that 中 is more like 'middle' and 中心 is more like center and disambiguate 央 as only being a suffix... but then you get into the 状態・状況 type of abstract words and ugh. It's not worth my headache to make non-ambiguous 'production' cards. As your vocabulary expands you'll need to keep going back and making more disambiguation notes on the front side or randomly get questions 'wrong' even though your answer was really correct for the question... just not the expected answer.

Quote:I'm honestly not that good with grammar (anything more than a couple of sentences spent on one idea makes my head spin), so I'm going to tell you what not to do: read through grammar guides without doing anything to reinforce things.

Reading. Read the dialogues in your text, read the mukashibanashi on hukumusume.com, read nhk news easy, read easy manga, read anything you can handle. Get the 'Read Real Japanese' book and work your way through it. Particles and other little helper words are a) often dropped in casual conversation and b) easy to miss even when they are there. Written material has it all laid out and is more likely to be grammatically correct. (Try not to read stuff written by other students - you're looking for correct and natural examples to become familiar with. Even a perfectly 'correct' piece by all textbook definitions can still be something a native would never, ever say or write, not because it's 'wrong' by any rule, it's just 'awkward' or 'not the way we say it'. Writing from non-natives who have lived in Japan for years are a little different from 'student' writing in some cases, but it depends on the person and how well they've assimilated the language. I'd avoid it unless I have good reason to think otherwise.)
(Note that Manga being mostly dialogue does still have the problem of dropped particles. But you have to get used to which particles can be dropped in speech too, so, just keep it in mind and don't make it your -only- reading.)

I recommend taking online classes. I use Japanese Online Institute (JOI), which I learned about here. Many other people use italki.

Helena4 Wrote:I would use the premade Genki deck to save you the gruelling task of making so many cards and I would stop writing any exercises. Writing is 100% the least useful, least fun and lowest priority part of language learning. You don't need to write until you can speak and you can't speak until you can listen, so also spend some time watching Japanese dramas. Watching something fun at the end of a study session can be very rewarding and its even better when you know its helping your Japanese! But don't use English subtitles, that kills the benefits.

That depends on what your main goal is. If your goal is to mostly read Japanese books then reading/writing exercises are the most important.

Regarding writing (or "spelling" flashcards, as they were referred to), I think its not an effective use of time for most people. Recognizing the word when written as kanji is useful, but being able to write it is much less so.

These days, most writing that you do is probably via a computer of some sort.
And when you type Japanese, what happens? The IME presents a list of the possible kanji candidates for you. This means that what you thought was a production task, has actually become a recognition task.

Actual writing is much more effective than trying to practice writing via a flashcard, I think.

Zarxrax Wrote:Regarding writing (or "spelling" flashcards, as they were referred to), I think its not an effective use of time for most people. Recognizing the word when written as kanji is useful, but being able to write it is much less so.

These days, most writing that you do is probably via a computer of some sort.
And when you type Japanese, what happens? The IME presents a list of the possible kanji candidates for you. This means that what you thought was a production task, has actually become a recognition task.

Actual writing is much more effective than trying to practice writing via a flashcard, I think.

I would like to be able to write buy hand and the Genki workbook requires writing anyway, so I'll just practice writing that way if it's not worth it with flashcards. However, I only get a spelling card wrong like a tenth of the times I get the other kinds wrong, so there's almost no reason not to use those cards, at least for isolated vocab (as they take up a very, very small amount of review time).