Just found a way to spice up my anki and rtk studies. I have oodles of sentences on anki using sentences from my canon wordtank, textbooks, death note, and oxford beginner's dictionary. I also finished rtk but have over 800 failed kanji. I was doing my reviews and then trying to relearn 10 kanji. That was getting boring.

I also do anki. Now what I'm doing is completing reviews (no more 1/4 year breaks) and also doing my anki. Even if I can read the sentence if I don't remember any kanji, I look it up using the rikaichan lookup bar. That tells me the kanji within the words and gives me the Heisig index number. I go back to RTK and work on those stories. What this does it helps me use "kanji in context" and also helps randomize my review of failed kanji. Those kanji are guaranteed to come back "in context" because they are part of my anki reviews.

I think it's really important to break up routines when they start to feel--routine. I'm probably doing something that folks have already figured out to do but just thought I'd share.

depends on what you mean by routine....
if you mean something that bore you to death yes you have to get away from that....
because learning japanese is a endurance trial , you can t bear something that you find dull for several years.... ajatt method really stresses the importance of pleasure. Because you re supposed to do it 24h a day and you can t do it out of will 24 a day... there must be pleasure too.
if you mean any procedure I ll go against that . Creating routine is one of the key part in any training process . as you know by heart the frame, as you have reflexes you can focus on the content . It took me a while to find the best way to study rtk, same goes for ajatt method (and i m still not totally satisfied) but once I found an appealing procedure I improved at speed light. As much as you can you should try to stick to the same method as long as possible.

whatever i think kathz said , and i totally agree with him on this point , something like when you feel good with something then it a good method .I could feel in my guts when something was wrong my method and when it was right... Concerning ajatt I think my current method is the 4th i employ and at last i "feel" it s working. So you just have the feeling it work fines for you then you re right. Obviously there are 100 percent flawed approach but there are also a lot which are equally good. And everyone of us has different assets . It s the key error of the traditionnal studies that they aren t able to understand how the learning process is different in each one of us that s why there are so many dropouts.

As I've said in another post somewhere, after finishing RtK, I just couldn't bring myself to continue doing kanji-only reps until the cards became a manageable daily number. I wanted to learn Japanese, not kanji, and I wanted to that very moment. So I just started doing sentences, lots and lots of sentences, and when I find a new word, and a kanji which is a little hazy, I just fire up RevtK and refresh the story in my mind.

This method also allows you to get much better at the more useful kanji, while learning ahead into vol. 3 with more useful ones, like who - dare - 誰