When it comes to the core 2k/6k/10k packs, do you guys do recognition, production, or both?


In my opinion it seems like both is overkill, and would double your study time.
Currently I've only been doing recognition, but am wondering if this is a bad idea?

I did both, because I didn't know anyone I could chat with in Japanese at the time, but if you're already speaking Japanese regularly you might not need to do both. If you're curious, you could always try doing both for a review session or two and seeing if it helps you recall the words better or not.

I used to do both simultaneously but it wasn't working out very well because one type of card would give you the answer to the other type. Until I read about someone here who did one type, suspended the other until he felt comfortable, and then switched. That's the way to go I think.

Similar to EratiK, I do both. But I have related cards hidden on my deck, so if I'm studying the J -> E card today, the flip side of that card (E -> J) will be buried if it was scheduled for the same day. I aways have recognizition show up first.

I find that for the basic, starting vocab you need to be capable to have good recall and recognition. I could see the argument that further along you just focus on on recognition, especially if you're mainly interested in watching/reading stuff with non-everyday (historical or genre) vocab.

I'm doing only recognition, but I consider Core 10k as an appendix to other decks I work with, so I don't spend too much time on it.
Plus, I already know some of the words from Core because they are part of other decks (where I do both recognition and production).

Recognition only, as I am a believer in a weak version of Krashin's input hypothesis.  I don't believe that input alone will make me fluent at speaking and writing, but it will get me 3/4 of the way there.  Actual speaking and writing practice will get me the rest of the way.

I also find production flash cards unnecessarily difficult and sometimes misleading since it seems to be all about understanding subtle differences among similar L2 words.  However, I don't believe learning subtle differences is best learned by association with L1 analogues, as the L1 v. L2 relationship is rarely perfect.

I personally find production cards to help my recall a lot more than recognition.  I used to do just recognition for a long time, then I switched to both, and then finally I mostly use production now.  

The key to production cards is figuring out how to format them correctly, I use images from games and manga with cloze deletion now and I'm pretty happy with it but I still have to refine it. For example if the scenes in a game aren't unique enough it will create problems down the line.  I also blur character cutouts when they are present to avoid association with them.

Another tip if you do decide to use production cards is to use only one word in English and not every meaning for the word, for me this will be the use that's shown in the image.  I agree with yogert about cards not really being good for learning every usage and I find that comes with encountering it in the wild.  So instead of trying to capture every meaning with a single card I try to create a memory hook similar to the keywords used in RTK.

EDIT: I missed that this was about the core set. I stand by production but you might have to edit those cards to make them more memorable because the pictures are bad and there are some English definitions that probably won't stick.