This is a bit confusing, sorry. This is a PASSIVE VOCABULARY learning technique, by the way.
I think that trying to force output of the words you're learning too soon maybe frustrates some people.
Anyways:
- I have two notebooks, 1 for onyomi-only compounds and one for everything else (kunyomi words, mixed readings, etc.). I think it's much easier to run through the lists like this.
- I collect words from wherever, totalling between 40 and 70 a day. Minimum 40, but the average is more like 50 I guess... About 90% of these are onyomi compounds as right now I'm trying to learn onyomi readings en-masse as well as writing kanji from hiragana -> kanji (i.e. れんらく ＝ 連絡)
- My word book pages have 11 lines on them. I find this is the perfect amount for me. The lines have 4 columns - 2 medium ones, 1 small one, 1 large one. First column is the Japanese word, second is the reading, third is the part(s) of speech it is, and fourth is English translation(s). This is all just sorta basic and gives a very basic overview of the word... it doesn't have to be perfect, just enough for my mind to grab part of its meaning/usage.
For example: 連絡 レン・ラク n, vs, adj-no contacting; get in touch with; communication
- At this point, I have several lists. So I do them one at a time. I will first go from top to bottom reading the Japanese words (using the readings if I need help), then look at the English translations. When I hit the bottom, I go backwards from bottom to top and try to read them without the readings helping me. If I make any mistakes I repeat this process. I almost always just need to go through it once.
- Next, I start at the top again and cover up the Readings/Translations. The first time through, I try to read each word, then check it against the translation. If it's correct, I put a hash mark next to it. The next time through, I read the Japanese word and associate it with an image instead of the English word. I go through the Japanese list, trying to read the words and recall its meaning 5 times. Usually each word ends up with 5 hash marks next to it. I never miss a word more than once doing this...
- When checking these lists, I follow a pattern. I go top -> bottom; bottom -> top; outermost -> innermost; innermost -> outermost; random order. (The description here is hard to understand. Anyways, I have a pattern).
- When I've ran through it these 5 times, I cover up the Japanese/Readings and look only at the English translations. Then I recall the words from memory, 5 times through, using the same pattern as above. I put hash marks next to each item as I do these as well. Occasionally I'll miss one doing this, just a bit of confusion with some readings usually.
- After this, I enter the list into Anki (all of the above mentioned data), then move on to the next list. I should mention that my Anki deck has the Example Sentences plug-in, so after entering them I browse the sentences (wary that they can't be trusted of course) to get a better feel for each word and its usage.
- Each list takes about 10 minutes to get through and enter into Anki. With Anki, I test from Japanese -> English (or I should say, I test from Japanese -> Comprehension... ).
- My deck says my recall rate is 96%.
I find that by doing this, there's no upper limit. As a test, I barreled through 15 lists doing this one day (165 words) and had the exact same recall the next day as I usually do with just 4-7 lists. The key is to just spend the exact same amount of time with each word, every time. That's what the "quizzing myself" system does. I encounter them all the exact same amount of times and spend the same amount of time with each. By the way, while the day that I did those 15 lists, it was hellaciously boring. Which is why I don't do it every day.
Here pretty soon, I'm actually going to calm down on my vocab memorization anyways... it's probably my least favorite studying activity.
It helps, as well, that for the past two months I was doing almost exclusively kanji compounds with onyomi readings while going through my Kanji deck again and going from Japanese onyomi compound -> Kanji (using an onyomi compound as each keyword).
Kunyomi-based words are SO much harder to memorize, in my opinion. Isolating them in their own notebook/anki deck has helped, but it's still difficult. Recently I've been experimenting with 5 word lists of these words, then creating a quick mnemonic for each one. This has worked really well, though been a bit more time consuming than I'd like... My next project is to run back through my Kanji deck and give a kunyomi-based Japanese keyword to each kanji. Maybe this will help my recall rate of these words as well.
Hmm, hope this wasn't too confusing. It's really hard to write down the method I use. heh...
Edit: Also, I realize that this is looks like a reject of the "sentence technique." Anyways, I maintain a few Anki decks, including a sentences/random information deck - I like to keep my studying separated like that, makes it easier for me to track my progress. Anyways, I noticed that while doing only sentences, often I'd know what the words would mean before I even got to them based on their context. So I wasn't really reading the words I wanted to study as much as I wanted to. So I wanted to isolate them and really focus on making sure I could understand them, minus their context. Not that context is bad, but maybe you can't rely on it all the time.
Also, when I study only vocabulary cards, I use a rather large font size to -REALLY- analyze the kanji I'm looking at. This helps a lot, since I'm also writing the kanji for many of these words I'm studying with Japanese keyword->kanji cards in my kanji deck.
It should also be noted that I spend a fairly large amount of time either watching dramas or reading each day so a lot of this vocab I learn gets some outside context through that.
Edit #2: The more I think about it, the more I think that memorizing all those lists of only onyomi-based compounds really helped my ability to remember them. That knowledge really builds on itself (learning onyomi readings makes it easier to read words with the same kanji later) and my knowledge of kanji keywords Heisig-style gave me really easy hints into what most words might mean anyways.
