I did the sentence thing for a long time, but I got really tired of that, and I wasn't really satisfied with my progress.
So now I've decided to focus on single vocab words. I've been using a core6000 deck and going through about 30 words a day, which is a much better rate than I was doing sentences. However, my retention is horrible. I am using the learning mode plugin for anki to initially drill the words, and thats working out great. But I find that when the words go out to an interval of a few days, I just cant remember them. I'm talking about maybe 50% failure rates on my new vocab.

I was wondering if maybe it would help me if I have 2 sets of cards, one just for testing the reading the the kanji, and another for testing the meaning of the word. This would be nice because I will only be testing myself on one piece of info instead of two, but on the downside, it seems like I would basically be doubling my workload.

Anyone else split it up like that? How'd it work out for you?
Any other suggestions for drilling these words into my head?

I'd say just keep doing 30 a day, eventually the vocab will retain itself. Best to read outside the srs, trust me it helps a lot.

I've been sentences/vocab(sentences for 1 year now, vocab for 6months+). I must say that vocab has made my understanding to a high level. Sentences provide context though, so it's definitively recommend you read a lot outside the srs

As for the understanding, it's quite strange but I either don't provide a meaning and if i do I provide a monolingual look-up or a translation. Eventually after immersing,reading and srsing a lot of sentences/vocab. It just made sense. I believe doing RTK1+3 helped me understand it internally(knowing the kanji meanings, but this eventually got replaced with japanese ones)

Here is what I did back when I was doing my crazy JLPT vocab marathon (oftentimes 100+ words a single day).

* Review all expired cards - reviews are more important than new material
* Go through new vocab in the deck. Make note of any words that have new readings or have kanji that don't relate to the word these are words that may cause you problems.
* Don't spend more than a couple of seconds on words where you know readings and kanji make sense, you'll probably remember these solid after just a couple reviews.

By now you have added all of your cards, and have a list of maybe like 20-30 problematic words that will be hard to remember (in your case doing 30 a day, this should probably be only 10 or so).

* Split words into groups of 5-7 (I like to do this in google docs)
* Cram top-bottom in every group until you remember all readings and meanings, this should only take like 2 minutes per group or so.
* Save this list and repeat this next morning. Or if it's on google docs, just pull it up at work/school and look over it very quickly during the day.

Usually after this, by the time you go to review, you will get about 75% on first pass, which I think is great! And everything else, just keep failing them, eventually you will remember!

Basically the most important thing I've found (for me at least) is to study the vocab not once, but twice or three times before doing your first review. I was actually using a variation of this method for doing kanji back when I was going through RTK1 & 3

I dont really see much benefit of splitting up your cards according to meaning and reading, but you could maybe do production and recognition using the same cards. Anki makes that pretty easy to setup. Its probably a good way to reinforce the information. I never went through with this plan myself.

My personal favourite method for vocab is to read through example sentences and then create my own definitions for the words. They usually end up really wordy, and its kinda time-consuming, but I get a lot out of it. I am also able to sort out synonyms directly (these become a real problem if youre doing production vocab cards).

I feel like I am in the same boat as you, and I must say, I dont think I ever learned anything from all the sentence study I did. But I think I'm on the right track now. Case and point: I didnt understand the words "saki, nochi, ushiro, mae, and ato" and their differences until I went after and systematically studied their usage. I dont think I ever would have understood just from "context". Context seems more like an excuse to take for granted the finer points of grammar than a valid method of learning anyway.

After completing Core2K with only sentences I found myself slightly frustrated in seeing a lot of the Core2K words and not being able to recognize them outside the context of the sentence I learned it in. Basically that indicated I wasn't really learning meanings of individual words but rather learning to recognize and read entire sentences (which has merit!).

I created a separate Core2K deck in which I presented the Core2K vocab word alone, out of context and reviewed that. I found that I had really strong feelings for general connotations of words, but could very rarely nail down a proper definition. The good news was that I could review 200 vocab words a day easy, because they are so fast compared to sentences. So right now I have a vocab out of context to go along with my Core6K endeavors. Basically when I start a new Core6K step I start the vocab-only and sentence-only decks simultaneously. If I do 30 sentences per day, opening up the vocab-only deck and doing 30 stand alone vocab words takes, literally, a few minutes. I feel like this focused attention on single words really strengthens my readings of the sentences, too.

One final note: I did do experiments with vocab-only cards (the thought being, "hey, at this rate I could do ALL of Core6K in no time, then just start reading whatever!"). My results were that the Core6K steps that I tried with vocab only and no sentences were, not surprisingly, all the vocab words that I remember for 3 iterations and then on their fourth iteration, a month or whenever down the line, I can't remember. I find that I keep reviewing a lot of the words that I did without sentences.

My conclusion is that to review vocab only and no sentences is really inefficient in terms of long term memory (for me), but as reviewing vocab only cards takes such a trivial amount of time I just do it in parallel with sentences and things seem to work well.

k.