I'm planning on sticking notes around the house with short sentences that detail what I'd think or be saying in situations.

For example, a few notes on the fridge that have sentences like:
"I want to eat (X)"
"I ate (X) at (X) time and then I went to (X)"

or
"I should watch (X) before doing (X)"
"I need to use the crapper before I (X) myself"lol
"I trained my combos in SSF4 and it helped alot when I played online last"
"That movie was funny as hell"

or whatever. No translations to English, but I may use furigana.

Has anyone tried something like this? Tips on.anything?

This is the kind of thing that sounds good in theory, but I'll guarantee you get bored of it and you'll very quickly stop paying any attention to those little sticky notes. Just focus on methods that grow your language ability, listening/reading or textbook study if you can enjoy it. Forget about sticky notes, paper flashcards etc and use an srs. I used to make paper flashcards cards but it's way too easy to neglect reviewing them.

I just noticed that Windows 7 comes with a 'sticky notes' program.

I actually tried this "sticky notes" thing once (when my parents were on vacation for a day..): i wrote thousands of them everywhere in the house, ony teabags, teabox, sugar jar, pots, just everywhere, on a chair and desk f.e., on the door.. Everywhere. Somehow my parents did not like the idea and i had to remove them (was a good gag anyway.. they were kinda scared of all the kanjis they cannot read and thought i went crazy or what writing some kind of anti demon seals everywhere in the house).. Prolly it'd have worked out learning all the vocabularies f.e. in that way, but couldn't test it for longer than 24 hours.. Worth a try when you live alone

a fridge that asks you questions and unlocks only if you can answer them correctly... that could possibly work.

While I think the idea behind this approach is interesting (and dramatic), I don't think that this is a viable way to learn any real amount of vocab. How many notes are you going to put up? 100? 200? 300? Think about that - that's a lot of post-it notes.

You are going to spend more time writing and posting them around the house then you would need to learn them via SRS. Also I don't see how this would work for everything except nouns, and even then, that limits you only to stuff you have around the house.

So save yourself some time, suck it up, and start a vocab deck in anki

For sticky notes, try evernote.
it can store notes in the cloud and also has tagging support.
It is available for nearly all platforms including mobile phones.

Evernote blows, for sticky notes stick with sticky notes. But the OP is referring to dead-tree versions.

Tori-kun Wrote:I actually tried this "sticky notes" thing once (when my parents were on vacation for a day..): i wrote thousands of them everywhere in the house, ony teabags, teabox, sugar jar, pots, just everywhere, on a chair and desk f.e., on the door.. Everywhere. Somehow my parents did not like the idea and i had to remove them (was a good gag anyway.. they were kinda scared of all the kanjis they cannot read and thought i went crazy or what writing some kind of anti demon seals everywhere in the house).. Prolly it'd have worked out learning all the vocabularies f.e. in that way, but couldn't test it for longer than 24 hours.. Worth a try when you live alone

Ha. Same thing happened to me. I used removable tape (post-its kept falling off) on a bunch of stuff (and book titles) in an afternoon, but when my parents came home...yikes. I did it to my room for a while though.

It really doesn't work, because you do end up ignoring them. Making kanji review posters on florescent board and putting them in the bathroom seemed to work, but not labeling things.

If there's any benefit to it at all, it's looking up all those words and writing them. That's probably the most concentration you'll ever spend on the things.