Hi guys, I'm using Anki with the core 25000 japanese. The problem is, even if I go through them all I ALWAYS forget them before I review them the following day. It's not like this when I study korean "which I have been speaking for 5 years" so I attribute this problem to having no foundation. My japanese is next to nothing. another problem is that I can only recognize the word if I do know it, and I could never use it off the top of my head.

can anyone suggest a way to tweak the program to be more efficient?
also, how can I change a deck to review in both directions J>E, E>J ?

thanks for the help guys!

Did I understand you right that you started with learning Japanese vocabulary in Anki using a core deck and you tend to forget a lot of them? How far are you? At least I had the same problem, I just knew a bit Japanese after going through RTK, words like 食べる、行く、母 and so on. I started with the tags from "Genki" in the deck as I was parallely working with the same textbook and I just kept adding 20 cards á day. It became quite hard, but you just need to keep it on.
Concerning the deck structure, for vocabulary I use this one:

Question field
Expression (in Kanji)|Sentence

Answer field
Expression (in Kanji plus furigana)|Sentence (with furigana and the corresponding Audio file)|Meaning (of the word from 'Expression')

After 500 cards or so you will feel better :)

What Tori said. Reviewing J->E and E->J may work for some time. But when you are about to mass learn vocabulary, you will soon notice, that many Japanese words translate to the same word in English. So you better review J->E or Kana->Kanji having English on the back of the cards.

If you have little knowledge of Grammar, work through Genki I, II, or Japanese for Everyone first. This will make it easier for you to work with decks such as Core, Kanji Odyssey, because you can fully concentrate on acquiring vocabulary.

In your deck properties you can remove the check next to "Per-day scheduling," so that you can Review whenever cards are due. You find it when you open your deck, Settings, Properties, Advanced. The last option on the bottom of the tab. While there, you can also change the Settings for Initital button 2 interval, 3 interval and 4 interval. For me 0.0333 for button 2, 0.0555 for 3 and 1.0 for number 4 works well. You see the cards more often if you change the settings accordingly.

Also you should read, read, read as much as you can, and look-up words on the Internet. Even if you can't understand much, look for content that you can potentially read. If you don't do it, and do nothing else but learning and reviewing, you will always forget the words, their meanings and everything else. The more you learn, the better your recognition will be, just keep at it.

Edit: Here is a resource where you can find articles for beginners and advanced learners (JLPT 5 - 1) http://chokochoko.wordpress.com/the-great-library/ With the material you can also reinforce learned vocabulary. There are similar resources out there, just browse through some old topics to find them.

Thanks a lot guys! @Nagareboshi- I think I'm gonna use your button settings.
@Tori-Kun- I'm not very far, I'm taking a class at my Uni. but I can barely speak at all "better than most of my classmates because I know korean, but still bad". We're using the Genki book, but I don't know how to set anki to review those words first. I found them listed by tags, and found the Genki one's but I don't know what I'm supposed to press from there.

You can do one of several things, with the following three being the easiest.

Open your deck, click on Study Options, New Cards, Change. At the upper half select the option Show only cards with the following tags, in your case Genki and on the lower half Change settings for Reviews.

The second option you can do is to open your deck, choose File, Export, Limit to Tags and export the cards to a new deck.

The third is to open your deck, click on the magnifying glass, and suspend all cards except the Genki ones.

I don't think I saw it said but, also make sure you have the option "Show new cards in order added" enabled. I know for the corePlus deck that the core2k (and 6k?) were inputted properly so that most cards are building in a n+1 fashion. This makes learning the cards easier as words you'll learn a word and probably see it in a sentence later on for another card.

As far as getting E->J. You can make a new card template in deck properties and in the model, for it. I believe you can then just open card browser and click Actions > Generate Cards, and tell it to generate cards for the new card template. Make sure you try this on a deck backup first.

When you just start out without any previous vocab of course it's going to be hard. The bigger your vocab gets the easier it becomes to learn new words, probably because it all becomes associated in your memory. If you just keep learning words and readings eventually they will stick if you just keep up with reviews.

thanks a lot guys, I'm gonna give it another try now
I know it will get easier as time goes on because my korean is like that now.