Its been about 18 months since I've studied Japanese - I passed the N2 JLPT in December 2010 - and I want to return to some kind of regular reviewing using Anki in order to try to maintain some familiarity with Japanese study!

But I'm not sure where to start. I've got an old deck of 6,000 cards, as well as the Kanzen Master N3 Grammar book, the N2 Grammar book, and the UNICOM N2 Vocab book.

I don't know whether its worth reviewing compounds, going over my old deck, or reviewing sentences.

Any advice?

Is there any reason you need to maintain N2? Why don't you just study as if you're preparing for N1?

I feel like I've lost a lot of my N2 ability. I didn't clear the N2 pass mark with room to spare - I slightly scraped it - and I have limited time to study Japanese now. I want to make the best use of my limited time - but I don't know what to focus on.

Focus on everything!

Do the Kanzen books come with any reading practices? I have the Unicom N2 文字と語彙 book; it has some excellent sample sentences in the answer guide for each vocab item. Maybe start with those? I know there are other N2 books (haven't acquired any yet) that contain longer reading and listening exercises. Those would probably be the best refresher.

Or you could just dive into native material. Depends on what you want to do with your N2 skills moving forward.

so what did you do in those 18 months when you weren't "studying" japanese. Were you at least reading/watching/listening to some japanese content that you find enjoyable? or was it like you just did whatever you do in english?

No I had no interaction with Japanese language content at all.

gaiaslastlaugh, I think mining sentences from the 漢字単語ドリル book might be a good first step. And maybe after that going on to the Kanzen 文法問題 book and mining those sentences in Anki.

Well, I feel like the only reason to take the JLPT is to get a piece of a paper that legitimizes what you do... so I don't see a real need to review something you've already passed even if you've forgotten it.

That's why I feel that working towards JLPT N1 would be a better use of your time if you want more paper.
Alternatively you can actually work with native material. If you passed N2 you should be able to roughly understand native material and study off of it.

so you only study japanese to study japanese? then what's the point? aren't you just going to forget again? or is it this time around you'll keep doing anki reviews even after you finish studying to maintain the info?

would getting the n1 help you get a job or a raise? what is your goal?

Yes, essentially these days I study for the sake of study I lived in Japan in the past, and don't want to completely forget what I learnt. Who knows if one day I'll get a job back in Nippon, or even one that uses Japanese, but for the time being I just want to do some study!

kainzero, you raise a very good point. It's way too easy to get into the mindset that JLPT level is anything more than a simple benchmark of how good you are at passing the JLPT! I will go through the books I mentioned first as I reckon they have useful sentences in that I would do well to refamiliarise myself with - but then I'll move onto a native source - probably an online newspaper.

Thanks for your suggestions.

I'm in an extremely similar situation. Passed N2 in Dec 2010 with not much breathing room, then moved away from Japan in May of last year and haven't studied at all. First it was my work schedule and travel, now it's because I don't know what to study or do in Japanese. Everything I try this time around doesn't stick because I have way more distractions.

Positive point is my wife is Japanese, so we still speak together, but it's mostly day to day stuff.

I tried reading again, PS3 games, Anki, Lang-8. I can't stay motivated/consistent. I'd like to find more Japanese friends as that has always been the best way for me to stay motivated and improve.

I can't help with motivation, because that's an individual thing.

But I can tell you that you can come back from a 5300 card deficit in Anki. I know this is true, because I just did it. Granted, it took 3 months to do, and ended on Sunday with an 800+ card review session, but it's definitely doable. Just chip away at it a few cards at a time. (Anki on a cellphone/tablet helps a great deal in this case.) Each time I cracked a 1000 card barrier felt good. Going clothes shopping with the GF helped a great deal. I knocked out 600 cards in one day, and she got some bargains.

I found it was useful to discover what had slipped my mind, and what still stuck, as opposed to just starting over. Anki is really good at that so long as you're honest with the flunk button.

In my case, I didn't take a long time off from studying (just 2 months or so), but I did take a long break from Anki-- about 6 months.

Also, I found "Review from Longest Interval" helps, because it digs up the easiest cards in your deck and eases you into it. Downside is the last cards you do will all be hard.

Thanks rich- I definitely have some decks with due counts in the thousands. I also think I'm just sick of doing the KO deck- I've spent hundreds of hours reviewing those cards and I just don't want to see them anymore. I'd like to find another deck with audio that's in a similar vein- I've tried using Subs2SRS and never really got into that either.

I do love reviewing on my phone- very convenient.

I burned out on the KO sentences a long time ago, mainly because they were too long and had too much extra vocab in them. So I switched to using dictionaries with much shorter sample sentences with less extra vocab in them. They aren't particularly interesting, but I can go through them at a decent clip. Interesting stuff comes after.

CB's EPWING 2 Anki program is great for getting a bunch of dictionary sentences. Just pop in a word list, and get a bunch of sentences out of it. (I wouldn't recommend using the default Tatoeba sentences, tho, because that's Tanaka Corups stuff. Get a good dictionary.)

If that isn't possible, try DictScrape if you can set aside a small Linux partition. That one scrapes online dictionaries. A little slower, but still better than doing it all manually.