Most people initially use SRS for basic recognition. Reading is the first step.
That means kanji on front, kana and definition on back.

IMO this would be the "best" place to start.

Eventually, as you become more familiar with Japanese, you'd transition into writing (kanji on back). There's other ways to do this such as cloze deletion...
Search around. Experiment with Anki, find whatever works for you.

[But don't make yourself suffer trying to find the perfect method. Enjoying real media is the main priority]

Last edited by Aspiring (2013 March 25, 11:49 pm)

After a bit of experimentation, I now do kanji on the front, reading, definition and a picture on the back. I initially put the picture on the front, but found I only learned to associate the word with the picture and wouldn't recognise the kanji. The pictures do seem to help from the connection a lot quicker, and make the cards more interesting, they take longer to make, though.

But yep, you'll find what works best for you, wouldn't worry about it too much.

The way I do it is

Front:
架空 (erect, empty)
1: aerial; overhead;
2: fiction; fictitious; imaginary; fanciful
----------------------------------------------

Back:
かくう

The thing is, there are three things (kanji, meaning, pronunciation) you need to know. Ideally, you'd make them in all three directions (for a total of 6 cards / fact). Combining two of those into one side simplifies it much (only 2 cards/fact). I've chose to combine kanji and meaning, because very often, the kanjis give a huge clue on the meaning (especially when you review it, maybe not so much when learning it for the first time). Hope this helps!

I try to keep it monolingual while having the english def there if i'm stumped...

so for my core cards,
_____
Q: kanji word

A: hiragana
    example sentence w/furigana
    (audio of example sentence)
    <english def. only revealed upon mouseover>
_____

A simple japanese def would probably be useful but core doesn't provide that and I couldn't be bothered to provide one for 8,000 cards. The example sentence works fine and the audio aspect is hugely beneficial for attaching a correct pronounciation to the word from the very beginning.

Like Ampharos64, this is the way I do it for my vocabs and Kanji cards:
Front > Japanese kanji or word
Back > English meaning and reading

Btw, how long does it take you to create an entire deck of cards for, let's say one JLPT level?
I tried making my own for N1 and N2 but it's taking me forever and it sort of eats into my review time

Well N1 has a list of 10,000 possible words if I recall correctly. If you use a premade deck like Core6k, it'll will cover about half of those words while saving you time from individually making each word.

Essentially what I did was go through Core6k premade deck. After that, I created my own vocab deck which contains words from what I read. I use a combination of Rikaisama to quickly save words to a text file and then epwing2toanki to generate a list of definitions and example sentences from epwing dictionaries. In the question side, I just have the word itself and then in the answer side, I have the reading, definition and 3 example sentences to show me how it's used.