If I were you, I would focus on easy to understand and enjoy listening and reading content. Stuff like shounen manga, dramas, anime, nature documentaries and things. With these things you have additional context (pictures and video) that helps you comprehend and enjoy the content while your vocabulary is still too low to understand a lot. Even though you say you want to concentrate on reading, I think you should devote at least as much time (if not more) to listening as this is what will improve your real-time grammar intuition which will improve your reading in a round about way. Try to spend the majority of your study time on reading and listening and some of your time on your vocab/grammar studies.

I looked around for some easy stories since that seems like the natural progression, but easy stories are mostly kana, with very few kanji. This is a bit hard for me to read since I sometimes don't know what a word means if it's not in kanji (probably due to my kanji->kana+meaning cards), and there's also words I don't know yet obviously. I was thinking about converting the stories from kana to kanji first and then using them as reading material.
--->>

Do not do that. Just find anything you want to read. There's rikaichan and other tools to help you.

Zarxrax wrote:

I would definitely suggest practicing the stories that are in kana, rather than just skipping over them. You can't always depend on words to be written in kanji, so you have to get over that hurdle at some point. And if you ever want to listen to Japanese, you aren't going to have kanji available to help you there, either :p

I'll second that. If you read some kids' books that are heavily kana, you'll also pick up a lot of common vocab along with context. The Magic Tree House books in Japanese are great for this - lots of common vocab in short, simple sentences. I've also heard good things about 魔女の宅急便, but haven't checked them out myself. Might be more useful going that route and adding to your own custom deck than doing Core6K.

I'd also recommend the stories on http://hukumusume.com/douwa/betu/index.html. You'll hit some more classical terms plus speech mannerisms that aren't that common, but you'll still pick up a ton of vocab and grammar reinforcement. Plus a lot of the stories have word-for-word audio for listening comprehension.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I tried those stories and some manga and can read them fine (with lookups). Manga seems nice since the speech is more casual but in order to lookup words I have to write them on firefox and use rikaichan, which is a bit annoying.

As for the kana only studying, I figured after reading more it should naturally come, no? Some words I couldn't understand if they were in kana, but could in kanji, started making sense after a while without trying, just by reading them in kanji. That's why I'm not really worried about not recognizing them right now.

Finally, about the listening, I really am terrible at it so subs2srs seems a bit overwhelming. Do you think I'd benefit from having, say, a seperate core2k deck just for listening since I can already read it? Something like sentence(audio only) -> sentence(written).