I'm on a drive to learn as much vocabulary as possible.
The longer I study Japanese, the more the enormity of the task becomes apparent to me, and therefore the more time I end up committing to it.
On recent consideration of how slow my progress was becoming I decided to start watching as much TV as possible. My self-satisfaction at being able to work out what the plotline of a particular drama was was soon tempered by the realization that over 50% of the vocabulary is still unknown to me. Hence the vocab drive.
Using the Anki flashcards and the tangorin dictionary website I've set up a system where every new word I come across is saved into tangorin, and then example sentences uploaded to anki at the end of the month. I'm then able to review the vocab over the next couple of months on my phone.
I've actually been using this system for over a year now, and I'm starting to see some good results. It's a good feeling when a word you have recently been learning crops up on TV and your understanding of that word opens up a whole new area of meaning to the conversation that you're listening to. It's like an extra light being turned on in a badly lit room.
