A totally new tack: Anki

This study method is a work in progress.

I found I was reading ライオンと魔女 and the new words, I'd forget as soon as I looked away from them.  How do I get myself to remember new vocabulary?

On reddit, Anki the online flashcard program is a god only rivaled by the almighty Genki. I tried it before on my desktop computer.  It was clunky; I couldn't find things easily.  It was bossy.  "You want to look over this deck again?  Sucks to be you, huh?  NO."

But if it's designed for remembering things, and I'm not remembering things, and I'm not ready to get out index cards and a Sharpie... Anki's promise includes "spaced repetition," which is supposed to get you learning things appropriately.  (You see a flashcard when you've almost forgotten it but not quite, essentially, and Science Has Revealed that this is the best way to cram things in.)  Well, I like science.

So I took the first short story in Reading Japanese with a Smile -- nine stories from Japanese weekly Shuukan Asahi, with almost everything defined and discussed for language learners -- and put all the vocabulary I didn't know into an Anki deck.

Now instead of looking at the book and forgetting the word instantly, I can look at the deck and forget it instantly.

So I put in mnemonics.  It's helping some.  だいこんげき , "deeply moved," I remembered when I woke this morning based on "The key to deeply moving Gaye is a daikon radish" -- ack -- but mostly I'm forgetting the mnemonics too.

One reason is the kanji:  despite work in Kanji Study, I don't know them all.  So today I put them all into Kanji Study.  Several reasons this is annoying:

• I can't just select all and put 'em on the clipboard.  I have to go to each individual card and highlight what I want.  Can't just swipe between cards, either; go into a card, highlight and copy, go to Kanji Study, select +, select Add from Clipboard, go back to Anki, get out of the card, do it all again.
  
  There may be a way to export the deck to CSV, load it in Excel, and then put it into another program; IDK.
• I can't browse the cards for an individual deck; I can only browse all cards in the database at once.  (This is Android version.)  This is going to be a pain when I add the next deck for story #2.
• It doesn't match with the way I've been using Kanji Study:  learn kanji by common component, rather than by occurrence in a particular bit of text (!).  Oh, well, this was going to happen eventually, no matter what methods I use.

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OK, it's been a few days.  I am getting the flashcards eventually.  It feels like very shallow learning -- I see a word and guess how it's pronounced and I'm right, but I don't know why I'm right and I'm sure I'll forget in a couple of days.

But I've got to get vocabulary expanding or I'll never get anywhere.  So I'll give it a fair shot.