I put all the vocabulary from a Reading Japanese with a Smile story into Anki. It's nontrivial. Since there are still kanji I don't know, I copy them into Kanji Study. Then I do what I usually do with kanji, when I get time: I find other kanji with the same radical using The Kanji Map; make up mnemonics or steal Henshall's; stuff them into Kanji Study as well. OK, this is still fun.
The Anki flashcards look like this: correct spelling (front), phonetic spelling and mnemonic (back).
大晦日
おおみそか, last day of the year
Big day, dark as miso soup, at year's end
Without mnemonics, I'm hopeless. (Except on the easy ones. It's unpredictable what's easy, but I always know.)
Thing is, I'm finding what draws me to Japanese was the beauty of the language, especially its written form. Memorizing weird squiggles without understanding them robs me of that beauty. So I have to get the kanji and understand them, to have an interest in going on.
It helps that Reading Japanese with a Smile is quirky and fun. Not sure it's going to be enough. I may have to go back to my old way of doing it, despite the drawback that I'm not piling on vocabulary that way.
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