Can't recommend anki flash cards enough. One thing that I found important is that you need to build the deck yourself and you'll miss out a lot by using prebaked decks of any kind. Reasons:
- Context is the king. Most of the words have multiple meanings and it's easier to remember them if you just added them from a text you've read. Moreover, this approach gives you an opportunity to see the words being used in the wild which gives confidence on when to use the word/idiom
- Words with no context are just harder to learn
- 3rd party decks will give you loads of words you don't care about
For learning French I've found kwiziq much more useful. Very little gamifications and lots and lots of training and exercises with examples that actually make sense
I've been working on an idea for a long time which is to break classic public domain books (in the original foreign language) into small chunks for study of the source language.
An example passage is here (from one of the greatest works of Japanese literature, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki).
If you click on any passage, you can see all the kanji and the translation of that passage in full.
Each kanji is clickable and displays the proper stroke order and animates it. You can practice writing the kanji and then save that for later.
What's unfinished is I want to allow you to save kanji into Anki and build out flashcards.
If there is a cohort of people reading the same passages, they can help each other with grammar questions, and this is all facilitated because the site is built on the incredible discussion platform "discourse."
I took a in person Spanish class for 2 weeks and then tried to continue with Anki and I found it painful since it did not do anything for my pronunciation...
Of course, using it during the class was invaluable
- Context is the king. Most of the words have multiple meanings and it's easier to remember them if you just added them from a text you've read. Moreover, this approach gives you an opportunity to see the words being used in the wild which gives confidence on when to use the word/idiom - Words with no context are just harder to learn - 3rd party decks will give you loads of words you don't care about
For learning French I've found kwiziq much more useful. Very little gamifications and lots and lots of training and exercises with examples that actually make sense