I do this myself as well.

But I actually have a system on top of this, rather than just doing that alone.

I began my Japanese learning myself before I started TF, so I have about 700 Japanese flashcards that I’ve done up, that I’m still working through, which I created at various points when I was studying Japanese in a classroom environment.

I’ve learned about 2/3 of the cards with certainty, but the others are harder for me to absorb for whatever reason.

I basically divide them into a daily deck, weekly deck, and monthly deck. When I drill myself on the daily cards, if I get one correct 5 times (5 days), I move it into the weekly deck, if I get a weekly card correct 4 times, I move it to the monthly deck. If I get a monthly card correct 4 times, I semi retire the card as learned, and I occasionally will go through that pile making sure that I know everything at first glance, if not, it goes back to the daily pile.

As far as the post its go, if I have a card that I get wrong twice in the weekly or monthly deck, I put it back to the daily deck. If this happens twice with any card, then I make a post it of it and put it on my monitor just as you do.

A bit more complicated, but it tends to stop my monitor from being crowded with post its.

Also as a side note, any Anki cards that I have particular problems with, I make a physical flashcard for and put it through the above process. So I’d have to be having a whole lot of trouble with an Anki word before it becomes a post it. The only one I’ve had to do that with so far is the word for police officer and nearly for subway. Those words just wouldn’t stick in my brain for whatever reason.

I got the idea from when my ESL students were having problems with words and I noticed that my housemate at the time used post its to remind him about things on his monitor. They seemed to have good results with this as well.

Basically it’s just a case of saturation. The more you see something the more you will remember it, as they say, out of sight out of mind. You may be correct however, in that it’s only getting stored short term.  Even if you learn a word fairly well, if you were having problems with it before, it’s going to fade away over time.

So as Kanjiman said you need to start using these in sentences.

What I got my students to do was to make huge lists of the words they knew and to break them down into categories: Nouns, Adjectives, and Verbs.

Then I got them to make a separate list of situations they could be in where these words would be used.

For instance a very basic word list:

Apple, banana, food, drink, chair, table, male, female, child, puppy, ball, winter, summer, rain, insects, and textbook.

Situation list:

Having lunch at a cafeteria, eating a snack at school, walking your puppy through a park, daydreaming in class, etc.

So then you would take the situation and try to write a story about it using as many of the words that you know. If you don’t know enough to make a story then just try to write as many related sentences about it.

My students were a lot more advanced so their situations were more like: Renewing your visa at the embassy, applying for a driver’s license, etc.

This helps you retain the words you know, and also points out new words you need to learn if you are trying to make a story and can’t figure out how to explain a part of it.

Obviously this will only be helpful once you get to the point that you do know around 15-20 each of Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives, so you may need more time if you aren’t there yet.

Protip: You essentially made a physical SRS.

Second Protip: The reason why it works is because you write it down.

Write people, WRITE.

One of my instructors got me to do that once, and it was just annoying as they got everywhere.

It’s a good idea, but I think a better way would just be to add the words to your Anki deck. So every week look around your house and identify a certain number of objects that you don’t know and add them to your deck.