I found this site named Quizlet a few years ago during my German classes. I still recommend it even though it doesn’t nudge you into the same regimen that Anki does. At some point they added flickr’s API to the site, so free accounts can search flickr to tie images to their flashcards. You can make some beautifully ridiculous cards that way.

Anki is a great program, but Quizlet has a couple features that make it a worthy complement. It has a couple games that you can play with your flash cards that can be a fun and, at times, infuriating. I made a set of flashcards on Quizlet for TextFugu’s season two vocab. list. You should try the Scatter (it’s like the drag ‘n’ drop kana games) and Space Race games for the set I made. Space Race might seem very easy at first, but don’t let it fool you. Soon enough you’ll see a wall of kana flying across your screen. Make sure you pick “Japanese” where it says “Show…” at the bottom, or prepare yourself to switch between Japanese and English input.

I like to play those two games after I’ve seen a vocabulary list several times. Playing space race in particular helps me master vocab lists. It seems a little too recreational at times, but, hey, you always need to find variety, right? It can be a fun break, anyway.

I can give advice to anyone who makes their own lists with Quizlet: try to avoid any characters that require you to press some modifier key, like asterisks and ampersands. Maybe this only applies for those who become Space Race addicts, but there are few things more frustrating than being steamrolled under a wall of terms because you couldn’t type a question mark fast enough. That makes entering kana directly difficult, but there are other study modes on the site.

Look at Quizlet and tell me what you think. I might post more lists as I go through TextFugu, but there are many Japanese lists on there, much like for Anki. Of course your mileage may vary with any user-created lists, even mine.