I had the same problem until very recently… I’m halfway through Season 2, and had imported all the relevant kanji decks. Some of it was fine, but the kanji vocab was throwing me completely. I just found myself cycling through the same cards again and again, without ever really remembering them.

I decided that I had clearly missed something, or tried to run before I could walk, so I suspended any cards that were causing me problems for now (pretty much just the kun readings and that katakana card, just as you have done), ignored Anki completely for a while, and went back through it all again on the lessons.
Looking through the kanji pages, I realised I hadn’t devoted enough time to learning the Kunyomi at all. You are correct, there are no mnemonics for the Kun readings, as it’s essentially vocab. It’s just gonna take pure memorisation, same as nouns, verbs etc.

Are you taking any sort of notes to revise from, or is it just Anki and the lessons on here that you are using? I find writing things down really helps me remember them, so I’ve started making my own revision notebook. At the moment I’m devoting an A5 page to each Kanji and its readings, so I can see them all at a glance whenever I have a few minutes to spare.

For me, I can’t use Anki effectively until I am a bit more familiar with what is on the cards. Cycling through the same unfamiliar cards over and over does nothing to help me recall them at all. That could just be me though… I hope you find a method that helps you to remember them. Try not to get too frustrated, it will all click eventually!

(apologies for the lack of hiragana, I’m on my work computer!)

I recommend you make your own mnemonics. It’s fairly easy with most Japanese words. Keep saying the Japanese word over and over again while trying to figure out what it sounds like in English (or any other language you know). You can also make your own words from the starting letters of the hiraganas that are involved in the word. I still remember my mnemonic for the word しんぶん (newspaper). I thought it sounded a bit like “she burned”, so I made the mnemonic “she burned the newspaper”. Sometimes you may have to really stretch it like that, but I find that even then you will remember the words way faster(and longer).

Regardless of mnemonics, as you get used to learning new words, you will get better at remembering them automatically.

I used to use Michel Thomas too… haven’t finished the course yet though (started to get a bit annoyed with the format to be honest… all of their voices grated on me after a while, especially the female student). Will finish it at some point though, as I learnt quite a lot.

I just found the students to be really slow sometimes… how many times did she have to say to the guy ‘Make the word sound long… coooheeee, not like how we say coffee’ and he’s still pronouncing it like in English, with short vowels??
But yeah, it is very helpful once you get used to them. Everything you learn is used over and over again, drawing back old words into new contexts. I like it.

Freezing here this weekend isocracy but thanks! And you’re so right ooh_a_robot, the コーヒー thing drove me crazy too! O_o Annoying!
Ok…where’s my cards………. °~°

http://www.readthekanji.com is a really good website, but once you’ve used it for a while it starts to focus on compound kanji instead of teaching single kanji which is problematic I thought. So I’ve stopped using the website until I have a good grip of the kanji meanings on their own, for that I am using the book Remembering the Kanji which is okay, it works, I think it’s pretty boring but it seems to be one of the best options.

Both of the above use the Joyo kanji list so you are looking at around ~2136 to get through in total, I think Read the Kanji is going to be really useful when I finish this book, it’s also great for learning vocab and reading sentences.