I’m not sure there is a right or wrong answer for this.

I’ve been following Remembering The Kanji which, if you’re not aware, only teaches you the meanings of and how to remember the joyo kanji. I do my best to get in 20/day – I tried 50 once and dear jesus don’t do that unless you have superpowers – and that seems to be pretty good progress-wise. 340 and counting, which feels pretty good.

The way I study, I do practise writing the kanji out; both because I’d like to be faster at it and because currently my kanji writing looks like an armless, PCP-riddled, drunk, blind guy using his mouth to write with a pen made of butter. Many imagery, such silly, wow. Anyways, by doing this I am able to write a bit faster. Basically what I’m saying is it comes down to practise. I’m constantly in a battle with myself of “why aren’t I better yet?” and I always have to remind myself that I *am* better than I was a month ago, and that it’s a slow thing to learn an entire language. It’s definitely a challenge, especially if you’re very much results-based like me, but it’s very very worth it if you can manage to keep your self-judgement in check. Some days are harder than others, but I can’t really advise on how to overcome that.

In terms of finding what will work and what won’t, you may wish to employ what I am now calling Justin’s Razor – when you don’t know how to do something, start by trying everything. In the span of two days using that, I discovered which studying methods worked for me and what didn’t. Maybe that’s just me, you might have a different experience, but when I tried all of the options, I very quickly figured out what felt “right” and what didn’t.

Have you gone back and looked over season 1? There’s a lot of good stuff that may help you get to a point where you don’t feel that your studies are “less than adequate” with “no consistency.” Here’s what I would do: go watch some TEDx stuff about language learning (the creator of http://www.fluentin3months.com/ has a good one), watch some jvlog videos (I recommend the Abroad In Japan ones if you don’t know where to start), jam on some J-Pop (since all of these list items are getting subtext, throw down to some きゃり ぱみゅ ぱみゅ), and generally just get yourself totally pumped about Japanese. Then, while still high on motivation, go back to season one. Follow it through and do all of the steps – including writing out why you want to learn Japanese, setting up a study area, and another one that I wanted to list but have forgotten about. Just do them all, is the point. Even if you’ve done this before, it sounds to me like what you really need is to re-focus.

Then create, if not a schedule, then a ritual. There is a difference. A schedule adheres you to a time frame. That doesn’t work for me, personally. Scheduled things are easy to miss, and that can completely screw you up. What I do instead is have an outline of what I’m going to do when I study, and then follow that every day. I think it’s the beginning of season 3 or possibly 4, or maybe the end of 3? I don’t know. One of those. It has some studying tips. Try all of them, except maybe the sleeping and napping one because that’s brutal. When I’m having a hard time studying, I always just do the 30/30 one, where I work for a bit, watch half an hour of anime to keep myself in the spirit of Japan, and then back to work, and repeat until my eyes hurt.

I don’t think I’ve really answered your question, have I?

If you’re going to separate kanji and vocab, I’d recommend doing kanji first, solely because of the multiple readings. If you already know the kanji meaning/writing, it’s much easier to associate the vocab to it, I would think. If you really hammer down on kanji, you can have it finished in relatively short order (at 20 per day, it should be less than 4 months). Personally I think it’s best to separate them because it’s a lot of information to learn how to write the kanji, what it means, what the readings are, and the different vocab associated with it.

It must be repeated though that there isn’t a correct answer here, it’s whatever works for you. What works for me is taking it a step at a time, with lots of encouragement sprinkled throughout.

This was shared with me a little while back when I was having motivational issues, and it’s surprisingly effective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxGRhd_iWuE

It might help you when you’re feeling like you’ve dug yourself into a hole. Cause remember, no matter how deep a hole you think you’ve dug, if you had the utilities to dig that hole in the first place, you have the utilities to make hand-holds with which you may climb out. (The less metaphorical version of that is like this: periodically I feel overwhelmed by my anki study because I’ll have 100 kanji show up at once. But the only way I could get to the point where 100 show up was by learning how to write and understand those 100 in the first place. So I stop learning new ones for a day or two, and I just use the exact same process to get myself on top of the ones I already know. I don’t increase my study time or anything, I just apply the time more specifically at review, but using the same methods I use to learn).

I hope this novella has been of at least a bit of value. At least a chuckle or two would be enough for me to feel validated ;) (I don’t actually need validation)

Cimmik that’s a great link! Good breakdown of the different ways of doing it. Although a bit biased lol. I still maintain that trying to learn the kanji meaning, writing, vocab and readings all at the same time is a lot to ask of your brain. I think it works for some people but it definitely does not for me.