If you add cards yourself to a deck, chances are you will care about the words you are learning. This is good because you will be more motivated towards learning, and because you will see an increase in understanding what exactly it is you like to do in Japanese. If you do this through core, you will learn a lot of words, which you will probably never use, and that you won’t care about. Because you only see it through the core examples, you won’t know the proper usage either.

But I think it is up to every person to figure out what works best for them. I still like to get a few new reviews in core 6k sometimes just in order to get some more cards which require listening due. My main focus is however on my monolingual deck.

First of all I recommend getting the add-on which automatically adds furigana to words. It is pretty awesome, and you can save you  a lot of time. Making a new deck is probably also a good idea, and along with that a new template. I myself prefer to have definition -> word
word -> definition/reading

But you can of course change that around to your liking. For example sentences I usually just use jisho or alc since they have mostly meaningful sentences and provide it in an easy to read, easy to copy format. With J-J dictionaries I am all over the place. It really depends if I am happy with the results I am getting.

I already know the verb, but for some reason I had trouble remembering the meaning while I was reading, so I just went ahead and added the noun as well in hopes of never having to think twice when I see this word :) Maybe it was a bad example of how my deck looks. This card was added just so I could see the word more, so that I could remember it better. Once I have the word down I will probably end up deleting it, but for now I will keep it to make sure this word won’t bother me again. I just took a screenshot of the first note I had due today :P

But yes it is 100% self-referential^^’

How about you rename it to “Joel’s help desk” seeing how he is the only one who cares about answering question which can easily be looked up online?

How to look up words as a beginner:

1. go to your dictionary of choice

2. search for example sentences.

3. look at the example sentences, and see how the word is used in context.

233 example sentences on Jisho, if that ain’t enough there are plenty of other resources for example sentences out there.

http://jisho.org/sentences?jap=%E6%AD%A3%E3%81%97%E3%81%84&eng=

Threads to refer to for help

http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/how-do-i-say-thread/page/18/

http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/the-i-found-some-japanese-i-dont-understand-thread/page/34/

(the has no search function so there is no way you would know they exist – which is why I posted them here)

I was pretty much forces to upgrade due to anki shutting down their syncing service this month. the new anki has carried everything over perfectly, and I only lost 1 day of reviews when I changed over – though that was due to my own mistake, not anki’s mistake. If you have media in anki, make sure you read the section about how to get media to work in anki 2 carefully ^^ It is pretty simple, but I didn’t do it, and had to figure out myself where to put the files…

If you don’t use the sync it is pretty much just one click and everything is copied over, I don’t see much reason why you wouldn’t upgrade. The review intervals should have been optimized, there is now improved cramming, and a lot of other cool function. The graph system was in anki, but you can see way more stats and graphs in the new anki :)

He is referring to  the core 2k/6k decks. They contain 6k words in total, with example sentences and audio – it is a pretty good deck overall :) You can either download them through anki og sign up at their website.

your initial questions was

“What level of the JLPT should I be able to tackle at the end of Season 4? How about at the end of Season 8?”

Which is what we answered.