Also, I should add that, as an educator, I have pretty strong feelings about turning learning into a competition. In my view it should always be collaborative. If you have found something that helps you, you should share it. The purpose of learning something should be to take steps in the direction of decreasing ignorance, not raising your status over that of others. Don’t take this personally. I know in text format, things tend to sound harsh but that is not my intent. Just pointing that out. :)

I don’t see what the target of the second card is.

I was thinking of starting to throw a J-J vocab deck together too…

分かる is an intransitive verb and may be better translated as “to be understood” than “to understand”. You do use が　not を.

With ～たい, I think both are fine. From the (admittedly little) searching around I’ve done, it looks like が was more common traditionally but を has come into use more recently as the language has become more influenced by the west. If you think about the way たい is used, it is much closer to and adjective than a verb and if thought of that way, が does make more sense.

Reading native material asap is a good idea in my opinion so I fully support you on your decision to try and read Harry Potter. In fact, I’ve been trying to do a similar thing with Spiderwick Chronicles. However, I noticed the same problem with my reading as with my listening: it’s too easy. It’s not that hard to be able to pull the meaning out of the sentences while filtering out what you don’t completely understand. Then you stop progressing when you reach a “good enough” point. That’s the point of the textbook.

I started the 日本語総まとめ series yesterday for for the JLPT N3. I bought all the books; kanji, vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension and listening comprehension as well as a book with two sample tests. Each book is supposed to take six weeks but I decided to do kanji and vocabulary together first, then grammar, then listening and reading comprehension together. It should take 18 weeks meaning I finish around the middle of June. I imagine I’ll miss some time for various things and will give myself to the end of June to get through everything and then take the practice tests in July. Then look into starting some sort of intermediate textbook from there. My plan is to take N3 in December and I’d like to be able to breeze though them easily.

So any intermediate text suggestions?
I’m leaning towards Tobira.

It also doesn’t explain why sites other than texfugu display Japanese characters perfectly fine in Chrome. Nor does it explain why this would have only started to matter after the last update.