Mostly works out fine. There isn't a perfectly strict separation between grammar ant vocab like you imagine. I do it through sentences, so naturally a little vo

Mostly works out fine. There isn't a perfectly strict separation between grammar ant vocab like you imagine. I do it through sentences, so naturally a little vocab is required for that, and that's ok. The goal in the grammar phase is to collect and Anki enough sentences to be able to parse sentences grammatically. I usually need about 3 to 5 sentences for each grammar point. The vocab phase is purely about vocab. Grammar is done at this point. I remember first year of Japanese study was Kanji then grammar. At the end of that first year I knew about 2000 words. The second year was purely vocab. I managed to acquire 10,000 new vocab by the end of the second year. After that point I could understand most spoken and written things with patches here and there. I could hold conversations for hours with a single person. In the 3rd year of study I did much the same. I remember my Anki vocab deck getting up to about 17k words before reviews were at about 300 to 400 a day and the returns were diminishing, so I just deleted the deck. Stopped cold. End of that 3rd year I could read novels pretty well. Hold conversations on any topic for any length of time in group settings. It worked remarkably well. It was damn hard work though.