I took words from my reading. When I was at a bit lower-level I worked through a newspaper, highlighting words I didn't know making flash cards of them and then

I took words from my reading. When I was at a bit lower-level I worked through a newspaper, highlighting words I didn't know making flash cards of them and then practicing the flash cards during free time and then reading the newspaper selection later. Here's an entry I wrote about that process: http://toshuo.com/2007/learn-a-language-by-taking-advantage-of-hidden-moments/ http://toshuo.com/2007/learn-a-language-by-taking-advantage-... Every single word encountered this way should make its way into your SRS after learning it. As far as deck strategies, I was an Anki user and didn't like getting too many decks going at once. I tried doing separate decks for each book, video game, etc I was working my way through but it turned out to be huge pain. Now I favor only one deck per language for recognition, one for writing and one for ear training.