>>28207473Mining Stage (years upon years)
Once you got a couple of month of reps under your belt, it's time to start taking off the training wheels and get into the main event - mining your own cards. The idea is to encounter Japanese vocabulary and grammar points in an organic fashion using content made for natives that is not dumbed down or simplified for learners, because the stuff we learn this language for won't be either. Learning via immersion is particularly effective if we consume media that has both sound and Japanese text at the same time, such as anime or dramas with Japanese subtitles or voiced video games. Of course, text-only games, books and manga or content without subtitles are also fine for learning purposes, but if you consume media that has both audio and text, you can train your listening and reading comprehension at the same time, which is probably the most efficient use of your time at this stage.
If you have Anki running and set up everything correctly, you will have very likely noticed that when you look up Japanese words with Yomichan, there's a green plus button in the top right corner. If you click on that, it will draw from the dictionary data in Yomichan and create a card with the word, the sentence you got the word from and a dictionary definition. If we use a program such as Memento or Animebook, we can load a video file and a Japanese subtitle file and do the same thing with anime, dramas and the like, except in that case it will also rip the audio of the sentence and a screenshot of the screen where you got it from. This basically means you can create your own card within one single click whenever you encounter something new that you deem interesting and want to learn. We can do something similar with games, but it might be slightly more complicated. You can extract strings of text from some games such as visual novels using a Texthooker and feed them into an empty HTML page on your browser so you can just mine the dialogue with Yomichan, take a screenshot of the game and record the audio using ShareX. This doesn't work for all games, but unless you are playing an NES or SNES game with pixelated font or a game using an oddly stylized font such as Persona 5, you can just use ShareX's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) function to get the text, iron over potential OCR mistakes (it does a good job in general but it's not perfect) and create your cards that way. For a lot of other games, you don't even need to bother with OCR because the full scripts are out there and you can just keep them open in a different tab and mine directly from there. The possibilities are endless. If you acquire your vocabulary this way, you have two major advantages. The first is that it will be easier to remember, because your brain will almost definitely remember the scene where you mined the word from due to the audio and/or screenshot and you will forever associate that origin with the word itself. I literally get the picture of the scene where I first mined some words in my head whenever I encounter them! This kind of link in your brain makes words much easier to remember. The second advantage is that you will mostly only learn words of domains or topics that you specifically seeak out and that actually interest you and will further help you get better at the domain they come from. If you, for example, like Mecha anime and start mining Gundam and then want to watch VOTOMS next, it'll be much easier because you will be familiar with a lot of the genre vocabulary because you previously mined them. Pre-made decks will always have "random" vocabulary and don't build upon each other this way. So, as a consequence, that means, whenever you start mining a show, it gets easier to watch over time because you already know many of the common words from the previous episodes. The same thing applies for streams. These are harder to mine because there's no subtitles, so you will have to do some transcribing of the sentence you want to mine, but at some point you will be familiar with the way FBK speaks and what kind of language and grammar constructions she likes to use. If you want to mine streams, try looking for Japanese clip channels, they almost always have Japanese hard subs so you can just type them up instead of having to guess by ear, which can be quite hard at the beginning.