The way that I've been studying Japanese has been ridiculously inefficient.
Both in time and paper.
Anki and Memrise are paper free and are supposed to be incredibly time efficient. But I have a lot of trouble sticking with either. Like I would keep up with it for a month, and then I had a bad day and didn't go back to it for a few months and at that point I really felt like I was starting over.
Writing my notes on paper though, it feels like I'm actually making progress and I've been able to keep it up for several months.
But it's a huge amount of paper and it takes a couple days before I am noticeably getting better at word recall.
So I am trying something different. Making paper flashcards.
Took this list of 7200 words with two translations each that someone wrote up, added a few extra things. Spent a few hours working on excel tricks to automate part of this.
And mostly automated those 7200 vocab words into 2300 cards, where each card is organized by character. So each card has between 0 and 7 words.