Production vs Recognition
In "How I Passed 2Kyuu" you said
I entered all of this data into SuperMemo. First, I made a flashcard with the kanji and reading as the question and the English meaning as the answer. Then I made a second flashcard with the kanji and English meaning as the question and the Japanese reading as the answer. Then I added the example sentence as the question with the reading as the answer. I added furigana (using parentheses) behind any words I didn't know that were also in the example sentence. Over time, as I learned those words, I cut and pasted the furigana from the question to the answer (SuperMemo allows you to edit questions even as you answer them).
I'm confused about the idea of "Production" versus "Recognition" in Anki, and the structures you mention above. Anki sets it as:
JAPANESE => YOMIKATA + ENGLISH (Recognition)
ENGLISH => JAPANESE + YOMIKATA (Production)
I realised that for the JLPT you don't need "Production", so your way fo doing JAPANESE + YOMIKATA -> ENGLISH and JAPANESE + ENGLISH -> YOMIKATA is more tailored to this, but I'm worried that I'll miss out on important speaking vocab building by not doing ENGLISH => JAPANESE + YOMIKATA. Surely this "production" method means that you actively associate Japanese sentences with their English equivalent, expanding your spoken vocabulary? What do you think?
Cheers!
.
I disagree
I would not use the Anki defaults to memorize sentences and test myself on recalling them from English; this is too time consuming and not very helpful in the end anyway.
For vocabulary, production might be useful. But, personally, I don't think it will help you prepare for the 2kyuu- or your general studies- much. The reason for this is that even on the 2kyuu (not to mention the 1kyuu), there are too many words with similar meaning, and trying to recall which should be linked with which English word is too much of a pain, if it's even possible.
For example, say you have the English word "development." This would be a fair translation for 発展（はってん） and also for 開発（かいはつ）. So, which is the correct answer? At the 2kyuu level, you will probably start to realize that Japanese words don't map to English very well; as the cultures are so different, the way in which words are deployed to give meaning is varied to the point where trying to recall a Japanese from an English "equivalent" will be not only difficult but often not helpful. In cases like these, I think all Japanese example sentences are much more helpful than English translations.
If you want to improve your vocab, a more effective method is to use Cloze deletion in the example sentences. Simply input a quality example sentence and delete the word you want to remember, and test yourself on remembering that word. This method, too, has some problems (there may be several words that are appropriate, so you are hesitant to grade yourself with a "wrong" answer if you remember a correct word, but not "the" correct word).
This is one of the reasons I don't recommend Anki; unlike SuperMemo, Mnemosyne, and many of the other spaced repetition programs, its default settings are not informed by research, but appear to be just the result of what people thought might be cool.
Regards,
Kaeru