I consider this a feature rather than a bug 
“huh, I added this two years ago and have never seen it since. delete”
There are a few words burned into my memory from Anki early on that I see again finally years later and am like “… Was that worth it?” 
The textbooks I used were Genki and Quartet, and although I disdain learning from textbooks to the point where I view them as a tool to get to where I want rather than a form of learning that I actually enjoy, they were tolerable enough to not drop.
Without a teacher there to force you to do all the exercises, even the ones you don’t want to do, it’s really easy to skimp on the practice exercises. So I made sure to do as many exercises as I could to the best of my ability. For Genki that meant using the sethclydesdale website, and I did every exercise at least once. I did the workbook for Quartet 1 but didn’t find it useful enough to continue with the Quartet 2 workbook. I also prioritized keeping up with the WK study group, so that meant I skipped some of the speaking sections, but in the end I probably completed at least 90% of Quartet. There’s no website like sethclydesdale for Quartet, so I uploaded my exercises and writing assignments from it to Langcorrect.
In the beginning I was able to dedicate a lot of time to textbook work, because I wasn’t at a level where reading or watching would be beneficial. I spent 30-60 minutes per day on Genki, then another ~30 minutes on WK, and then a few minutes reading graded readers or the like. By the time I started Quartet I was able to consume native media, which I found much more interesting than a stuffy textbook. This is part of what lead to me developing a distaste for textbook learning, because why would I want to sit at a table with my nose in a book learning all the minute little rules when I could go learn organically instead? I ended up doing Quartet for 20-30 minutes per day, but not happily. By the end I was stewing and moping and brooding my way through the book, thinking this time could be better spent elsewhere.
I’m currently working my way through A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar, and plan to continue with the advanced version. No matter which grammar resource someone chooses, I think these dictionaries are useful for filling in any leftover cracks in knowledge. They’re also useful as a cross-reference, for the few times your main source didn’t explain something in a way that you understand.
That is a definite downside. For anyone who this may be useful for:
If you’re doing the pre-built decks, you’ll probably still have to initially tell it you know a number of words, but the same would be true of someone starting completely fresh in Anki (tho it’s arguably easier with Anki’s “browse deck” feature)
That’s a very fair frustration. Someone has built a jpdb importer, with recommended additional plugins that basically replicate what jpdb does.
Guessing it won’t be worth it for you, given that you have such a finetuned Anki setup, but figured I’d mention, since it might be useful for others here as well
That’s fair. Maybe the code from the importer I linked above will be useful for that? It works well for me, bc that’s basically the format I want, and it has pre-built decks, with stats, for various media. I generally don’t wanna bother with customization, tho I might check out some of those Anki plugins to use with my 固有名詞 (proper nouns) deck
That was very interesting, I might take some inspiration from that when I get back to Tobira in December/January!
I tried to break it down as well, but not as in depth.
I usually do not do it in a week though, but spread it across 2-3 weeks. I also have the vocab and kanji in my SRS.
Day 1
Do Introduction Pages, if something interesting on there, look it up (some chapters are boring… I hated the robot and the sports chapter)
Listen to the main text audio only
Read main text without looking anything up
Read through vocabulary, highlight unknown words in the list
Day 2
Read main text again, highlight unknown words/kanji and look them up.
Listen to the dialogues audio only
Read and shadow dialogues and vocabulary, highlight unknown words (directly, since they are shorter texts)
Answer the reading understanding questions
Day 3-4
Work through grammar section, tackling 2 pages or ~5 grammar items each batch
Read example sentences and highlight grammar structures in main text/dialogues
Cross-lookup grammar in A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar and bunpro
Do the grammar exercises per batch
Do the kanji writing sheets (just tracing and memorizing)
Day 5
Do the application grammar exercises (writing longer sentences incorporating the grammar)
Read and shadow the dialogue practice dialogues and practice applying them
Do the kanji PDF from the website
Day 6
Do the extra grammar PDF from the website
Do the expansion grammar exercises (writing a short essay incorporating the grammar)
Might review some exercises online on Tobira Exercises | Tobira Study Resources
Day 7
Do the pairwork exercises (in lack of partner with AI - I usually give it the whole task description plus the roleplay character description - it doesn’t matter if it’s not fully accurate, as a IRL practice student would also not be accurate)
Read the extra cultural note
Look at the extra material on the website (video questions and extra dialogue practice, but the videos are super dated - kind of like video cassette in the 80s quality)
Review by re-reading all the text and focusing on grammar
Hello
Im gonna preface this by saying i dont have a lot of experience studying Japanese, Ive only been at it for less than a year so I get nervous giving advice, but i wanna suggest watching anime first then going to read the manga without worrying about its difficulty level. Honestly I think jumping straight to N2 territory (aka fun territory) and struggling a lil bit would be more sustainable than stagnating on a level you think is dry. Learning vocabulary from anime before learning its kanji is easier and more realistic than adding them to your anki then learning them in context later.
Also, i think grabbing a textbook or two about 敬語 would improve your reading and listening comprehension vastly especially because you’ll find a lot of 敬語 in upper levels, I like the one I’m reading rn but there’s also a newer edition, both come with audio as well.
But if you find it boring you can scout the internet for native material there’s an ocean of it out there. Good luck!
Edit: i forgot to recommend 出口日語channel on youtube that helped me a lot with n3-n1 grammar. Having someone explain JP grammar to me in JP changed my life literally haha, if you are Chinese you can also check his n5-n4 levels and honestly i envy you 
it also made grammar textbooks easier to navigate because i already knew what to expect after finishing his videos.
Slightly random question, but what sort of process do you use to use these as a study tool?
Curious as I have these and was trying to just read through them or use them when I needed to check certain grammar but I rarely seem to be able to remember stuff from them so I mustn’t be using them effectively.
This is awesome, thank you for breaking this down into chunks and explaining in depth. I’ve never taken formal classes so having this explained piece meal is super helpful and insightful 
What textbook do you use for 敬語？
にほんご敬語トレーニング - it has a newer edition 新・にほんご敬語トレーニング . personally i prefer the older one because it’s written entirely in -simple- japanese. the 新 one has english and korean (maybe chinese) translations which dont benefit me because none of these languages are native to me so i try to limit my study to jp only to avoid unnecessary confusions.
If you (or anyone else) wanted something a little less textbooky (but still educational) there’s: 満点ゲットシリーズ ちびまる子ちゃんの敬語教室 集英社児童書 | L22??.
There’s a whole series of books for kids teaching different aspects of language (I also have the 四字熟語 book). It probably helps a little to be familiar with the ちびまる子 characters but it isn’t going to matter all that much.
fwiw I think there are similar series with Doraemon, if that’s your truth.
Since I’ve finished Quartet, and am reading N3~N2 level books, I’ve already seen many of the grammar points presented in the intermediate version. The extent of my knowledge for most of these points is in the realm of “I’ve come across this while reading and looked it up a few times” so my knowledge was still fuzzy. The dictionaries presented me with the usage rules and 10+ examples that really hammer the point in. I tried using it earlier this year, but at that point most of the information was brand new to me, and I don’t think it was as effective.
Then once I’ve read a grammar point I unsuspend that card in Anki. I’m reading it cover to cover but it could also be used to learn the points as you come across them while reading. Kinda like how a dictionary is supposed to be used…
Another thing this has reminded me to recommend,
this site has a tonne of lessions aimed at various school levels.
I think some lessons give really good viewpoints of the language, that sometimes textbooks miss (and they’re more visual/interactive), e.g. 言葉の単位と文節
Thanks, I forgot about the 新 one, I’ve seen that before (but don’t have it yet ). The one in simple Japanese sounds like a better option for me too as I had more luck with trying to learn the grammar etc using Japanese than I have using English.
Cool 
I’ll check this out, thanks.
Thank you. The grammar not being familiar to me is probably why I wasn’t being able to hold onto the info so maybe once I’m better with it, using these as a refresher might be more efficient. I’m just not there yet then. 
The way I tended to use these (and other similar reference grammar works) was purely to look up specific items:
This topic is great! Am enjoying getting a peak into everyone’s study routines.
@shitsurei It seems what you want is to go from Natively 20-25 to >30, and while I’m sure textbooks can help a bit, since your issue seems to be lookups (not grammar) I think what will help most is “just” reading books at that range and learning the vocab you need as you go. I’ve recently gone from reading L 23 books straight into a 32 novel, so maybe some of the thoughts below might be relevant.
I’m reading the harder one very slowly, though, but it does get dramatically easier as I go, so much like how starting to read at all was a hump to get over, I suspect reading novels (mostly 30+ books) is the same - at first there is more intensive reading practice required (so I read easier stuff alongside extensively to not go crazy). While I think a mid-range (25-28) book would have eased this a lot, the mid-range manga I’ve read seem to be rated highly due to their highly specific vocab. I don’t feel (at least the manga I have read) were good prep for me getting into a novel tbh. Read what you are most excited by!
My textbook/grammar experience: I got my grammar from Genki I+II, Satori glosses, and conversation practice over the years. That got me firmly into reading Zenitendo which I loved. I recently attempted to start Quartet but it’s not competing well with books for my attention so I understand your issue there.
And so far the vocab I’ve seen in Quartet (N3 textbook) isn’t helpful for reading fiction, and as you also read a lot extensively at N20-25, I think you’d be like me, you’ve already covered most of N3 grammar. That’s why I’m not convinced a textbook like Tobira is going to solve this for you. I’m finding the textbook great more for pushing my production into the N3 range, but finding that harder to motivate. But is it helping my reading or looking like it will help my reading? No, the huge challenge for the novel is vocab and I’d rather learn that in a context I’m highly interested in.
For making the paper back novel I’m reading less painful (N 32), I’d say the most helpful things are joining with a book club (this is IBC, and it’s helpful even though I’m reading slower) and word frequency lists. Mostly word frequency lists because that is the real time sink, and it sounds like it is for you as well.
Having a frequency list helps with the low tolerance for lookups, and the book clubs help with the ambiguity. That said, I think getting comfortable with ambiguity has helped me a lot. Normally if I read something ambiguous but just keep pushing for 3-5 pages, it clears up because I see where the arc is going, so I just go back and reread those pages and it’s fine.
Here are some thoughts on alternatives to JPDB and how I use it (it took me a while to find a way I like to use it).
Basically, I’m just agreeing with the folks who said something like this:
Wow, thank you everyone for all of your posts. I’m (finally) circling back since it seems like we’re quieting down in this thread.
I had been hesitant to get back into anki/SRS. I spent way too long reviewing the core decks, playing around with card styling, and going through RTK while rarely engaging with native (or even fully in Japanese content for learners). I’ve made a ton of progress dropping formal study and just reading and watching native content, but it feels like maybe I’ve either started to stagnate (or maybe more optimistically) I’m approaching a level where the time it would take to happen across all of the vocabulary I need to know to get where I’m wanting to be is longer than I want it to take without SRS. So I’ve restarted an anki deck with only words that I’ve encountered during reading or words from books that I’m pre-studying in order to read later.
I also think that I tend to sell my ability short, and have noticed that I’m frequently writing off my ability to engage with harder content without giving it a try. I’m going to do my best to take Natively levels as more of general suggestions of what might be good to try, and not electric fences around content that is certainly too hard for me.
Thank you so much for this insight. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken formal classes, and even longer since I’ve taken classes that used a textbook. It’s a good reminder that this type of learning is better left to a classroom setting, and also that I really do not like classroom language learning. I still think there’s room in my studies for going through something more intensively, but I’m not sure if it’s a textbook anymore. That said, is anyone in the market for a used copy of Tobira?
These are all really good ideas of something I could maybe do more intensively… I know the social pressure of a book club helps me a lot, so maybe that can be my first stop… 
I’m glad you (and anyone else) thought so. Sometimes I think I’m like a whiny little 後輩 always asking how to get where I’m trying to go when the answer tends to be keep doing what you’re doing, so I’m glad other people get value out of my crisis of faith posts 
Final bonus shoutout:
After bouncing off of jpdb again, I checked out Manga Kotoba, which is made by one of the users on WK and does a similar thing to jpdb but for manga. Since the manga have so much less text, I find it less annoying to go through the wordlists and tell it the words that I know, it has neat graphs to show you where in the text the words appear (is it twice on the same page and never again, or does the word appear throughout the manga so it’s probably worthwhile to learn it). And there’s a wordlist export to get words out of the website and into my own SRS decks. Thought I’d mention it in case there’s anyone else who also struggled to use jpdb.
Tobira Advanced? If so, I’m interested
Looks cool tho seemingly not fully functional on mobile? Will have to check out when I have a moment
I am a bit late, but another tip I have is browsing directly on Amazon Japan (even if you don’t buy there). Natively is of course still missing a lot of content and if you find something interesting and then later on add it to Natively it’s a win-win. You can read the blurbs and the reviews in Japanese and also get some soft practice in via this.
Additionally, I really wouldn’t get caught up in Natively levels too much and really focus on reading the sample pages on amazon to gauge difficulty (with the caveat that a prologue is usually harder, so maybe skip to chapter 1 or 2 and see how you feel about it. The sample pages on amazon are usually very generous!) I also look for stuff in the amazon sample pages that is often not visible on natively, for example, are the chapters really long or short? Are there lots of breaks? There are of course lots of other things to look for and you will probably get a feel for it if you work through a lot of sample pages.
You can also do the same thing on audible, to make sure you have an audiobook to listen to as well!
When it comes to anki, I did tweak my deck/card making until I manage to get good review speed and good retention so it doesn’t becomes too much of a chore. For a while this meant adding anki cards manually because the act of creating them made me remember them better and my review time went down, currently I can add them automatically via Yomitan but, as an current optimization, only get one or two definitions that I select myself instead of the 5-20 definitions Yomitan would otherwise automatically populate. (I recommend going through the Yomitan anki wiki if you use it to create cards, I am using {popup-selection-text} to get fewer definitions for example! Yesterday I also added frequency into my cards so I can sort them via frequency in the future.) I also removed sentences from the front of the card because it made everything take much longer, I now only refer to the sentences if a word feels a bit ambiguous to me. (Although I recently also added monolingual dict definitions to the card, so instead of the sentences I often refer to these now… so as you can see my anki deck evolves a lot all the time!) So I would definitely also play around with anki until it doesn’t feel so much like a chore anymore.
I found everything on here extremely useful too, thank you for asking the questions I didn’t know or think to ask.
Also I feel like that at times and don’t always ask because I don’t want to feel like I’m asking silly questions (though most of the time it’s purely a “I don’t know what I don’t know” situation ).
