Speedanki

A really good place to study (if you wish) vocabulary for the JLPT is at Speedanki.com. Speedanki has the Kanji vocabulary for each level of the previous JLPT.  The old 4 levels. As you probably know, the JLPT will now have 5 levels. But still, the vocabulary you need to know is not going to change all that much.

I will begin preparing for the Level 1 JLPT. Speedanki has 1228 cards at that level. Other vocabulary you need to know at that level which wasn't on lower levels is vocabulary written in Katakana or Hiragana.

What's my plan? How will I use Speedanki? I'm going to do 10 new flashcards a day. That's pretty easy. I'll review up to 10 previous days' words, which makes 100. I think if I "master" the words on the first day, and then see them again for 10 days, they should be pretty well stuck in my memory.

Here's how I do it: I go through 10 cards from the unread deck which is where all of them are initially. After trying to guess and checking the answer of the card, I click on the "read" option which moves it to the "read" deck. After I have done this for 10 cards, I then move to the Read deck.  Then I go through them a couple of times until it's no longer a challenge. This usually takes 3 or 4 times through.

After that, I study the Familiar deck, which will have no more than 100 cards. After 10 days, every day, 10 cards will move from Familiar to Mastered and 10 cards will move from Unread to Read.

That will take me about 4 months to get through the deck of cards for level 1. After that, I'll have about 3 or 4 weeks I think, to whip through them all again and see how well I remember them and which ones need refreshing.  I'll also want to start reading news articles every day at that time in order to rev up my reading speed and sentence comprehension.

Then I'll take the JLPT in July. I'll consider it a practice test just to see how close I am to passing. If I continue reading every day until December, I think I'll be ready to pass the test by then.