Use Evernote to catalog your Japanese vocabulary.

For someone who has been using Japanese for a long as I have, my vocabulary is horrid. When you live in the language, daily communication revolves around a certain number of words, and you end up using those words over and over again, because they get you through your daily communication.

I decided to work on improving my vocabulary and my kanji at the same time, by reading a lot more. Whenever I come across a word I don't know, or more importantly a kanji I can't read, I'd look up the word or phrase in a dictionary and write it down on some scrap paper. After a while of doing this, I accumulated a bunch of scraps with no way of utilizing what I had written.

It was then that I remembered about the software Evernote, that basically catalogs your life. It's cross-platform, with mobile versions, and the ad-supported version is free to use until you get addicted and do decide to catalog your life, or want to sync over 40mb of data per month.

The first thing I did was copy all my messy handwritten notes into Evernote, this was a little bit of a hassle, but had to be done. Instead of just using one big note, I just made one note per piece of paper. I also use one note per day. All of my notes are tagged "Japanese vocab" for easy reference.

The thing I like about evernote, is that I can search for words. Maybe I took a note of the word, and vaguely remember it. I'll just search for it, before adding it to my day's vocabulary.

After I've accumulated a bunch of words, it's time to import into Anki. But, here's the only problem I've run into so far. I was planning on importing to Anki with tab delimited text, but Evernote replaces all the tabs with 5-spaces.

To fix this problem, I just copied the text into a new text document and replaced the 5-spaces with a pipe.

Now the file is ready to be imported into your favorite spreadsheet application.

Depending on the application you're using, you'll have to get the individual entries into their own cells, I just used "text to columns" in OpenOffice using the pipe delimiter. Save the file as tab delimited, and you're all set to import into Anki. After importing, I'll tag the note as "Anki Imported" so I know it's in Anki.

Evernote provides a great way to keep track of your Japanese vocabulary, and Anki helps you learn and retain the words. Being just a n00b to Evernote, I'm sure there are better ways of using it to study Japanese. If you have a novel idea, please do share in the comments.