If you've gotten this far, then take a moment to congratulate yourself, because you have successfully set up every single deck that you will need for at least your first year of Japanese studies. Bossossity! If you're still missing one, here's a link to all three of them.

I want to talk about our daily flashcard flow, but before I do that, let's take another look at the 1-year schedule that's laid out in this guide, should you choose to follow it exactly:

This timeline is an estimate, and the truth is that some of the phases are likely to overlap. For example, it's actually okay to study vocabulary as you're studying the kanji in Phase #2, only in that case your only daily priority is learning and reviewing kanji. In other words, on your daily chain calendar (should you choose to start it in Phase #2), you could put an X simply for reviewing all of the kanji that were due, plus learning 22 new kanji (or whatever amount of kanji you're trying to learn per day). Then, once you enter Phase #3, you could only give yourself an X if you reviewed all of the kanji and vocabulary cards that were due, plus you learned 30 new vocabulary cards (or whatever number you choose). That might sound kind of confusing, but here's a breakdown:

These priorities are slightly different than what will happen in Phase #3. For example, let's say that I want to study 6,000 vocabulary flashcards before the end of my first year of studying (This would not be 6,000 words, because the 4,000 cards in my pre-loaded deck only have around 2,000 new words in them, so all together (adding words throughout my studies and possibly other pre-loaded decks) I would learn around 4,000 words. That's not quite enough to pass JLPT N2, but you'd still be at a pretty solid level of Japanese. To reach this level within our 1-year study plan, you'd need to study about 25 new vocabulary cards per day from Phase #3 onward. You can actually set any goals that you'd like, but here's what your daily flashcard flow and priorities would look like if you were to set that as a goal:

That might sound like an overly complicated system, but I think that you'll find that it's quite simple and logical if you give it a try for a few months.

The target we set above for Phase #3 is 25 new cards per day. There will probably be some days when you have a lot of free time or are feeling very motivated, and you might want to study 50 new vocabulary cards. You're totally welcome to do this, but be careful not to overdo it with the amount of new cards that you add each day.

As you'll probably notice over the course of Phase #2, consistently studying large numbers of new cards on a daily basis really stacks up in the amount of daily review cards. If you find yourself getting overwhelmed by the amount of daily review cards, then take a break from new cards for a while. It's fun to have lofty goals (I'm gonna learn 50 new words a day!), but those goals can be counter-productive if they end up overwhelming you and causing you to fail to study your daily review cards.