One of the core principles of this guide is that if you build something grand and magnificent, you won't let it go to ruin.

I often see blog posts and videos about language learning in which people debate at length regarding the purported usefulness of spaced repetition systems like Anki for acquiring foreign language proficiency. They're not the most effective way to spend your time, some say. Memory palaces are better, others say. The only way to really retain vocabulary is to speak all day every day for five years straight, they say.

I have no interest in arguing one way or another. The main reason that I study with Anki is not because I think that it's the most effective way to retain vocabulary (although I think there is a pretty solid argument for that). The main reason that I study using Anki is because digital flashcards are measurable. There will almost certainly come a time when you consider quitting your Japanese studies. You might not phrase it so harshly. Usually people say things like, “Ah, my [Japanese] is getting rusty. I haven't practiced in [months]." And then months become years and “rusty" becomes “nonexistent."

It's easy to let something get “rusty," because it's such a vague concept. Oh, wow, I was way better at [Japanese] six months ago, you think.

Letting your SRS flashcards fall to the wayside is an entirely different kind of feeling. You don't think, “Oh, I'm getting rusty." Instead, you think “I studied over 3,000 vocabulary words, and now I'm letting myself forget them!" That's a horrible feeling, and we should all be grateful that that's a horrible feeling, because it will keep many of us from letting Japanese slip away from us.

If you do everything in Phases #1-3, you will have built a magnificent mental palace—Your Personal Japanese Proficiency. Each word is a well-trimmed garden shrub. Each grammatical construction is a poolside sculpture, marble and glistening. Your native-like rhythm and intonation is the silk sheets on your king-sized bed. Altogether, it's something that you can be proud of. It's something that you can make even better by furthering your studies. And, most importantly, it's something that you can maintain with ease.

If you spent your life savings starting a business, you wouldn't close it down the first week after finally making a profit. That would be ludicrous. You put all of this time, effort, and money into building this business. Of course you're not going to let it fall apart just because [fill-in-the-blank excuse]. You made a profit this week! Maybe you'll make a bigger profit next week. Maybe in a few years you'll be rich! It would be a waste to give up now.

I think that maintaining your Japanese is very similar. You spent so much time, effort, and (most likely) money building it up that you shouldn't even think about letting it fall apart because of [excuse]. You're finally getting to the point where you can understand some stuff. Yeah, there is still a long road ahead of you, but things are looking up. In a few years you might be at a seriously high level of Japanese. By completing Phases #1-3, we are trying to get to the “profit stage" as quickly as possible, thus motivating ourselves to stick to our studies.

We maintain our Japanese by reviewing.

We improve our Japanese by learning new things.

Ideally, the daily schedule for your flashcards described in Phase #3 will be continued indefinitely into the future.

There will probably come a time when you don't need them anymore. If I'm going to be completely honest, I'm not sure that I need them anymore. I have reached a high enough level of comprehension in the language that immersion in and of itself is a form of constant review. And yet, I still do my flashcards every day. I'm not about to see my 17,000-Card* Flashcard Palace fall apart.

(*When I first wrote that sentence it was 17,000 cards. It's actually quite a bit larger these days.)

Our Daily Flashcard Flow & Priorities for Phase #4 is just a slightly modified version of our flow and priorities from Phase #3. I think you'll find the alterations very intriguing:

You don't really need to change your listening habits at all from Phase #3 to Phase #4. If anything, you can just relax a bit on your “daily listening requirements." I still think that it would be quite beneficial to continue reviewing with dialogue tracks and pushing forward with the main audio tracks taken from JapanesePod101, as I explained Phase #3. However, since you will be at a considerably higher level in Phase #4, you don't necessarily need to be listening to audio “lessons," per se. Any Japanese audio should be just fine.

For example, if you've reached an intermediate level or above, then you could auto-generate flashcards from your favorite anime, then put the audio tracks from the anime onto your listening device(s). This way, when you have spare time and can look at your phone, you can do focused, intensive listening practice. Then, when you don't have the luxury of looking at your phone, you can just listen to the mp3s of the dialogue tracks that you created when you made your flashcards.

In this guide, I've been using the term “grammar" in a very general way. What I'm actually talking about are sentence patterns and constructions, which happen to be quite straightforward in Japanese. I'll give a specific example.

Let's say that I was studying my anime flashcards (which, again, I talk about later in this guide), and I see the following phrase:

This card shows a character from the show 進撃の巨人 / Shingeki no Kyojin / “Attack on Titan" saying the following phrase:

おい、エレン、急に大声出すんじゃねぇよ。
Oi, Eren, kyuu ni oogoe dasu n ja nee yo.
Hey, Eren, Don't start yelling so suddenly.

Looking at that phrase, maybe I recognize the following construction:

[Verb] + んじゃねぇよ

Since I've already studied this grammar before, I know that when we have a construction like this, it means “Quit [verb]-ing," or “Don't [verb]." Since the verb in the action being expressed in the sentence is 大声（を）出す / oogoe (wo) dasu / “to start yelling; to start talking loudly," I understand that:

大声（を）出す ＋んじゃねぇよ

＝

Don't 大声（を）出す

＝

Don't start yelling.

Great, I understand it. But understanding a sentence construction is much different than being able to use a sentence construction. So maybe I write down a note to myself that I should try to use this phrase the next time I take a Japanese lesson, do a language exchange via Skype, or write an entry on Lang-8.

It would be extremely rude to use that grammar construction with your language partner or teacher, but there are ways around this. You can just tell them that you'd like to practice making sentences like this one. Then you shoot off a bunch of sentences, trying to mimic the pronunciation you heard in the flashcard (there's a link to the audio above):

Then, when you ask your teacher or language exchange partner lots of questions about this construction, you will start to get a feel for how it's used and when it's appropriate. I'm guessing that most teachers will be like, “Don't use this grammar! It's rude." But if you go live in Japan, then you'll probably hear your (male) friends use it from time to time. So just keep pushing when teachers and friends resist explaining. You might also get them to explain that 分かるんじゃねぇよ, shown above, is wrong… mostly because it just sounds strange to tell someone, “Don't understand!" as an order. You don't really give negative commands using verbs that express an action of one's own will. It's the same in English.

If you went through this whole process, I'm pretty sure that you would be comfortable using this sentence construction in the future, and you would understand it each time it was used in a conversation. This is what I'm referring to when I say that we need to clean up our grammar in Phase #4.

Ideally, you want to be able to create every grammar construction that appears in one of my favorite books, A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. Last time I checked, it wasn't available on Amazon, but they do sell it at White Rabbit Japan (which is a pretty fun site for a Japanese-language nerd, by the way).

Once you get past all of the grammar in that monster of a text, you can level up to A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar. From there, you can move onto A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar. Or you could take a less systematic approach and just learn whatever grammar you come across in your day-to-day studies.

Since I'm kind of a grammar nerd, I'd probably make flashcards for every single grammar point in those series. But for most, maybe that's overkill?

Just take it one sentence construction at a time, until you become a total Japanese grammar boss.