Day 3 - Beginner Sentences Challenge

I just finished day 3 of my new 30 day challenge.  It feels a lot less painful than my previous 120 day challenge (which I put on hold).  At day 3 I'm already 10% of the way through the challenge as opposed to 2.5% if it were a 120 day challenge.  The other big difference is that I'm reading beginner sentences and I already know most of the words and Kanji readings.

My process for doing sentence reading recognition cards is simple.  The front of the card is in Japanese, full Kanji with no Furigana readings.  The back of the card is in Japanese with Furigana readings and an English translation.  I begin by reading the card out loud so that I can practice pronunciation.  Then I flip the card to verify that my reading and understanding of the sentence was correct.  At the rate of 100 new cards per day I've noticed that my mouth starts to get pretty tired after about 50 sentences.  I've never been a big talker so I suppose I just need to keep exercising my jaw muscles.

My goal is to finish all 2,252 sentences in 30 days.  The pacing for this is about 75 cards per day.  I've been doing 100 per day because they've been really easy so far.  If I keep up this pace I will finish the new cards in about 21 days.  If I do end up finishing early I'll spend the last week doing review cards.

Learning New Words in Context

Out of the 300 cards that I've completed I estimate that I only encountered about 5 new words.  When I tried doing sentence flashcards last year I gave up very quickly.  I found it too difficult to learn new words in the context of a sentence.  This is especially true when trying to learn not only word meaning but Kanji readings as well.  I prefer to memorize words in isolation before learning how to use them in context.  No doubt there are people that disagree with this approach but I think it depends on the person and their pre-existing knowledge in the language.  Learning words in context can work but I think most of the time it's too slow.