Anki flow to pre-study for a Japanese game/book

I've been trying to self-study Japanese recently by immersing myself in a Japanese game/book. There are various study strategies out there, mine is learning vocabulary strategically before playing/reading. By strategic, I mean I only learn a handful of vocab that is frequently used - any other vocab I'll attempt to pick up when I see them. This should enable me to understand a significant chunk of the game/book with minimal time spent studying.

There are tons of forum threads on doing this, but I couldn't find a comprehensive and easy-to-follow tutorial while I struggled with the tools, so I decided to write my own flow down for future reference. Bonus points if this helps anyone else reading this ;)

What you'll need:
Anki
Morphman Anki Plugin
cb's Japanese Text Analysis Tool
AntConc
Epwing2Anki

Brief steps:

Find the text scripts of the game. Usually <game> 台詞集 / セリフ集 will give you results.
Save the game scripts as txt. Recommended to encode in UTF-8.
Analyze the word frequencies using Japanese Text Analysis Tool.
Focus on highly-recurring words, compare this list against a list of known words using Morphman. You'll get a list of unknown words that occur frequently in the game.
Use Epwing2Anki on the list of unknown words to create Anki cards.
Additionally, find highly-recurring phrases using AntConc. Use Epwing2Anki on this list too.
Import the cards into Anki, and study them.
Once you feel comfortable, start playing the game while continuing to review Anki.

Tip: it's best to use all-ASCII characters for the input files to the tools, some of them will throw errors otherwise.

That's it :) Sounds simple, but there's quite a few tools involved and I was overwhelmed by them at first. So I will write the details of each step in separate posts later ;)

Comments

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