I’ve very new to Japanese and trying out the Tango deck on Anki to learn some new vocabulary, but am not too sure how I’m supposed to go about it. It shows a sentence (in Japanese), then shows the English translation when flipped over. I’m able to read all hiragana/katakana, but don’t know any of the kanji used in the sentences. Am I supposed to learn the kanji used in the sentences alongside the vocabulary (memorizing kanji shape, pronunciation and meaning), or am I supposed to know the kanji beforehand so I’m only focusing on the vocabulary? Sorry if this question is worded confusingly – any help would be appreciated!
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The tango decks are a great resource and you can go about this in a few ways. These decks are set up in i+1 order which means that every sentences after the first one should only have 1 new word. You should also study grammar separately from the tango decks using a resource like Bunpro (not free), Cure Dolly (free YouTube), Tokini Andy (free YouTube), or Tae Kim (free pdf).
To start off with you should go at a moderate pace for learning words. You will be tempted to go much faster especially in the beginning but trust me when I say that reviews will build up quicker than you realize. I suggest 10 new words a day, if you find that to be easy enough after 3 weeks or so then bump it up to 15 if you like or stay at 10. If you find it too hard then drop it down to 7 or even 5. I wouldn’t suggest going above 20 despite what you may here people brag about on here. It almost always leads to burnout and doesn’t not seem to speed up language acquisition which is different than just memorizing words.
When going through the cards the main goal is to understand the one new word, but you should have a secondary goal of understanding the whole sentence including grammar, meaning and reading it properly. Personally when I did tango if I couldn’t read the card I marked it wrong, especially if I couldn’t read or understand the main word.
For kanji you have a couple of paths.
1. You can make a kanji card on your own for every new one that comes up and put it in a separate kanji deck (meh lots of work).
2. You can sign up for something like Wanikani (very expensive, kinda slow, and not tailored to your learning).
3. You can download the Migaku Kanji God addon for Anki and it will automatically create cards for you based on the cards coming up in your decks 100% tailored to you (best option in my opinion requires a PC and 30 min of work to set up, but it’s completely free).
4. You can do a kanji book or RTK or any other kanji resource but it won’t be tailored to the kanji you have in Anki.
5. You can brute force memorize them as they come up.
6. You can download a premade kanji deck and suspend the whole deck, then as new kanji come up you unsuspend the card you need and study it.
I think option 3 is the best personally.
You don’t learn a language in Anki you learn it by using it through immersion. So once you get a few hundred words into Tango it’s time to start reading and , watching stuff. Kids shows, easy manga, easy anime, easy news.