Anki Decks
I have, over the last few years, been attempting to learn Japanese and fill in some skills that school never managed to teach me. After struggling continuously for a long time, I discovered the concept of spaced repetition. Through this technique, you can train yourself to remember information with increased efficiency by never overstudying material.
The best program that I've found for studying using spaced repetition is Anki, a free program developed by Damien Elmes. Anki takes care of all the details of a spaced repetition system, leaving you to focus on studying. You can add individual facts straight to Anki, or you can use premade decks made by other Anki users.
Below are the decks I have been using to study with Anki. I hope that they can be of some use to others in their studies. If these decks help you, send me a message and let me know!
In case this causes confusion, open the spreadsheets using Open Office.
Hiragana and Katakana Anki Decks
Before you can really study Japanese, you need to understand how to read the language. There are three components to most written Japanese: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. There are thousands of Kanji, and it can take a lifetime to really gain a complete understanding of them, but thankfully this isn't necessary to learn Japanese
Many words in normal Japanese writing are expressed using the Hiragana and Katana syllabaries, two sort-of alphabets with a little over forty characters each. The decks below will let you memorize both the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries and start using them to study right away. You may wish to read a little bit on Japanese pronounciation and how Hiragana and Katakana work before you study these.
JLPT 3 & 4 Anki Decks
The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) is an annual exam that lets non-native Japanese speakers from around the world certify their ability to speak Japanese. The test has four levels, with JLPT4 being the easiest and JLPT1 requiring native-level speech and reading skills.
I haven't taken the JLPT (yet), but the exam provides lists of vocabulary, Kanji, and sentences that speakers should understand, which makes for an easy study list. Below are a series of decks and the accompanying source material for studying the curriculum for both JLPT4 and JLPT3.
Japanese Reading
The deck below is a modification of a deck by "Dan" found on the official Anki deck page. The deck Dan provided was full of good sentences, but had data cleanliness issues. I exhaustively cleaned the data and segmented the deck by difficulty. If you want the second half of the deck (which I haven't used yet, so I haven't created), download the spreadsheet and import the deck into Anki.
Maps
Maybe I wasn't paying attention in school, maybe I was sick that day, who knows. I graduated from a decent college with all sorts of knowledge, but I never learned to label the states of the United States on a map. That is just lame. That said, I would only be embarassed if I weren't fixing the problem, and I am indeed fixing the problem. Here's a deck (with images) to quiz yourself on the states of the United States, as well as the source images from the deck. Do for yourself what school never did for you.