Ideally, we should be adding every single new word that we encounter to our personal vocabulary decks. I mean, ideally that's what we should be doing. But in practice it can be quite exhausting, especially if you're reading some difficult material.

I like to take a more laidback approach to reading, as I want it to be an entertaining form of language exposure. Sometimes I'll make flashcards. Sometimes I won't. Here are a few options, though…

While I'm reading on my Kindle, I can highlight sentences that I want to add to my Anki flashcards later. I can then go online to kindle.amazon.co.jp. After logging in, I can click on the “Your Highlights" link at the top of the page:

This will take me to a page that lists all of my current highlights. They mostly consist of either (1) sentences that I thought sounded cool or (2) sentences with new words:

I can then copy and paste these directly into my personal vocabulary deck on Anki, which I talked about in Phase #3:

I can get the definition of the word that I want to learn (気を揉む) from Weblio, like I explained in Phase #1. Then I can automatically add a voice recording to the card with AwesomeTTS, like I explained in Phase #3. I also wrote an English translation for the sentence. The whole process takes me about 1 minute from start to finish. Obviously it will take longer than this when you're first starting, but you should be able to find a nice groove eventually.

Now I have this clean, pristine, relevant, and educational flashcard:

Thanks to Anki's superpowers, I'm unlikely to ever forget this word again. And I'm especially likely to remember it if I keep on reading for fun every day, because it exposes me to such a ridiculously vast amount of Japanese words.

Sometimes while reading, if I see a word that I want to be able to use myself, I'll bookmark it in imi wa? so that I can import it into a flashcard deck using this method described in Phase #3.

If I'm feeling lazy, then I just gloss over words that I don't understand. Or, I look up their definition, but I don't bookmark or highlight them, because I'm not interested in making flashcards for them.

This isn't the ideal method for increasing my vocabulary through reading, but it's certainly better than doing nothing.