Update (Japanese):
Phonetically, Japanese vocabulary is going very well. The mnemonics have proven invaluable in this area, and even though my vocabulary has atrophied over this last semester, I’ve reached a proficiency with the words that I’ve reviewed that I’ve never had before. The mnemonics just make the pronunciation quick and unambiguous.
As for the characters, it’s going well overall. I can go from the characters to the pronunciation for all of my vocabulary, and I can write the characters for most words without hesitation. There are some though that still give me difficulty. Prompted by this, I decided to do some research about how proficient native Japanese speakers are at writing. It seems like, similar to in the US, actually writing things by hand in Japanese has become fairly anachronistic, and as it turns out a lot of Japanese people can’t write a lot of the common-use words themselves. Their recognition, however, is very good. I’m keeping this in mind now with my studies. While I still think writing is important, being able to perfectly produce all vocabulary in written form seems unnecessary.
For those interested, here’s a video showing Japanese people being quizzed on some common words.
edit Update for French:
So my vocabulary is currently > 1,600 (or possibly > 1,700). I’ve nearly exhausted all top 100/200/etc. lists for grammatical classes (adjectives, adverbs, etc.), and Duolingo is giving me new words at a pretty slow pace. I’m going though the “top 5,000 French vocabulary” deck, but it’s taking a long time to find words that I don’t know, which is expected because they go in order of frequency and I’ve only seen ~500 cards. Maybe I should delete the words I already know. All these extra cards are cluttering my reviews.
Plan: Reach at least 2,000 words before returning to school, continue with the top 5,000 deck and Dulingo until both are finished, then start on the 5,000 - 10,000 list while also drilling sentences with audio so that I can practice everything in context.