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Lately I've been stepping up my efforts to become literate in newspaper-level Japanese.

Besides following Mainichi Shinbun's account on twitter, I've begun to use a great flashcard drill site called Flashcard Exchange. Originally I was intending to make lists of vocabulary words taken from articles I've been reading, but I'm currently going through someone else's pre-made list of 1000 terms common to Japanese newspapers.

The site is free to use in its basic form, but if you pay $20 you can permanently upgrade your account, which allows somewhat more sophisticated control over the sets and subsets of cards that you are using. I appreciated the no-nonsense design of the site enough that I upgraded without hesitation.