I always found that the hardest thing for me studying Japanese wasn't the vocab or the grammar so much as just making myself sit down every day and study. I was talking with a friend about this a few months ago and we came up with the idea of using competition as a way to make studying more fun.
I've been working on building a website based on this idea to help make studying vocab (hopefully) more fun. The website is up at http://mindrival.net, and the way it works is you select which set of vocab words you want to use (vocab from JLPT level 2 or 3 currently), and then you enter a game with other players (or your friends if you want). When the game starts you are shown 10 words at random from the vocab list and have 40 seconds to select the correct translation of each.
Everyone in the game can see which players get which cards right and at the end whoever has the most right wins. After you finish the game you can review all 10 cards and learn the correct answers for the ones you missed.
The site is still a work in progress but I think it's mostly bug-free enough to have people start to give it a try (As long as you don't use IE6 :p). If any of you have the time to try this out I would be truly appreciative to hear any feedback you have to offer. There may not be many people logged in to play against so you might want to ask a friend to log-on with you to play against, or if I'm logged in I'll gladly play a few rounds with you!
I hope this helps some of you with your studying, and if not, you can at least find out which of your friends knows the most Japanese words . When I tried it with my roomates they all actually got really competitive about it! I'm working on adding an anki-esque self-study mode as well so you can really learn the words you don't know.
I would really like to hear what you guys think about this. Do you think this idea has potential? Would you use something like this as a study aid?