Japanese Vocabulary

I just can't seem to remember any Japanese vocabulary

Everytime I try I seem to hit a brick wall.

Throwing me some random vocab, putting them in Anki and "trying" to remember them just doesn't work, even after 3 days I still forget them after 5mins, it's terrible.

I got Slime Forest, it's fantastic for the basic meanings of the Kanjis, I could do 50 a day. Then I tried the vocab, didn't work, couldn't remember them and it kept adding some without having mastered the previous ones.

I found out I learn better if I read it and translate it myself. Like I was playing Seiken Densetsu 3, on the equip screen there's a slot with nothing equipped. "Nashi", apparently it means "without". Here, I did this once and I still remember it. But here's the problem, I can't go translate every word because all of these damn Japanese > English online dictionaries are terrible, can't translate it 3/4 of the times.

So yeah, I need something better than "Watch that word and remember it!" because it just doesn't work. Taking classes are not an option.

Right now I use Human Japanese to learn some sentence structure and LiveMocha to learn some vocab (it does work, but there's not that much on the site plus they explain jackshit about the sentence structure... In fact, they explain jackshit about anything)

So, anybody have any ideas, tricks? Anything? My goal is to be able to play Japanese vidya.

Thanks in advance

>>1
Are you sure you're using Anki right? I'm having a fine time learning lojban gismu with it. Make sure you're not overrating the ease with which you remember a kanji (e.g., if it's hard, press 2, and if you only get it kind of right, press 1). Don't worry if some kanji take a while to stick. It might help you to do both a morning and an evening study session. Don't try to do to much in a day. Perhaps most important of all, think of a visual mnemonic for every kanji you can manage. These will help you a lot on cards you haven't memorized well yet, and it should be fairly easy to do. For example, you can say to yourself that the kanji for mountain looks like some mountain peaks, or the kanji for fish has fins on the bottom. If it's the Japanese words themselves you're having trouble with, you can do much the same thing, although it may be harder to find a phonetic resemblence to something you know. You'll definitely need to find some low-level reading material to solidify your vocab, and throughout your day, try to come up with the Japanese word for various objects and situations.