Purpose of going through the list is not to perfectly learn all the words, but to familiarize yourself with them, to kind of “prepare” them for Anki. But it seems to me you are already familiar with words (since you crammed them in Anki). You just can’t recall them.

Well, there is one thing I left out when writing about lists, because it seemed obvious to me – I use mnemotechnique for every single word, just like Adriana described. Awesome examples, btw. I can imagine how learning words letter by letter, without assigning any meaning to them, could be very hard. If there is nothing to “tie” the English word to its Japanese counterpart, recall can become hell. If you are not using mnemotechniques, give them a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

There is also another way of learning vocab I tried out, without using mnemotechniques, but I find it troublesome and time consuming. Maybe it works for you. Basically, you have to repeatedly expose yourself to words you want to learn. For this you need a picture and an audio of a word (because you still need to “tie” the word to something; put it “in context”). Good thing about this, beyond finding pics and assembling everything together, you don’t have to put any effort in it at all. Just go through all pics/audio every day. Bad thing, it takes long time for everything to sink in (for me, 7-10 days), before you can use Anki for reviews. Compared to that, if I go through vocab list one day, I can start using Anki the next, so I like the first method better.

And yes, whichever method you use, when you start reviewing in Anki, you will still fail some cards XD Don’t worry. Review more. Good luck!