http://www.cardmonkeyhq.com/

It’s still a work in progress and a little rough around the edges, but I’m using it to study Japanese now.

First, L1 to L2 (and vice-versa) was not very helpful for me. As you have said, using your mother tongue as a frame of reference is inefficient, as it slows down or completely blocks your recall of the word during a real-time conversation. Using L2-only dictionary definitions was not much better, because the definitions were hard to understand and boring (although if you're at a certain level, making up your own kindergarten-style definitions – for example, 'the thing you put your head on when you sleep' – in your target language is a lot more helpful!). I found that personally, I had a lot of trouble recalling a word on-the-spot when the time came unless I had anchored it to some kind of real-life context when I was studying it. This means that example sentences (or often, even less than sentences – syntactic chunks, like 'a gorgeous dress', 'access the internet', etc.) were extremely helpful for both remembering the word and recalling it with ease. To get these sentences or 'chunks', I either do a google search or make my own that is relevant to my life (e.g. 'My dad is stubborn') and have it checked by a native speaker (on Lang8, etc.) if necessary.

The second thing really useful thing I found is one that I'm surprised no one mentioned in the comments here! The fact that you can insert images synchs perfectly with your method of associating an image/concept directly with the word. If it's a concrete noun, or something easy to visualize like 'angry', don't bother with sentences or definitions at all – go straight to Google image! (After I choose my image, I like to stare at it for a while and repeat the word for a bit, all the while trying to think to myself that 'of course this is a —–! I've been calling it that my whole life! What else would it be??' This is optional of course, but I like to think the positive attitude makes my brain more receptive to the new word ) And it's not just for beginner words – I use this technique surprisingly often for my highest-level language, too. My image-based cards give me the highest retention rate by far, and if I could I would make all my cards like that!

It's called smart.fm (http://www.smart.fm).

You can set up your own free account. I was initially turned off by it, because I thought you could only study their supplied word lists (boring!), but once I discovered how easy it is to enter my own content, I became hooked.

A couple of advantages:

–Whatever algorithm they use, quite efficient, and they'll give you a specific date, which might be days later, to study a particular list. You can also stop at any time, and it'll remember where you left off, but you'll never be put in a position to make up for missed days.

–There's some automated voice included with it, which I thought would be hokey, but it is surprisingly helpful, as I find I remember words so much better hearing them.

–You get spelling practice, which I also find totally useful. There's even a “dictation quiz.”

–There's a simplified iPhone app.

I thought much of this would be bells and whistles and nothing more, but having used it for the past week, I am addicted. I had found that Mnemosyne was becoming much too time consuming, and as great as I thought it was, smart.fm is taking words that were somewhere between passive and active in my brain to active, and much more quickly, and in much less time.

My personal method: I've created lists around what ever my source might be. So I've got a couple of different ones from various books or websites I read, a couple from words and phrases I pick up from conversation partners, and so on.

I've recently started using ANKI as well, and i wish i had done it sooner. It's not the golden bullet, but i think it's a useful tool in acquiring a language (at least the vocabulary).

I can already speak and understand spanish quite well (conversations), but eg in books or blogs i encounter a lot of new words. What i do now is i add them to a google document (spreadsheet). If i have enough words i will export that document (to a .csv file) and import it in ANKI. This way i'm only putting time into “new” words, wordt i didn't know. You could as well download existing decks, but i haven't found many with more “advanced” vocabulary.

Reading the post/comments made me realise that perhaps a better way is to copy sentences and translate those… Which is more work, and probably worth it for a beginner because you also get a better feel for the language, but in my case not really necessary.

Small tip: this a deck which you can subscribe to in ANKI online for spanish sentences:
dec31522e74211d4 (Level i'd say is beginner – medium)

I'd like to use Anki but I have some questions (bakuninzh put it quite well, I think):

1. What is your experience with the whole “you shouldn't learn associations from L1 to L2″?
2. Do you think Anki is mostly helpful at the beginning stages or also after fluency?
3. My personal experience is that as your language proficiency grows you move from word-by-word to phrase-by-phrase to idea-by-idea translation. Eventually, I've found that even WHAT I choose to say is controlled by my L2 so that I'm not translating even at the idea level. So my the question is: would we be better off not learning word-by-word translation in the first place so that we don't have to go through the gradual un-learning process?

Hope the blog turns out to be your silver bullet, but I really think that's within you. Stop looking for inspiration elsewhere – sometimes you have to BITE the bullet