By making a list of kanji beforehand, the contents of which may number in the hundreds (even thousands, if need be), you save time and energy. Better still, the kanji list would contain characters in the order that they appear in the actual text, and, the list may, if you want it to, be comprised only of uniques (i.e. there won’t be any duplicates).
A quick explanation: The main purpose and use of this method is to generate, in raw text format, a list of sentences separated by newlines. (The ‘\n’ character.) Spreadsheet apps are able to import them with greater ease as such.
I intend to make a series of entries, chronicling the way I go about learning languages; in particular, the Japanese language. I will share any and all methods that I’ve come to devise myself over the past few months. Some of these methods have been of immense help to me. I hope the same will hold for you as well.
Project Gutenberg has come to be of greater use to me ever since I begun my studies of French and Japanese. Classic literature, from different languages, made available to me with immediacy, at the ultra-sexy cost of nothing. Ooooh.