Not an exciting post but hopefully someone can help! Most of this post is background/just a rant, so feel free to jump to the tl;dr.
I’ve been learning Japanese for about 220 days. Although I did start learning it about 10 years ago, it wasn’t with any seriousness – mostly just picking up the odd phrase from anime and a very beginner classroom course. Back then I don’t really think I had any issue picking up vocab. I didn’t try particularly hard to learn it; sounds would just pop in my head during the day, i’d look up what that sound meant, then I would know the word. I still remember a lot of the words and phrases I learnt back then.
Nowadays things are quite different. I study every day using a combination of Duolingo and Anki. I watch lots of YouTube videos describing Japanese grammar (Japanese Ammo, Cure Dolly etc), and I do an online course with a teacher once a week (and a small group of other students) where we go through a textbook. I try to consume media that is both native (e.g. Japanese TV shows) and for learners (podcasts etc).
The problem i’m having is the vocab; both in terms of memorising words and recall. This is actually the third time i’ve attempted Anki; the first time I tried 5 words a day, just clicking good/again until I could say the word. I stopped when the reviews were taking hours and I could tell I wasn’t really learning many words.
Second time, I did 10 words and would spend a lot of time on each card. I’d write down the word, say it to myself, use it in a sentence etc. Again, had to stop as I could tell nothing was really sticking past a day or so and the reviews became too much for me.
This time, I have a method that seems to kinda work. I’ve written every card that’s come up on Anki on a paper flash card and review the cards during the day. Problem with this is I basically review every single word that’s come up, every day. So far, I have a few stacks and it’s manageable but this isn’t spaced repetition. I’m just using Anki to get the list of 10 new words and adding it to my pile. It does keep my Anki reviews low enough where i’m able to do them without getting overwhelmed. Even with this, my recall is really bad. What’s worse is the more I learn, the harder it is to recall words that I know quite well. For example, last night I had trouble remembering the word for “fun” even though たのしい is a word I actually know quite well. I know the word for train and bike, but when asked what “じてんしゃ” is in a lesson last night, I couldn’t remember which it was.
I am much much happier with reading (when there is kanji). Even though I don’t know many Kanji yet (almost the n5 list plus other common ones), i’m pretty good at recognizing them which makes things with subtitiles so much easier.
Does anyone have any advice/dealt with this before. A lot of the language advice is use Anki and learn grammar but it’s not quite working for me. I can’t even imagine doing the number of words a lot of people seem to do. Not sure if it’s relevant but I have Aphantasia and can’t visualise things in my head very well.
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Tl;dr Anki doesn’t work that well for me. I have a terrible memory and the more words I learn, the harder it is to recall the ones I do know. Has anyone had success with other methods beside SRS/Anki?
2 comments
So if you simply spend something like 10-30 seconds on a word in attempt to memorize, you won’t be able to recall it?
The way retention works is that with time it becomes harder to recall. It doesn’t disappear completely, but we need stronger and more focused stimulus to trigger it. I would suggest to do a short test. Try to memorize 10-20 words in any way you like, but don’t spend too much time on it, 5-10 minutes is enough. Leave it and have fun for 20 minutes, then check how many words you can recall. If there are some words you still remember, do the same, but with something like 2, then 6, then 12-24 hours intervals. Such way we can find out if it’s a problem of initial learning, or you simply forget it in the process.
People are quite individual, if such approach doesn’t work and you have a problem with initial memorization, then that simply means that you need to use some different approach. But if you have something like 60-80% retention in the first 2-12 hours, that simply means that you can adjust learning review intervals.
Mnemonics are literally the reason why I haven’t given up Japanese a second time. The first time I did I knew around 2000 words and I kept forgetting them even though I had them all in Anki and I used it every day, so out of frustration I gave up. Then I took it back up after half a year, but I decided to make a mnemonic for every single syllable/mora (not like there are a lot, just 60 or so IIRC), and here I am now, with over 11000 words under my belt, and I still use mnemonics every day because I learn 25 new words a day.
The good news is, the more familiar you get with the language, the easier it is to just remember words from their kanji. So when I see the word ばくだん (assuming I didn’t know what it meant), I already know there’s a good chance it has something to do with explosions, since ばく is only seen in 博, 幕, 麦, 暴, 爆, 漠 and a couple more kanji. だん is way more common than ばく, but that’s where mnemonics come in. Things get rough when it comes to words made up of really common moras, but even then it gets easier to decipher them once you get used to kanji, like the word 波形, which took me a while to remember (because no mnemonic I made for it stuck), but I finally memorized it once I learned three or four words in succession that ended with a 形, so now whenever I see けい at the end of a word/compound my brain immediately asks “could it be a 形?”