I just finished Wanikani and am now swapping to SRS from sentence-mining. Mostly it’s been great, especially when using my WK skills to learn new kanji and kanji-based terms.
However, I’m encountering a problem – I’v’e focused on WK and kanji stuff very heavily, and so the way I’ve learned Japanese really relies on the pictographic aspect of Kanji, which is of precisely no use when learning stuff that is written only in kana. Why is やけに “frightfully” or “awfully”? Why is ずきり “piercingly”. Well, because that’s what it is, but I only have a crude grasp of how to memorize it!
This was kind of an issue when I was making my way through Genki and learning kana-based grammar stuff, but those grammar constructions built up from smaller parts in a way that made internalizing them much easier. When it comes to actual content words which nonetheless are kana-only, I’m totally lost. Do I just keep bashing my head against my SRS deck until they stick? What techniques do you all out there have?
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Learning “kana-only” Japanese words is the same as learning words in any other language, so I don’t think you need a special technique for it. I mean how would you remember that the French word for “clock” is “horloge” or that the German word is “Uhr”? If there was no kanji for it then learning “とけい” would not be any different. It’s reading kanji that makes Japanese special, so that’s why people use special techniques for that part, like WK or RTK.
What you’re asking for sounds like basically an etymological dictionary. Which sort of looks like is outside your grasp at your current level, but you can give a shot with 日本国語大辞典 (Nihon Kokugo Daijiten) it’s a pretty thorough dictionary that has some etymology of words or at least some historical reference for when a word was first used.
But tbh I feel like until a very advanced level is reached, the reason why a word is the way it is isn’t really important. Until that point of very advanced understanding, that word is that word simply because it is. If you’re really bashing your head against SRS with a word it might be because you’re not actually seeing it anywhere. SRS will act as a placeholder for you and give you gentle reminders but it probably won’t stick until you see and hear it in real life.
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If you keep failing a card/word, just throw it away. Don’t focus on mastering vocab through SRS. SRS helps you get introduced to the word. You really learn it when you’ve seen it in the wild (books/tv) a thousand times. Try not to get caught up in the SRS trap. Remember to spend 80% of your time reading/tving.
I have the same problem as you, but more specifically it’s the onomatopoeia that I’d like to be better at. I finally found a way that seems okay, but I’ve yet to confirm if it really work in the long run.
I make a card with an image, the definition of the word, and maybe a context sentence with the word hidden, and if there may be ambiguity the first kana of the word.
on the back of the card I put just the word.
For example プニプニ (punipuni, squishy)
The front is プ・・・ and 3 pictures, one with a finger poking at a cheek, one with a dog toy thingy, and one with a dishwasher detergent liquid in it’s little bag.
To find those, I just screenshot parts of google image.
On the back, only プニプニ is written.
Then, I try to force myself to actually use it, and say out (or mumble, or think depending on the situation) プニプニ when I see something like that.
What didn’t work :
– Do the same as with kanji. This works only for words were you know the kanji correlation. for example ワクワク (exitement in anticipation) and 沸く (waku, boiling) -> meaning thus boiling of anticipation
– understand theses from context. Because onomatopoeia don’t repeat context, they add to it. And if you have Onomatopoeia plus the word fear, you can’t understand if it means that the character is freezing of fear, trembling of fear, have goosebumps, etc…
– learn the word in the context of a sentence. On the front of the card, a sentence with the word I’m trying to learn in it. Don’t know why, but it didn’t work for me.