I suck at memorizing vocab, looking for an alternate approach

10 comments

1. read a fuck ton. write down what you figure you need to or use something like satori reader that lets you add it to a study list. but mostly just try to read enough that you get exposed to words enough times to remember them. i replaced flash cards in my study sessions with just reading because it works best for how i learn and i find i’m remembering things better. but every method is person-to-person.

2. ok so I had this exact thing, after Genki2 I started reading. So I knew only like 1200 words at best.

   This was a really hard time.

   Here’s a few things I did:

   1. I was doing a lot of anki at that time, like 1 hour. It was way too much, I only do 30 min now. Consider how much anki you are willing to put yourself through.

   2. For kanji, I use two kinds of cards. First I make a card with vocab, ok you are doing this. Second, I made a kanji card. Kanji cards are like, kanji in front, keyword in back. I get a story with it from https://kanji.koohii.com

   3. Each day I make a vocab list and print it out and have it by me at all times and go over it a lot, whenever you can. What I put on this list is words I want to learn that day or spend extra time reviewing

   4. I made a list of all the time-related words because I was getting them all mixed up. You might have to do something similar or might not.

   Don’t give up!!!!!!

3. I had a similar problem to you back when I first started, except even worse because I couldn’t memorize more than 200 words of Core2k. The main reason was the fact that I could only see Kanji as random squiggles and couldn’t really tell them apart from each other. The way I got around this was by using Kodansha Kanji Learners Course and its accompanying Anki deck. I found that writing down each character (and in particular, learning the stroke order), helped me to consciously recognize Kanji and their radicals from each other. I stopped somewhere around 1100/2300 characters because I could now unconsciously recognize the differences between Kanji. To be specific, I could recognize that I had seen a character before, and sometimes even which one it was and a common word that uses it. After that I had no problem learning any number of new words.

4. Make a mnemonic for each phoneme/mora and from there make a mnemonic for every word you want to memorize (eg associate い with a thing/idea, do the same thing for たい, and when you come across the word 遺体, you can make a new mnemonic or a short story using the mnemonics for い and たい, or, in this case, just associate 遺体 with 痛い). Use Anki every day. Learn the most common kanji associated with each mora (eg さく is most of the time seen in kanji compounds that have either 作, 策, 昨, 削, 索, 錯, 酢, and that’s about it).

   If you are like me and memorize over 20 new words every day, then chances are, you will not have the chance to use all of them in your day to day life. Reading a “fuck ton”, as someone else suggested, also doesn’t help when you get past the phase where every word you learn is super common. Soon enough you’ll start learning words that are common but not that common, then unusual, then rare and so on. Nowadays most words I learn are not common at all and “reading a fuck ton” does jack all to help me memorize them. Writing them down every time you come across them in Anki helps, but who has the time and the means to do that for hundreds of words every day? Your best bet is do the three things I mentioned in the first paragraph, and always try to create an emotional connection with a word. If you have strong feelings for a sound, chances are, you’ll remember what it means. That’s where mnemonics truly shine, they can be truly memorable.

5. To memorize vocabulary don’t try to memorize vocabulary. No matter what you say, everyone does remember vocabulary even if you can’t remember it on the spot. There’s a video by Steve kaufmann that’s is called “don’t try to memorize vocabulary” or something like that and it’s a really good video worth watching

6. Be careful looking up things too often. You will just get overwhelmed and the vocab will just go in one ear and out the other. Try and only look up things every few minutes or maybe a few per page.

7. One thing caught my eye, you refer to them as “The kanji scribbles” and I’ve personally had the same thing come to mind at times. If I’m feeling like they’re just boiling down to scribbles, I give them more attention, I inspect carefully what radicals the kanjis use, and get a more detailed look at the kanji. It’s helped me many times. Maybe it will help you too

8. My personal advice:

   1. Cut down on Anki and read more. Reading should be the main activity where you get familiar with how words are used in context. Anki is just a supplement to keep certain words in your head.
   2. Don’t add every single new word to Anki. Use your intuition or a frequency list to be selective about what you add. If a word looks important or you’ve seen it multiple times in different contexts, add it. Many words are too rare to be a good use of your time at your current level, and others you’ll probably acquire naturally through reading without having to SRS them.
   3. Anki won’t magically make you remember things. I’ve had that problem before, where I’d fail cards over and over and I didn’t know why. The problem was that every time I failed the card I flew past it and hoped it would eventually get bashed into my brain. The better approach, in my opinion, is to look at the word and get as many “hooks” as possible into your brain. Which kanji are being used? How do these kanji contribute to the word’s meaning? Are those kanji used in other words I know? Are they pronounced the same or different? What are the components of these kanji? Which of the components (if any) indicate their pronunciation? What memorable context have I seen this word in? etc. Asking these sorts of questions eventually comes naturally and implicitly, but I think it’s useful to explicitly ask them sometimes so you can break out of the habit of just seeing the kanji as scribbles.

9. Try to focus your reading down to a very specific area – domain vocabulary is very powerful. That means picking a topic (recipes, baseball, photography) and reading very deeply about that for a bit so it should be something you are interested in.

   Try reading aloud rather than just looking at your flashcards, or writing out the readings (kanji→kana drills)

   Practice extensive reading methods for dealing with unknown vocabulary. Good knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, and parts of speech goes a long way. You do not need to know every word.

10. Using vocab is what’s going to get you to remember it – interacting with a word outside of a flashcard in basically any way. Practicing handwriting and stroke order is very helpful for remembering the differences in similar kanji, because recognizing them and writing them use different parts of your memory (IME).

    Reading is obviously very helpful with vocab but can be frustrating when you’re struggling with both vocab and grammar. One thing that I’ve done a lot that’s helped me remember tons of random words is to look at song lyrics for favorite Japanese songs. I look at them in Japanese and English, and I’ll either recognize a vocab word in the song, or a word from the song will come up later as a vocab word, or you can find 3-5 words or so that stand out to you as unique or interesting to know, etc. That word then becomes very memorable bc it’s tied to this song and the melody. Listening practice in general can help more than you might realize, I always feel my comprehension go up when I do more listening. Even just passive in the bg is fine honestly. Also it can help pronunciation, you can imitate words or sentences etc (non-anime media is best for this to get a naturalistic speaking style). Speaking is helpful too, even just to yourself!

    Basically it just helps to process words in context no matter what you’re doing.