When I study kanji in Anki using RTK (Remembering the Kanji), I employ mnemonics to connect the visual elements and strokes with their meanings. It’s a systematic process that proves effective. However, when it comes to vocabulary, I often feel like it’s purely a matter of brute force, relying on sheer memory and repetition. There’s a sense of helplessness, as sometimes I encounter a word I should know, yet I draw a blank when it comes to its pronunciation, despite understanding its meaning.
Have you experienced this before? Is it normal?
6 comments
Also try writing. Putting it in is one half of memorizing; taking it out is the second.
Yeah it’s normal. Natives experience this all the time too. I’ve been in chats with live-streamers and they regularly read out the chats, and quite often there is reading errors. They know the meaning but misread it. I wrote a comment using 緑 to describe about something I was eating and they stopped and skipped over it. Because it’s usually paired with 緑色 so they just presumed they didn’t know it. Another case where I was teasing the streamer saying I was going to change my name to something more difficult to read and wrote 天城す (あまぎす）and they caught up on it and read it as てってん・じょう while like 10 people in chat were writing あまぎ、あまぎす to correct them.
As long as you understand the overall meaning knowing the precise reading isn’t that important. Language is used for conveyance of intent and meaning not for technical prowess. I also find writing helps with remembering sounds, personally, since you aren’t going to input the right characters without knowing their pronunciation/readings.
As I understand it RTK doesn’t do readings, just ‘meanings’ so vocab after RTK is also readings ie part 2 of your kanji learning. Whilst all systems require a lot of brute force memory I’ve always felt learning the readings as you learn the kanji a far better method. Your options, I guess, are to brute force all the vocab readings (hard) or retrospectively apply a reading to your learnt kanji either via a mnemonic or by brute forcing that also (also hard). Others who’ve completed RTK may have better ideas.
Try writing the word and saying the word out loud. Also if you don’t have it try the Ankidrone decks. They are really good.
this happens to me all the time and I have 11k anki cards, the only way I found to fix it is to study more
sometimes the readings of onyomi type words get easier because different words can just use the same readings
kunyomi, so many of them are 1-offs, it’s tough
I dealt with this issue by favoring hearing and typing over reading at first.
Front side: just the word without furigana -> type that out
Back side: nothing but a text field -> type out the example sentence that’s being played. Replay if needed. Text field checks and turns green if the sentence is written correctly
Here is an example https://github.com/ihavenoface/anki-listen-then-type