Sometimes there are words and kanji that we just cannot remember and keep failing in Anki. Particularly for me I can remember the meaning but not the reading of a kanji. Then I bring out a mnemonic that I’m sure a lot of you would frown upon, but it kinda works for me.
I visualise how the romaji looks in my mind in English. For example I was having trouble with 隙間. I visualize “sukima” and it somehow works. Maybe I’m just a visual person, and I guess I should be visualising the hiragana instead to stay within the sphere of Japanese.
Should I try to change or just stick with what works?
11 comments
mnemonics are just shortcuts to establishing the knowledge in your brain. it doesn’t matter if you imagine sugma or sukima or a picture of your cat to see a word, if you do it enough times, and use/read/hear the word frequently enough, eventually the need for the mnemonic goes away entirely. learn however is best for you.
consider picking up the KKLC and learning about radicals and components, it drastically improves the ability to distinguish and internalize characters
https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/
Obviously stick with what works right the only requirement is to be personally memorable and nobody else can answer what that is.
I also try to make them as dirty as possible though because of course, it works, 服, >!is a guy with his back to the wall getting oral sex from a girl without “clothes” on for instance!<.
i use wanikani but i ignore their mnemonics & always come up with my own – sometimes it’s a correlation in english, sometimes japanese, sometimes another kanji. i’ll spend a minute or two making a story around it & it works as effortlessly as anything else.
Whatever works for you is going to be best!
If you keep finding that you consistently forget a word, take a quick break and try writing like 2 or 3 sentences using that word, and read them a few times. Sometimes seeing it in a new context can help familiarize yourself with it.
If a word really won’t stick during pure SRS (a leech, as they’re often called) then I generally just give up and start passing it even if I fail to get it out of the way.
Then when I eventually encounter the word somewhere IRL in the content I consume, *then* I try again, keeping this context in mind and using it to drive the word into my brain.
Very often simply having meaningful context that you care about is all you need to make it stick.
I am pretty “visual” (though now they say that’s not a thing…) and I used to do that.
Issue I had was it doesn’t scale that well to just have the text float up in your mind. Like, it didn’t scale past hundreds of vocabs (for me) and into the thousands that I needed
Do what works for you though. If it scales all the way up to 10k+ words do it!
For me what scaled better was making up silly sentences or sentence fragments for each thing.
I think that’s fine. Personally what I do is, for this word, 間 is a pretty common kanji, but perhaps I couldn’t get the reading of 隙 into my head. What I’d do then is study 4-10 words using that kanji and soon enough the sound would be associated with that image in my mind. If I can recognize the kanji and know how it sounds, the meaning often comes naturally.
If there’s a particular word you’re having trouble with, see it used in different simple sentences.
That is exactly what I do. I found it vastly easier to remember readings using romaji compared to hiragana. At that point, it is just like remembering the spelling of any other English word, something the English speaking mind is pre-wired for. Im a practical person, I just do what works. Efficiency matters.
I hate anki. It doesn’t work for me.