Hey folks,
Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten into the groove of learning vocab with Anki, and am generally doing well. However, I find myself with 10-20 words that I’m having to repeat day after day because for whatever reason my brain is not holding onto them.
What are some methods that you use to deal with these problem words?
3 comments
Write them out a dozen times, find more example sentences using them, learn other words using the same kanji.
I have many leeches and mostly they just suck my blood out but I found a few techniques on my own.
* T1: Learn compound words that contain your leech word.
* T2: Learn to output phrase with your leech word. The _output_ part appears to be very important (the entire linchpin of T2) but IDK why.
* T3: If the leech is a kanji compound like 観戦, learn other words which use the same おんよみ like 観客 and such, so you can build a web of knowledge rather than have this thing floating around on it’s own
* T4: Brute force it by drilling it more
* T5 give up and focus on it in 6 months. This is very weird but it can work. In 6 months this thing might not be a leech anymore. IDK why.
The recommended thing to do if a card keeps doing that is to suspend it. The time you spend trying to remember something that doesn’t stick is time you coulda spent learning other words that have a better chance at sticking. That’s why it’s called a leech. You can always set aside some time revisiting leeches. In the future something might change that suddenly makes the word easy to remember.