I have been studying for about 2.5 years and the route I have taken looks something like this:
1. Basics and whatnot
2. Learn meanings of 2200 kanji
3. Read and study sentences in a 6K core deck with the focus on trying to learn kanji readings (and no, it was not kanji readings in isolation)
4. Now I’m in the middle of using this 6K core deck for actual vocabulary SRS’ing.
This whole time also includes watching native content a lot and reading a bit less.
My weakest area is speaking, which is to be expected. But I do have Japanese online friends I love playing and hanging out with, so I do want to put some focus on this area. And now that I shared my kanji and “being able to read” focused study method, I can see this annoying pattern that happens for quite a lot of words:
1. I get a new word from my anki vocabilary deck. I know the meanings and readings for the kanji it has, so I can guess the word quite often. Especially since I have a japanese example sentence on the front side.
2. The word is very easy every time, so I click easy, and I don’t see those words very often.
3. At some point I see the word after it’s interval has grown for many many months and completely forgot that I should know this word, but it’s still easy to me.
So yeah, the problem is that the words don’t really stick and I can’t recall them, but seeing or hearing them in the anki deck is easy. Now I’m wondering what’s the best use of my time to start being able to recall these words better. Just read more, drop the pre-made deck and start building my own? That sounds smart in general, but will it help with the recalling in conversations? Is it just expected that recall builds up very slowly and I don’t have to worry about it?
So before I decide on a daily habit with some new learning method, I would like to hear some opinions from others.
3 comments
Other people will have more insights into this than me, but I firmly believe that we recall easily in conversation that which we have frequently used *in conversation*. You need to speak more, in low-pressure environments where you have the opportunity to pause and try and retrieve the words you need. Repetition will take these words and make then accessible to you in realtime. I’m not a neuroscientist, but knowing the meaning of a word in Anki and being able to produce it yourself as and when you need it are clearly different things. Just my two cents. Good luck, you’re squaring up against one of the core difficulties of learning *any* language here.
Read more, learn about passive/active vocabulary, start trying to think/have thoughts in japanese, start writing then speaking(speaking is harder for a myriad of reasons), by writing easy stuff at first (stuff that you don’t need to look up too much vocab for, because the more you need to look up stuff the more unnatural it might sound), when you do look up vocab, try to use stuff that you’ve seen a lot in immersion, so that you have a feel that it sounds right. If you do look up a word try to check example sentences for it to cement if the word matches what you try to convey (https://massif.la/ja is good for instance, or https://hinoki-project.org/natsume/ to know what is usually related to what).
Aside from that, you could use something like langcorrect, for writing prompts and/or to get native corrections.
None of that is sequential, just start on them all at the same time roughly, or when you feel ready.
This is my process:
Longer version:
1. Think of what I want to be able to say to someone
2. Try write it out
3. If I don’t have enough vocab for what I want to say, either a or b:
3a. Look up the word (s) I’m missing (u/Salieri_ has good advice)
3b. rephrase what I want to say only using words I’m already familiar with
4. Double check what I wrote with deepl/Google/ or ideally hello talk if I have time to wait for a correction
5. Try to say that thing to the person I want to say it to
6. If they understand me, great! If not, great, I learned that’s not how you say that thing
Short version:
Omit steps 2, 3, and 4
Aka, talk to people, knowing that I’ll make mistakes, and that’s how I learn