So are you all familiar with the memory palace technique? That one where you make a physical location and assign images to places along with other mnemonic devices, to memorize things in order? I tried that in the past and tried it again, but it's quite useless with how time consuming it is and the fact you memorize things in order and order is useless in language learning.
I thought of removing the location and trying to just come up with a story and vivid images that relate to the kanji's shape, it's meaning and sound and it's very very effective. Lots of words I can recall on second try, or third at most, but it's still time consuming if you do it faithfully, so I thought to implement a time limit. Every time I see a new word, I put a 15 seconds timer and try to come up with something and regardless of how well I did, I move on and its been working beautifully. Most of the time I can get something pretty solid going on already, but even if I can't the simple act of focusing on the word for a few seconds and manipulating it in my head seems to do wonders for memory. Seriously, I feel cheated for not doing this before and since it's done on the fly the context comes together and gets updated as I move on.
Well, this probably has been talked about before and Ill look like an idiot, but if this benefits anyone that's good. Give it a try.
by Moorevolution