How to lock in new words?

14 comments

1. Come up with a better flash card format. I have no idea what yours looks like but I’m going to bet it’s something terrible like just having a single word on the front and nothing else? Put a full sentence on the front. Have audio on the front. Have a picture for good measure. There are premade decks with these, or you can use tools like subs2srs to generate them, or whip up your own solution (Anki is infinitely customisable, and there are libraries for generating cards if you want to code something up). Whatever, really – just put what you need on the front to make it easy for you to succeed. You’re just trying to prime yourself to recognise it next time you see it in the wild – you don’t need to hammer it into your brain as a set of contextless squiggles.

   Alternatively/in addition – lots of reading. Ideally things at your level, not things that you’re looking up every second word of. The less unknown words there are, the more you get through, and so the more words you encounter and reinforce. Stop slogging – make things easy for yourself wherever possible.

2. “I use my own mnemonic.” You know… for words that I can’t lock in, I sometimes ask Chat GPT to give me a mnemonic. And I’ve given it rules about how to construct the mnemonic. Some of them are particularly memorable and more effective than my own mnemonic and it really can help. I think the little mnemonic story coming from another source besides your own noggin can be more memorable and thus more effective in some cases. I know there are many who are opposed to AI in language learning, but for me this is a great use of AI where there can be no argument whatsoever about whether or not it’s “correct”… a mnemonic is always 100% correct if it helps you remember the word.

3. Mmmm are you familiarized with kanji? Cause maybe that’s the problem, if you can’t tell the difference between kanjis they’ll all look the same making you constantly fail cards.

   Try to get familiarized with some 400-800 kanjis using something like RTK and then try learning vocab again, I think that would make a big difference

   I had the exact same problem though not to that extent. I kept failing cards(I was doing 10) but then I learned 500 kanjis and it got so much easier, and even more easier as I learned more words. now I’m doing 30 new cards a day and I have no problems with retention, heck, sometimes It feels like I could do more.

   Also read more, that’s definitely one of the reasons.
   If you were reading 2 hours a day no way you’d be failing 2 daily cards

4. If you’ve been struggling to memorize flash cards after 5 years, my advice would be to drop the flashcards and find some other way to learn. It’s a clear sign that it’s not working. Learning a language, like learning most other skills, is a completely different experience for everyone because we all have different learning preferences.

   You said you’ve always done really well at programming and math. Think about how you learned those skills and see if you can apply that to Japanese. Did you do it in a class? Reading textbooks? Using apps? Try those out instead and see if it makes a difference.

   Brute-forcing one method that clearly isn’t working will just ruin the whole experience for you and that’s why it’s making you feel like shit.

5. Flashcards could be a useful aid for studying. But Japanese is a language, and a language is a tool. If you don’t use this tool, you can use all the flashcards in the world, but you will keep forgetting words. It’s normal. The only way to stick words in your memory is by using them as much as possible. So, speak and converse in Japanese. If you keep speaking, that idea or that object word will be easy to memorize. Also,.writing could be useful

6. I guess to better memorize the words and vocab, you gotta use or see them a lot, if not all the time.

   By that, I mean stuff like trying to read and interact with comments on youtube or japanese forums, use apps like Todaii to read japanese news everyday (that was a game changer for me), watch Netflix shows or movies using japanese subtitle plugins like [this](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese-learning-resources-database/lln-language-learning-with-netflix/) or [this](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hashigo-learning-japanese/cacindbnpcofhdcbhfbncglgdacdhoin) in which you can actually interact with the subtitles for studies, write your own mini essays/articles/diaries on r/writestreakjp (forcing yourself to use at least 1 or 2 new words everyday) so a japanese redditor can make corrections, etc.

   Flash-cards are fine, but it’s just one of the many complementary resources out there, not your main tool to study japanese.

   Edit: typo

7. Flashcards are tedious, but they are extremely effective. Have you tried anki? Their algorithm is pretty good now. You can adjust your desired retention rate, so it’ll show you cards more frequently if you don’t reach that retention rate, and less if you surpass it (minimizing total reviews).

8. For me Anki alone would be quite poor at retaining any vocabulary, immersion is where it’s at. Anki helps me get familiar with vocabulary and is my only active study, but I only really learn a word if I start recognising it in my immersion afterwards and see it used in various memorable contexts.

9. Flicking through flashcards is the least interactive – and therefore least effective – way of learning anything, including words. And, “learning words” is not the same as “learning a language”.

   So what to do?

   First: Read. Listen. Watch.

   Seeing the words in context, hearing a person say them with specific intonation and emphasis, in a specific way, for a specific situation. Watching how another person reacts to that word or phrase. These are all super helpful and increase retention and recall.

   Then. Write, say, type. Try to produce a sentence with these words. Make mistakes, correct them. Struggle for 10 minutes to make one sentence. Do it several times a day. Then 8 minutes. Then 4 minutes. then 1 minute. ETc.

   The way memory works is that the more ‘senses’ you use, the better your retention and recall will be. And the way that language works, is that it’s designed to be used – not to be memorized or categorized.

10. https://preview.redd.it/1feicrs2ucfe1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=6b0e0ba332d71058e9afd79a0314ab6b1167c702

11. Have you tried wanikani? They have tools to help you remember the sounds

12. Are you familiar with the fluent forever methods? Have you studied Japanese Pronounciation? Do you practice the pronounciation?

    Learning about broken words has changed how I study language.

    Do you build your own anki cards? I’m lazy and pick up other decks but tend to modify/personalize them.

    Are you only doing self study? Maybe some italki might work.

    But my guess is you haven’t built your listening and/or speaking skills. There seems to be no golden bullets for this- except for maybe closing your eyes.

13. Here’s something I did that could help you

    I was never a fan of Anki and hated premade decks. And I did more than fine without using it for years, but at one point I did want to feel more confident that I was retaining vocabulary

    So what I did is that I made my own deck of audio cards only, using audio excerpts I was taking from the anime and movies I watched whenever I came across a word or expression I didn’t know. Usually the audio clip would be just long enough to have some context without being too long, [like this](https://streamable.com/964kky) for example (the word I didn’t know was 牽引)

    The front of the card was just the audio, and the back had the audio again plus a screenshot (because I was too lazy to type) of either the definition of the word in Japanese, or the word and its equivalent in French or English (so using the previous example, the back would [just be this](https://i.imgur.com/NWnTq8k.png), but you could add more informations). After a while, I often couldn’t even tell what was the word I didn’t know just from the audio.

    Knowing the context/characters etc. and actual voice acting (as opposed to text-to-speech) made it much easier and more enjoyable to do. It’s also a nice little game to guess the show just based on the voices and lines (which is easier than you might expect even with thousands of cards).

    It’s worth noting that I was already quite advanced in my studies when I started doing this so I had good comprehension, which might make learning new words in context easier, but it might be worth trying.

14. Do you have a mnemonic for the reading too? Maybe give Wanikani a go, it has mnemonics for the readings.