My method of learning is basically brute immersion. Meaning consuming native material with the help of a dictionary. Most words, expressions, collocations and grammatical structures are internalized through seeing them 100 times in different contexts. The most common language appears so much that in the three years that I've been immersing it becomes second nature. You just internalized it after a point. The problem with this method is that vocabulary that is more technical/advanced don't come up much in daily conversation or you come across them once in a blue moon and good luck remembering it. To demonstrate my point. I was starting to enjoy a piece of media and this excerpt came up. This is said by a German military man in WW1. He's talking about a French village (ドンレミ) in which a monster dwells, who is impending the German invasion towards Western France. He's saying this to a commander who is to lead a troop into this village to slay the monster:
我が軍はフランスの 北部国境を突破し、
今や西部戦線は、ムース川の西を越えた。
しかし、あの村だけが、飛び地のように
我が帝国の版図を拒んでいる。
ドンレミは美しいだけで、戦略上は全く無価
値な寒村だが、ドイツ皇帝の威信にかけて
帝国にあらかう者があれは、我々はその原因
を、徹底的に排除しなければならん。
たとえ、その相手が、化け物であってもだ。
・・・わかるね？
I have a dictionary app that tracks the date of the last time I checked each word. In all this passage the words I didn't know were:
飛び地 (Never seen it in the past, never looked it up)
版図 (Never looked it up)
拒む (Last looked up six months ago)
寒村 (last looked up over a year and a half ago)
威信 (last looked up a year ago)
排除 (last looked up three months ago)
How can I remember words like 拒む or 威信 or 排除 when they appear maybe once every 5 or 6 months within the material I consume? Like when I was reading this I recognized the words, and was like "I've seen these words before but I just don't remember their meanings" and in the case of 拒む I didn't even remember the pronunciation and had to draw the kanji on the dictionary.
How do some of you guys deal with these words?
by GeorgeBG93