Home Forums Tips, Hacks, & Ideas For Learning Japanese Tips For Retaining Vocab? Reply To: Tips For Retaining Vocab?

#11809

koichi
Member

I’m also thinking vocabulary, especially for kanji is pretty tough to learn. It’s a lot of abstract you have to learn, which is nasty :/

I’ve been thinking about vocab, especially kanji vocab, and I think I’ve come up with some ways to help to streamline the whole process for you (and make things way easier to study + remember).

This is just a little mindmap of what I’m thinking… any ideas going off of this?

A lot of it is already in TextFugu, but a few things, like some of the Anki deck studying order is a bit better, I think. There’s more emphasis on trying to learn the MEANINGS of the vocab words (the ones that use kanji you’ve learned already) before you move on. You get to use the kanji like mnemonic puzzle pieces, where you look at jukugo and say… okay, kanji 1 & kanji 2 have these meanings… when you put them together, they mean _______ because of the two separate meanings. I think as long as you know the meanings of the individual kanji (and in theory you should) you can use that to remember the meanings of the Kanji vocab words that have kanji you know.

Then, from there, because you know the meanings of the words already, you can build on that to learn Japanese → English meaning… then when you know ENglish meaning, you can start studying English → Japanese, which tends to be more difficult for most people (but if you do it this way, you already kind of know them, and know at least one half before you even start). After that, you’d do audio to sort of round out both of them.

Then there’s a couple “overall” things that’d change which would just make Anki decks easier to use and have a little more practice between things breaking kanji up a bit more (and letting you review a lot more often, rather than just relying on the learner to do that on their own… sometimes it’s nice to be told what to do, I think!).

ANyways, that’s my thoughts… Hoping to start implementing this in the next few weeks – shouldn’t be too much change, and I imagine Hashi will do a lot of it :D