Two words.

Spaced Repetition

which is what you’re already doing no? You don’t really need to cram them. Don’t be afraid to forget words. Anki will remind you and they actually end up stronger if you forget and remember.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 11 months ago by  Sheepy.

I am using almost the same method as described above, with some tweaks (great thing about self-learning is that you can tweak almost anything to suit your style of learning).
First I go through the entire vocab list and mark the words as easy or hard. Word is easy if I heard of it before or if it’s based on the word I already know or something like that. I do easy words at the end. Then I chop hard words list into small chunks (3-5 words each) and study each chunk the same way ブラッド does(takes around 10 min). After an hour or two I try to recall first set of words and go to the next set etc. I do this until I’m done with entire vocab list. This is why I start off with hard words – by the end of the day hard words get more repetition than easy ones.
Next day I load vocab into Anki, go through entire list and let the program do it’s magic :)

I try to do what was mentioned above, but I get so easily bored and distracted I can’t usually focus long enough. I like to instead play games with the vocabulary or try to make up stories with them. I use Quizlet.com for my flash cards, games, and tests. I also use Anki, but only once I feel I have a good grasp on the vocabulary. Here is an example of making up a story for a Vocabulary Word (some of these are my husbands!). およぎますー”Oh Yogi (bear)” Don’t Go try and SWIM! つまんない (tomorrow night) is going to be so BORING! It’s hard to make stories for everything, but it helps a lot of you can with at least a few.

Hope this helps, I will be watching this blog because I still need all the help I can get!

Purpose of going through the list is not to perfectly learn all the words, but to familiarize yourself with them, to kind of “prepare” them for Anki. But it seems to me you are already familiar with words (since you crammed them in Anki). You just can’t recall them.

Well, there is one thing I left out when writing about lists, because it seemed obvious to me – I use mnemotechnique for every single word, just like Adriana described. Awesome examples, btw. I can imagine how learning words letter by letter, without assigning any meaning to them, could be very hard. If there is nothing to “tie” the English word to its Japanese counterpart, recall can become hell. If you are not using mnemotechniques, give them a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

There is also another way of learning vocab I tried out, without using mnemotechniques, but I find it troublesome and time consuming. Maybe it works for you. Basically, you have to repeatedly expose yourself to words you want to learn. For this you need a picture and an audio of a word (because you still need to “tie” the word to something; put it “in context”). Good thing about this, beyond finding pics and assembling everything together, you don’t have to put any effort in it at all. Just go through all pics/audio every day. Bad thing, it takes long time for everything to sink in (for me, 7-10 days), before you can use Anki for reviews. Compared to that, if I go through vocab list one day, I can start using Anki the next, so I like the first method better.

And yes, whichever method you use, when you start reviewing in Anki, you will still fail some cards XD Don’t worry. Review more. Good luck!

I just write the word down (kanji included if my tutor has taught me the appropriate kanjis) and review in Anki – both English-Japanese and Japanese-English.
I have a book with all of the words written down, for English-Japanese I hide the word written in Japanese and just use the English word to help me remember. I must have written the word correctly with the kanji and able to pronounce it correctly for me to review Japanese-English into Anki.
Mind you I always jumble it up and space it out so it’s not just the pattern I’m getting familiar with.

You have to find whatever works for you, really.

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

I’ve actually found kanji readings, meanings, and vocab to be very easy. The teaching style seems to help a decent amount. I think also that the use of the readings in the vocab, and the ways that the kanji are used with each other help a lot – having structure to just about anything makes it much easier for me to learn it (engineer, guilty as charged).

I am getting bogged down on non-kanji vocab, though. I think I’ve taken almost a month to get through the two sets of adjectives in Season 2. I’m doing more of the spaced repetition, and it’s definitely helping, but I only really have the opportunity to spend multiple hours on it once a week, so it’s still slow.