TextFugu » Topic: Tips For Retaining Vocab?

Tips For Retaining Vocab?

Jason — Sat, 28 May 2011 05:00:38 +0000

So I am nearing the end of Season 2(Adverbs) and while I had soared through season 1 fairly quickly.. Season 2 is taking significantly longer. I don’t doubt that this is normal, but I thought I might as well ask about everyone’s study methods for vocab, as that is what is slowing me down. Right now I am just hard cramming with Anki 5-10 words at a time until i feel good about them.

What do you do?

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Sheepy — Sat, 28 May 2011 05:07:29 +0000

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.

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ブラッド — Sat, 28 May 2011 09:01:04 +0000

I may do it the really hard way, but it seems to work for me. I look at the .pdf lists made for the vocab. And I read the first word and move on directly to the second word. I then try to recall the first word looking only at the meaning, if I can’t I go back and read it again. If I do remember it then I try to recall the second word looking only at the meaning. If I don’t remember it I go back to the first if I do I go on and read the third. Rinse and repeat…

I’ve found that by the time I make it to the end of the list I’ve reviewed all the earlier vocabulary so much that I only have a few vocabulary that are not stuck in memory. Once I can recite the whole list or only have to look at the meaning then I download and use the anki deck, and I make sure to go through the whole deck once. Then just review when anki tells you.

When I do this I feel like I know most of the vocabulary so well, because I’ve had to repeat most of them 15-20 times, that I have little to no trouble with the reviews. And the whole process only takes 30 minutes to an hour. I would say that’s a good investment for getting the vocab really stuck in your memory.

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Hatt0ri — Sun, 29 May 2011 07:15:12 +0000

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 :)

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Narcoleptic LTD — Mon, 30 May 2011 18:38:27 +0000

forgetting vocab is definitely the first rut I’m running into as far as discouragement. I’m glad this thread was started so I know it’s not just me becoming senile, and there are some good suggestions here that I’ll try as well!

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Adriana — Tue, 31 May 2011 04:56:12 +0000

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!

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Jason — Tue, 31 May 2011 17:23:55 +0000

When tried using the lists like mentioned a few posts back I just seem to get used to the order that I am saying them in instead of actually learning the words.

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Hatt0ri — Tue, 31 May 2011 20:51:36 +0000

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!