I had a similar problem – I stared at the words in Anki and they just did not go into my memory. This was true for verbs and adjectives, but family members were the worst…
I got around this by using Memrise. I copied the vocab list into my own private course in Memrise then thought up some mnemonics to help me remember (e.g. ‘oh toes of my father!’) – this worked much much better for me.