I am trying to study and memorise any and all vocab that I encounter in books, anime, games, etc. However I find that unlike Heisig RTK1, normal vocab is much harder to remember:

For example
いざという時 = when it's important;
OR
したたかに (adv) = 健か 【したたか】 severe

Things written in Hiragana have no mnemonic 'hooks' so to speak. And even Kanji is pretty hard. So I've had to roll over and over the same Anki material I've added, and its taking away my exposure time with normal Japanese text. Any advice appreciated

It sounds like this is your main problem:

Quote:I am trying to study and memorise any and all vocab that I encounter

Stop trying to memorize everything and just focus on the words that you see a lot. Trying to memorize everything at once will just leave your brain screaming for mercy. I guarantee that you don't need to learn したたかに right now (and I'm pretty sure it's written 強か anyway).

I agree -- if you find that you are forgetting really common words that you see a lot, I would recommend memorizing a short, vivid sentence using the word, preferably a sentence that you got from a native material (but that's not necessary if you're still early in study). Sort of the same imaginative memory idea as RTK but with Japanese words instead.

But trying to memorize 100% of everything you encounter is not necessary, and it's very difficult.

While I agree with the others that you should be focusing on vocab that you see a lot, I'm also going to provide a solution:

See it more.

That means putting it into another program like Smart.fm, making flashcards, Iverson lists, etc. Maybe look it up in several dictionaries for sample sentences.

More exposure = better memory.

wccrawford Wrote:While I agree with the others that you should be focusing on vocab that you see a lot, I'm also going to provide a solution:

See it more.

That means putting it into another program like Smart.fm, making flashcards, Iverson lists, etc. Maybe look it up in several dictionaries for sample sentences.

More exposure = better memory.

This. I run into words I don't know and haven't seen before constantly at my level and usually I learn it just fine regardless, but not always. In those cases, Iverson lists and flashcards is a great idea. Basically, the idea is to overexpose yourself to those hard words a LOT the first day so that when you enter it into Anki, it's as if you've seen it a lot, you've created a pretty hard link to that word.

I don't recommend this much for beginners though, you're at the level where there are thousands of words used every day which you don't know, so IMO it's not the time to learn words you're not going to have any use for in the months to come.