Hi. I have studied Japanese for almost 4 years and I live in Japan since about 3 mounths.
The problem that troubles me most is my inability to remember Japanese words. When I see kanji, thanks to Heisig I usually know what the meaning is, but I often can neither produce nor recognize the reading.

The main problem is my inability to properly distinguish between stuff like しょ　しゅ　しょう　しゅう　ちょ　ちゅ　ちょう　ちゅう　じょ　じゅ　じょう　じゅう　ぢょ　ぢゅ　ぢょう　ぢゅう (I realize that some of these are pretty rare, maybe even non-existant)
In my head 給料 can become anything from ぎゅうりゅ to きょりょう.

Firstly, I am of course curious if I'm the only one having trouble with that.
Secondly, I thought about assigning mnemonics to those syllables to tell them apart more easy - and then make stories for words - Heisig style. Any thoughs on that?

Eh, more practice, more reading. You're not the only person who has trouble remembering this. Just keep at it.

試行錯誤

In anki, under card templates, there is a "compare field" option which you can start using to test yourself.

For example. My last card was 喜怒哀楽. So the word pops up

喜怒哀楽

(down here is an option to type out the reading)

So I put down きどうあいらく....hit enter and then see that I got it wrong. Fail the card. Move on to the next card.

Well, that's the whole point of Heisig - to enable you to write with the right stroke order AND to get you some basic meaning, so the kanji is not just a bundle of strokes.
Now that you've got that down, the only thing that remains is to utilize this knowledge to your advantage.
There're many ways how to learn readings (and I mean *learn* them by heart) - some people use RTK2, some prefer to put the new word (+reading, +/or definition) into Anki, some use premade decks.
Personally, I just stick new words into Anki and let the SRS take care of the memorization for me. I used to look up different words for different readings (two cards for one reading) of one kanji, consequently learning readings of other kanji as well (which, again, can be more easily achieved by going through premade deck).

For example　料 is always ryou, so it doesn't really matter what word you're learning it with, whether it is 料理 無料 or 清涼飲料水. I have these three as separate, totally unrelated Anki cards, but everytime I come across some new word containing 料, I just *know* that it's read as ryou.

Maybe next time you come across a word you just can't seem to remember you might try looking up the kanji and search for words you already know? (Again, personally, if I can't remember some word and I don't need to remember it right away, I just make an Anki card and suspend it for few days. You might be surprised how easily you learn that word next time you 'try to learn it' - after all, you've already seen it at least twice!)

Now if you will excuse me, I need to catch a wink *dead tired after night out* Sorry for typos and/or wierd English!

Thanks for your answers so far. I should have stressed my specific problem more clearly: It's not that I have problems with all words, it's those specific syllables that make trouble.
For example, the む in 無料 won't make me any trouble. I'll remember it after the first time I read it. But even after saying the words 100 times, and using it for months the りょう becomes りゅう.

The faint difference between long and short vowels (appended う), ょ and ゅ, and dakuten (゙) is barely noticable to my ear.

Is anybody else dealing with this specific problem?

I can completely relate. There are some words in anki I fail a ridiculous amount of times due to this. I was feeling really frustrated with it - but then something began to happen - I just got better at it - there seemed to be a threshold to were I stopped failing these things as much - or maybe certain words have a failure threshold each their own. I don't know why exactly, but I can say that it's not as much of a problem for me as it was say, six months ago.

However, one thing I would do is sometimes is use weird little mnemonics to distinguish them, which can help a little, especially when a word is fairly new. I would even use other Japanese words as hooks. Also, the more words you learn with the same reading/kanji can help cement the reading to that kanji, as you see it multiple times. In fact, sometimes I intentionally add another word or two into anki just for this purpose.

頑張って

I too struggle with this problem but I have been making some progress lately so I thought Id share.

I started using premade JLPT vocab decks where it's the kanji on the front and I test myself with the readiing on the back. If it's a word Im not comfortable with I put an example sentence on the back as well. This is diffeerent from what I had been doing which was going from the reading on the front to trying to produce the kanji on the back. This turned out to be way too frustrating and failure prone and so I'm glad I switched.

Another reason why I'd recommend to use a JLPT deck or any graded deck is that the difficulty increases incrementally so you don't spend too much time on words that you may not use much.

Using learn mode or cram mode. When I get a new deck, the first thing I do is take a chunk of about 25 words and put them into my "Learn" deck which has much smaller intervals than my regular deck, so I'm seeing a new word enough times to get comfortable with it before seeing it in my regular deck. This works wonders for vocab rentention.

Finally, practice practice practice. The fact that you will be seeing a particular kanji/word enough times over a regular interval means that it will automatically start to stick. There is a clicking point where the word becomes permanently affixed in your brain, but it takes many attempts and failures to get to that point. There's simply no way to get around this. Fail, try again, fail try again etc etc..

Hope this helps.

I memorised one onyomi reading for each kanji using mnemonics so I never had this problem. You can distinguish between long and short sounds quite easily by using different mnemonics. Eg. JUU=jew, JU= Juicy Underwear, SHOU=seaSHORE, SHO= SHOp etc etc. Just make-up new sound mnemonics for these phonemes as you need them and remind yourself of them while reviewing.

nadiatims Wrote:I memorised one onyomi reading for each kanji using mnemonics so I never had this problem. You can distinguish between long and short sounds quite easily by using different mnemonics. Eg. JUU=jew, JU= Juicy Underwear, SHOU=seaSHORE, SHO= SHOp etc etc. Just make-up new sound mnemonics for these phonemes as you need them and remind yourself of them while reviewing.

Yeah, that was my idea. In fact, I already used 'jew' as a mnemonic for じゅう.
I have now made a list. As I'm not a native speaker of English, please tell me if I'm way off there.

し: shit
じ: jeans
ち: cheeze
じゅう: jew
じゅ: juicy
じょう: joe
じょ: job
しゅう: shoe
しゅ: shook
しょう: shore
しょ: shop
ちゅう: chew / choose
ちゅ: -
ちょう: chore
ちょ: chop


Anything with ぢ is practically nonexistant.

Those all seem good enough. They don't have to match the pronunciation perfectly rather just act as a reminder for the correct hiragana. Regarding ぢ, I don't think this is a valid default onyomi reading for any character. Rather ち may turn into this when a dakuten is added, when the kanji appears in a compound word (Off the top of my head I can't think of even a single case). Anyway in time your ability to correctly guess/know when a dakuten is used will improve quite naturally. Once you recognise the major readings for each character you most likely won't have any need to use mnemonics to remember the readings on a word by word basis, so I wouldn't worry about that.

I can completely relate to this as well. For me, the しゅうしょう and しょうしゅう-type of words sometimes just mash together into the same thing and in the heat of natural conversations really trip me up. Written down it's no big deal but I often have to process these for a few beats longer than words like 美しい or しつこい when hearing them.

My favorite is the similarity in sound between きょうりゅう and きゅうりょう. I remember once a coworker said to me 「きゅうりょうが少ない、ね」 and I was like, no kidding honey, that asteroid really did a number on those things.

julianjalapeno Wrote:My favorite is the similarity in sound between きょうりゅう and きゅうりょう. I remember once a coworker said to me 「きゅうりょうが少ない、ね」 and I was like, no kidding honey, that asteroid really did a number on those things.

This made my day Sounds like a line from Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo

Try RTK2 (plus extra vocab to re-enforce), it helped me get over the same problem.

I'd say create more context with mixed words and then have tons of conversations about them. For example, chat in Japanese about Chinese high, junior and elementary school at the same time.　Then talk about Chinese subways near junior high schools. Or talk about Junior, senior high where you are from.

Example

私の中国人の友達の中学のちかいに、地下鉄がある。

Wow, that really was practice! : p Either way, I find a few little tongue twisters like these are excellent practice, especially after a few beers and you can still get it right : )

or maybe...
いつか　上手の女優になりたい。。。冗談だよ！

　　　　　（じょず）の（じょゆう）　。。。じょうだん！

Most of the people who posted here are right. It is practice. A Japanese person (of course) says the different words hundreds of thousands of times in their life time in various contexts. I feel after a few hundred (in context), you should be fine，especially since you live in Japan.

cheers

nadiatims Wrote:Rather ち may turn into this when a dakuten is added, when the kanji appears in a compound word (Off the top of my head I can't think of even a single case).

鼻血（はなぢ） springs to mind. But as you say, 血's reading is normally ち (and that's the kunyomi... hmm).

zigmonty Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:Rather ち may turn into this when a dakuten is added, when the kanji appears in a compound word (Off the top of my head I can't think of even a single case).

鼻血（はなぢ） springs to mind. But as you say, 血's reading is normally ち (and that's the kunyomi... hmm).

And from the Core 6k series, we also got the example of 間近（まぢか）

That's a kun reading though. The OP was talking about having trouble keeping ON readings distinct. There is no kanji with default ON reading of ぢ and I can't think of a single ONyomi compound word where ち becomes ぢ.

I have never really looked into RTK 2, so out of curiosity when you are reviewing are you trying to recall the kanji and the ONyomi from the keyword?

Learning new words gets easier and easier as your vocabulary grows. In fact, it becomes so easy you can pick up tons of new words and their usages just by talking with people, reading books, etc. So you don't need to worry about it if you're at a beginning level. You find it difficult because your Japanese is at the growing very slowly stage.

What worries me, though, is that you seem to have the wrong idea about knowing a word. You said you can barely hear the differences between certain phonemes. This means that it's impossible for you to know words with those sounds unless you ignore spoken language.

If this is not clear to you, consider a person who can't see the difference between the two letters "p" and "b". He's never seen the Latin alphabet so to him they're both a circle with a vertical line on the left. How could this person possibly remember written words with these letters such as "pig" and "big"? Isn't it necessary to know all letters used in a word?

Now you say you can't hear the difference between long and short vowels. Then how do you "remember" words with vowels? Don't you think you need to know the vowels in the first place?

I don't think it's absolutely necessary to train your ear to a native speaker's level or you should be able to pronounce them perfectly. But I think you should be able to hear the difference between each sound to some extent so you can easily recognize them as different sounds. You can't remember words you can't see or hear for obvious reasons.

magamo Wrote:If this is not clear to you, consider a person who can't see the difference between the two letters "p" and "b". He's never seen the Latin alphabet so to him they're both a circle with a vertical line on the left. How could this person possibly remember written words with these letters such as "pig" and "big"? Isn't it necessary to know all letters used in a word?

I know many japanese people who, for example, pronounce the words "sink" and "think" identically. Clearly they are struggling to separate those phonemes. Whether they can hear the difference but just not produce the difference is something i don't know. But it seems to me that if you can't separate certain phonemes then you are basically hearing the language with far more homonyms than a native speaker. Whether you are still able to understand it or not depends on how much context you have do disambiguate the homonyms. Obviously if you can't separate the sounds out, you have no hope of being able to pronounce those words correctly. But potentially it doesn't hurt your recognition too badly.

zigmonty Wrote:I know many japanese people who, for example, pronounce the words "sink" and "think" identically. Clearly they are struggling to separate those phonemes. Whether they can hear the difference but just not produce the difference is something i don't know. But it seems to me that if you can't separate certain phonemes then you are basically hearing the language with far more homonyms than a native speaker. Whether you are still able to understand it or not depends on how much context you have do disambiguate the homonyms. Obviously if you can't separate the sounds out, you have no hope of being able to pronounce those words correctly. But potentially it doesn't hurt your recognition too badly.

You're absolutely right. And my point is that the person who is hearing far more homonyms can't remember those words the same way as people who can distinguish the sounds. This may not hurt recognition too badly (I kind of doubt it though). But I'm almost certain that this is one of the biggest reasons why the OP is having trouble remembering words with sounds identical to him. He can't remember those words the same way as advanced learners who can separate them out. And in a very strict sense, he doesn't know the sounds of the words because he can't hear them. I believe this causes difficulty in memorizing/remembering words.

Edit: I also think it doesn't count as knowing words (in spoken language) in a strict sense if you don't know their sounds well enough to separate them from other words with distinct phonemes in your mind unless you claim that you're learning your version of the language. I'm not saying learners should also have a high listening skill comparable to that of naive speakers of a certain dialect. But I do think it's necessary to be able to separate out sounds the majority of native speakers find quite different.

Edit2: If you have transcribed spoken materials in your mother tongue, you probably know native speakers don't separate out each sound either in the way we might do when reading a sequence of meaningless letters; you can recognize "pbpbpooppb" letter by letter when reading but can't do the same thing when hearing nonsensical phonetically complicated pseud-words. So the "p" vs "b" thing isn't the best analogy. But you get the picture.

magamo Wrote:And my point is that the person who is hearing far more homonyms can't remember those words the same way as people who can distinguish the sounds. This may not hurt recognition too badly (I kind of doubt it though). But I'm almost certain that this is one of the biggest reasons why the OP is having trouble remembering words with sounds identical to him. He can't remember those words the same way as advanced learners who can separate them out. And in a very strict sense, he doesn't know the sounds of the words because he can't hear them. I believe this causes difficulty in memorizing/remembering words.

Yeah. I remember when i was first starting, i noticed that words with a つ in them, especially at the start, didn't stick as well as others. I never had any problem differentiating that sound or producing it, but lack of familiarity with it (it isn't a super common sound in english...) seemed to affect vocab learning.

magamo Wrote:Edit: I also think it doesn't count as knowing words (in spoken language) in a strict sense if you don't know their sounds well enough to separate them from other words with distinct phonemes in your mind unless you claim that you're learning your version of the language.

This is where it gets murky. Does pitch accent factor into this? 橋 and 箸 are not homonyms to a native speaker but they sure are if you can't differentiate the pitch accent. I can hear the difference if i hear the two next to each other, but i doubt i'm relying on anything more than context in an actual conversation. Do i know these words or not?

Word/sound play works and sentences w/ audio makes it even better, more hooks to utilize when reviewing, semantics/connotation and prosody.

zigmonty Wrote:This is where it gets murky. Does pitch accent factor into this? 橋 and 箸 are not homonyms to a native speaker but they sure are if you can't differentiate the pitch accent. I can hear the difference if i hear the two next to each other, but i doubt i'm relying on anything more than context in an actual conversation. Do i know these words or not?

In a strict sense, you don't know the sounds of the two words in the dialect you're learning or only partially know them. Whether it counts as knowing the words is a matter of semantics. That's why I said "in a strict sense" in the previous post. If you're ok with not being able to distinguish them and think it does count as knowing them, then you know them.

So, pitch accent tells you which mora is stressed. What if I couldn't tell apart the two "present"s as in "I'm looking for a present for my girlfriend" and "This presents a serious problem"? Do I know the sound of the word "present"? What if I couldn't tell the difference between:

Pitch accent is PRETTY easy.
Pitch accent is pretty EASY.

If I couldn't tell the difference in meaning between the two sentences by hearing them, would you say I knew the sounds of the sentences in a strict sense?

Since you mentioned pitch accent, I think it should be taught from day one. I often hear people say something along the line of "You don't need it because different dialects use different pitch patters" or "Native speakers understand you from context if you don't learn pitch accent in most cases so it's not necessary for basic communications."

Then why do you think verb conjugations are important? (You think they are, right?) Different dialects use different conjugation patters. We can understand you from context most of the time if you always use the dictionary form. For basic communication purpose, you don't need to conjugate verbs.

I don't think it's extremely strange to say that you don't know a verb in a strict sense if you can't distinguish conjugated versions (I'm of the opinion that conjugated verbs are different words in a sense though). I think the same goes for pitch patters and phonemes. I don't think it's absurd to think you don't know a pair of words (at least in a strict sense) if you see them as homonyms because you don't know the sounds very well.

@magamo
what do you think is the best way to get a good pitch accent?