I was wondering if anyone else came across the odd word that, no matter what, just do not seem to stick.

For me, one of those is 経済学. The がく bit is fine, but I never remember the readings of the first two kanji. I have it in my deck in a straightforward sentence (well I did, until it got suspended as a leech yesterday...): 専攻は、経済学です。, I have it as a vocab word on its own, with a nice picture to go with it. Nope, no good. It should be simple, but in each case I fail it almost every single time. I can't even remember the reading now, even though I saw it with Rikaichan a second ago. >_<

So, which words, if any, have you had problems with? What did you do with them, especially if they were in your deck, find a way to remember them, delete them, leave them till they got suspended?

Oh man, I feel your pain! I really hate 経済 too. Plus the kanjis don't match the RTK keywords. Economics = Sutra + Finish. Riiight. But I've first added this one like, 2-3 months ago and I'm proud to say, I do now kind of remember it.

Not that it's difficult, but sometimes I struggle hard for like せんしゅう. I start thinking せん could be 線 or 戦... and many many しゅうs come to mind... then I give up and facepalm myself when I see it was that stupid 先週. I swear sometimes it seems as thought "it" was looking at me saying "haha, that was just me You failed me again "

I virtually got rid of the leech threshold though. They do end up sticking, after a few hundred reps ;P

For me, it's slight differences between kanji that kill me. 掌 and 拳 are both in my deck right now, and I keep mixing them up. Drives me batty.

Beyond that, I'm currently struggling with a large bunch of adverbs I've picked up mainly from マジックツリーハウス。 I'm struggling daily to remember the differences between にっこり、　くるり、ぐるり, ぐらり、ぐらぐら、すらり、すんなり、しっくり、ぽっかり、and ぐっすり。AAAAARGH.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:For me, it's slight differences between kanji that kill me. 掌 and 拳 are both in my deck right now, and I keep mixing them up. Drives me batty.

Beyond that, I'm currently struggling with a large bunch of adverbs I've picked up mainly from マジックツリーハウス。 I'm struggling daily to remember the differences between にっこり、　くるり、ぐるり, ぐらり、ぐらぐら、すらり、すんなり、しっくり、ぽっかり、and ぐっすり。AAAAARGH.

ya the core 6k and 10k sets give you a good handle on the most commonly used variations of those guys... I forget their grammatical name. Maybe someone better than me can remember it for us all. It's good to know the name of the things that you're weak at.

I also suck at 自動詞・他動詞 distinctions...

I remember that I struggled a lot with 動物園 in the beginning. I added that card long before I bothered to find out what 動物 was... I is so smrt.

経済 wasn't that difficult to me, though I failed it 3-4 times before it finally stuck.

I'm now at 1050 cards, and about to start adding J-J-cards...which might be even worse when I have to understand definitions too. I'm not doing 10,000 pre-made J-E cards. No way.

@Ampharos64
Perhaps in such a case where you are at risk of getting 経済phobic, it might be worth using some mnemonic connecting the Heisig keywords of the two kanji with the meaning of the word—and possibly also with its reading. It may cost you some time to find one but probably less than if you keep failing the card in your reviews. When you have finally tamed that beast, you will safely let the mnemonic decay in your memory…

頭蓋骨！ this one was specially hard
臥薪嘗胆。
野心的。
忌憚。

damn words, It took me a lot of time to memorize them!

These onyomi words mentioned in the thread get easier as you learn other words that use the same readings.

After a while you can pretty much read onyomi compound words as fast as ひらがな. There are of course a lot of exceptions when it comes to readings that can throw you off though.

I have already noticed that knowing a word with a kanji in it helps me with reading a new, less familiar, word.

I've been using Anki for 2+ years now, and I swear there are a few words that I've been failing on a regular basis for 2+ years now. I'll get the words up to about a 3 month interval, and then I'll forget them the next time I see them. For each word, I've probably repeated this process 5 or 6 times now. I have like 60+ reviews of each individual word (I'd say over 300-400 reviews total for all these hard words) , and probably 1/2 of those are failures. It's almost unbelievable. I should really just suspend those words next time I see them (I don't currently suspend leaches automatically).

But really, it's probably like 3 or 4 words out of 7000 or so I have in Anki, so it's no big deal.

ばかり it just has so many nuances!

My active vocabulary of adverbs and gitaigo is low since they don't come up in conversation so much (at least not with the people I talk to). I find gitaigo especially hard to remember (meaning and output).

I wonder if there's some adverb/gitaigo training thing out there.

複雑 for some reason, should be easy. Guess I just don't see it often enough yet.

揺れる　震える

There's like a 50/50 chance I'll read them backwards like.

ふるれる　と　ゆるえる

And those words don't even make sense...

I mainly have difficulty with words that contain kanji I haven't yet encountered in any other words. The more words I knew containing a particular kanji, the easier it became to remember new words that also contained that kanji. I also had trouble with 経済 but after I learnt 経つ、経験、経営 etc. I found it easier to remember each new word.

There are some words however that I just cannot remember correctly. 方向 is an example of one. I always get it backwards and think it's 向方 no matter how many times I tell myself it's the other way around. Sometimes I even substitute 法 in place of 方.

blackbrich Wrote:ふるれる　と　ゆるえる

かわいいｗｗｗｗｗ

Umm for me I guess it's 激選（げきせん）. I always read it はげせん and in my head then realise immediately after >_<

[Zgarbas]

Man, I just struggle so much with 　四字熟語 (even the non-idiomatic ones) it's not funny. Been having the same items in my deck for aaagees and no matter how much I try with them I keep failing them, and as soon as I don't see them for a week I don't recognize them again =/. Even with the ones I've seen a gazillion times, I'm still struggling a bit and even use rikaisan only to realize that "aaaah, I've known that one forever!". No idea why I can't get along with them. Hell, sometimes it takes me a while to even recognize 四字熟語 when I see it, which is like the ultimate fail.

right now what you're doing is a waste of time. I've done that too, not with yojijukugo but just long words in general. like you said, you see it over and over, you can make it hard every single time or even fail it every couple days, you still don't remember and when you encounter it in the wild you don't even recognize it or it takes mad effort to remember. So I have a solution for that.

You should either do those cards in your current deck AND make MCD cards (install the plugin, press f9, add spaces between the characters and you're all set) or just delete that card and only do MCD cards for yojijukugo. If you can't do MCD cards (it sorta requires you to be somewhat comfortable with japanese that you have some type of intuition as to how Japanese is. For me, I'm monolingual right now so i'm fine - I built up my japanes intuition, I'm not sure how well it would work if you just started and you're still doing j-> e) then I don't think you should even be learning those yojijukugo. It would be best if you used your time to learn more common, useful Japanese words/phrases/grammar.

MCD has revolutionized my learning lol.

I made a yojijukugo card (if this is yojijukugo..by definition it's just 4 kanji that make up a word rights?) recently in mcd format.

front of the cards:
【[...]手空拳】で茸ワールドに身を投じた

【徒[...]空拳】で茸ワールドに身を投じた

【徒手[...]拳】で茸ワールドに身を投じた

【徒手空[...]】で茸ワールドに身を投じた

for the MCD cards I just focus on filling in the blank and not the meaning and then for the normal card I focus on recalling the meaning. I think it works awesome.

ALSO it's helpful for kakitori practice as well ie yojijukugo

here's other ways i use MCD.
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid163397

lardycake Wrote:複雑 for some reason, should be easy. Guess I just don't see it often enough yet.

Just tell yourself, "I can't remember this word - it's too complicated!"

I was drilling Anki vocab the other day. Flew threw a bunch of words, and then stopped dead trying to remember ためらう. When my gf heard the definition, she laughed.

乞食 - Weird readings; I guess most onyomi subconsciously at this point, and I always come up with some weird (wrong) answer to this. Always takes a few failures before I can send it off.

dizmox Wrote:My active vocabulary of adverbs and gitaigo is low since they don't come up in conversation so much (at least not with the people I talk to). I find gitaigo especially hard to remember (meaning and output).

I wonder if there's some adverb/gitaigo training thing out there.

I'm thinking of tagging all of these in Anki as they come up, and studying them as a set.

Side note: it would be more natural to say 専攻は経済です.

[Zgarbas]

Fadeway Wrote:乞食 - Weird readings, I guess most onyomi subconsciously at this point, and I always come up with some weird (wrong) answer to this. Always takes a few failures before I can send it off.

Just throwing this out since I happen to have a mental image for this one. I always ｔhink "Coin 時機" when I see it. Someone who wants an opportunity to take your coins . Might be worth sharing.
@MindTrick: 方向 Maybe an image regarding the sword going into the hole could help? ifyouknowwhatImean.

Interesting to see all those pesky words people are struggling with. Good luck getting them all down, they're surely bound to stick eventually!

jmignot Wrote:@Ampharos64
Perhaps in such a case where you are at risk of getting 経済phobic, it might be worth using some mnemonic connecting the Heisig keywords of the two kanji with the meaning of the word—and possibly also with its reading. It may cost you some time to find one but probably less than if you keep failing the card in your reviews. When you have finally tamed that beast, you will safely let the mnemonic decay in your memory…

経済恐怖症ですねｗ
That sounds like a good idea (especially as I just failed the thing again. I thought I had it this time, too). Hmm...
@comeauch
Glad it's not just me! XD Stupid word.

Perhaps looking out for these tricky words in a context more relevant and interesting to us could help, too. It's kind of ridiculous that I learned 恐怖症 without even trying after only seeing it once, purely because it was in a videogame I like. Memory is weird like that.

fakewookie Wrote:Side note: it would be more natural to say 専攻は経済です.

Hmm, would it? It's just one I got from Tae Kim's Guide, so I guess isn't necessarily the most natural way to say it. It's mainly just there to remind me of 専攻 and 経済, anyway.

Dude, I've reached the 6th kanji grade (nearly a 1000). My reviews usually go by without much hassle. Yet I STILL get stuck on stupid 生 from grade ONE! Shou, sei, shut up!