Bouncing off the topic of learning kanji vs. learning vocabulary, how do you all study vocabulary that is written only in Hiragana (onomatopoeia or verbs with obscure, unused kanji etc.) ? Personally, I find memorizing new vocab using already learned kanji to be a (relative) snap; but when it comes to hiragana vocab, 9 times out of 10 there's no toehold and I can't remember them well after a week or so.
I started including example sentences for every hiragana word in my anki deck, but the problem then is that I become overly dependent on context. I'm sure most of you have had this problem at one point or another: within the context of an example sentence I can get the meaning right every time, but confronted by the same word in "the wild" or without any context, I can't remember it at all.
Does anyone have any special method for learning these words?
I had this problem when I on-boarded a ton of adverbs recently. Like shinsen said, I find that finding and adding new example sentences works. A quick Google search helps a lot. (And usually ends up with me finding a blog I find entertaining as well.)
For stubborn words, I find it useful to remember collocations along with the world itself. I currently can't remember ぎゅっと unless I also recall 押さえる. (the original sentence is アサトはオレの左腕をつかみ、傷口を両側からぎゅっと押さえた。)
I've stopped failing a lot of cards in general since changing my approach to Anki. At the end of the day, I review all of the words that I failed. I load the failed words into a cram deck, drill them, write them out (even kana-only words), and re-read the example sentence a few times. If I still don't feel like I'm "getting it", this is when I go and look for more example sentences. My retention rate has gone way up since adding this study component.
Last edited by gaiaslastlaugh (2012 October 20, 10:41 pm)
