How do you deal with troublesome words/leeches/words you keep forgetting?

Japanese
#1

I can’t believe its taken me so long to ask this, but how do you deal with problem words?

For some reason there are words that no matter how many times I learn, I forget them.

In the past, I would just bruteforce my way through reviewing them, but it feels like now I’m reaching too large a vocabulary queue to do that without ending up in an untenable situation.

So, I’m curious how do you personally deal with these problem words? The ones that you just seem to forget as soon as you clear them?

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#2

Same here… It’s frustrating because as time goes on, this stack of problematic items keep growing larger and larger.

What is helping me is to approach them in 3 different ways:

  • Thinking logically about them: If you know the kanjis for that word and their readings, try to assimilate their meaning with the meaning of the word. If it’s too obscure, go with mnemonics. I think sticking with those are fine until you can recall the word without extra effort. That’s how many people learn the kanji with things like RTK, and while I agree that doing that will all the vocab is unproductive and a pain, doing so for just the troubled words should be okay.
  • Keep brute forcing: At least for me, waiting for new reviews seems like just delaying the issue… What I’ve been doing recently is to periodically cram these words. When setting up the cram session, there are many filters that you can apply. The ones that I use a lot are the troubled vocab content, and the SRS level filters. I think the troubled content filter uses your accuracy rate for each word, so it’s great to do some cram based on that every now and then, mixed with items in Beginner SRS level.
  • Cheat on those words: Being realistic, if you’re using cloze… Sometimes there are words that you may never use in your life. It’s important to be able to recognize them during input, but I couldn’t care less about the thousand ways of saying “manufacturing”. I don’t aim to be better at Japanese than at my native language. So if during reviews I cannot recall a very specific word, but I can recall one that would mean almost the same, and after peeking the solution I remember about it, then I consider it as correct. Not because I want to cheat on myself, but because I don’t want to punish me with a difficult review queue that never goes down.

I would also love to hear about other ways to deal with this :slight_smile:

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#3

I also have this issue. There are words I’ve apparently almost mastered that I just fail at properly remembering, over and over again…

Here’s what helped me:

  • making an effort to look up the word and understand it. I use youglish.com to hear how the word is pronounced and used in various situations (the site finds endless YouTube videos with the word!!). I ask ChatGPT to explain the ways it’s used in different sentences and see if I can think more deeply about the nuances.

  • finding a way to use it in a real conversation at least once on the day I failed at remembering it. If it’s a weird word I just tell my partner I’m practicing some new grammar and say some gibberish to say it aloud :man_shrugging:

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