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?
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:
I would also love to hear about other ways to deal with this 
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 
For me I create new mnemonics every time a previous one fails to work.
Often times there are two similar things I realize I keep mixing up, so I make a larger mnemonic for the entire pair.
Also I just try not to worry about it too much. The SRS will do its magic and put those leeches at the top of the review deck where they belong. Every time I fail one of them, that’s one step closer to mastery. I try to enjoy the failures. And the entire road is so long, that all of these leeches I’m encountering right now will be ancient history by the time I’m on the final mile.
And when my queue feels too large, I stop doing new lessons until that feeling goes away and the queue is comfortably empty. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. If you keep your queue too full for too long you’re working against the SRS math. I leaned that the hard way after my WaniKani queue got to like 2000. It’s under control now, and I’m about to hit level 20, but my progress graph is hilarious. My first ~14 levels took 8 days each, and then level 15 or so was like 150 days or something stupid.
Learning Japanese is the thing that made me a believer in LLMs.
I’ve been a software engineer for many years, but was very stubborn at adopting a more AI-centric workflow, literally only in the past few weeks, and boy do I finally taste the Kool aid.
But I learned nearly a year ago what a powerful tool it is for language learning. It’s certainly fallible obviously, and knowing how to use it right is so critical. But it’s answered questions for me that no other available resource could, including my partner whose native language is Japanese.
tbf native speakers are quite often the worst teachers haha
I generally don’t use Bunpro for vocab, but when there are words I keep failing in Anki/WK, I add them to Bunpro after I get sick of them.
On here - I set it to reading mode, and usually find the added SRS exposure and multiple sentence contexts that are on here get it finally hammered in for me.
Also - I am generally really relaxed about “failing” words that I don’t feel are important.
I’d say the time Bunpro helps the most is when I have the kanji reading nailed, but keep misremembering the meaning when seeing it in a single context sentence on Anki or WK.
I think this sort of thing is going to come down to the individual’s preferred learning style but I have always just let myself forget about the word/grammar point (if it is a flashcard then delete it/remove it from the queue). If it is important then it will come up again and, by then, it will probably be much easier the second time round.
Big caveat (which I don’t think applies to cafelatte’s predicament) is that for N5 to early-ish N3 there is little choice but to brute force some things, as they are so common you are going to see them again immediately.
My biggest leeches have always been grammar points. Things like causative-passive. Seeing lots of examples has helped me move away from them being leeches.
Early on kanji were often leeches, but I was learning kanji without the context of vocab. I find that giving context to a vocab, kanji or grammar point helps it much less likely to be a leech.
Ghost reviews help me. Some words I’ve missed so many times I though I would never learn them, but after having failed and reviewed them so many time, they’re now confidently burned in my brain.
Wow, this question/thread really resonates with me. I’m very interested in everyone’s solutions. I, too, sometimes get stuck with a pile of vocab items that don’t stick and keep clogging up my review queue.
So far, my methods have been exactly what @davconde posted. Most of the time, the words that don’t stick are the ones where I either don’t know the kanji, or where the meaning doesn’t much relate to the kanji. Or sometimes words that simply don’t have kanji at all.
In my experience, brute forcing (and accepting that I’m going the get the word wrong 15 times before it sticks) works as long as it’s just one or two words. If there are too many words like that, my memory gets muddied. Brute forcing too many words at a time is a mess.
Cheating or manually moving a word up to a later stage sometimes works for me. At the very least, it simply spaces difficult words out a little bit so they stop appearing at the same time all the time. In my settings, I’ve set “SRS strictness” for vocab to “half (current stage/2)” so when I get a word wrong, it drops back pretty far. That way, a word I cheated or manually moved forward automatically drops back to beginner stages if it doesn’t stick in my memory yet.
But honestly, this doesn’t solve everything. I still struggle with the same thing as you sometimes.
Oh yeah, occasionally I look up the etymology for a word. Even if there’s no interesting etymology, just the fact that I looked a word up means that it was in my small brain for a few minutes while I was putting that work in, and that by itself also helps.
Works every time lol 
I also occasionally do this, even for English! Sometimes the rabbit hole leads you to very interesting places. And yeah just thinking so much about the word and things to do with it helps a lot.
I just remembered one more method that has worked for me before.
I had trouble learning こしらえる. I don’t remember what exactly I did to come across this, but later I saw that there’s this set phrase 腹をこしらえる (to have a meal before doing something, to fortify oneself with a meal). This phrase even seemed rather useful to know, so I added it to my reviews. Knowing a set phrase with the word instantly helped me remember it well.
みなさん、よく勉強するために、腹をこしらえましょう！ 
I also think it is something you just sort of struggle with until you get it right… Spoiler alert I still don’t have every nuance of every word in the Japanese language mastered yet 
I was a huge supporter of cloze-only reviews until recently, but after a lot of thinking, the secret sauce for learning is cloze reviews to N3, then switch over to ̶t̶r̶a̶n̶s̶l̶a̶t̶e̶ reading for N2-N1. One of the reasons is this exact scenario.
In cloze reviews, during long sessions, it’s tempting to simply start glancing over sentences, reading the highlighted word, and hoping it’s the right one. ̶T̶r̶a̶n̶s̶l̶a̶t̶e̶ Reading forces you to slow down and look at the context, which in turn helps you to start realizing the differences between words.
Are you learning how to actively recall words by translate? Possibly not. However, that’s where speaking practice comes in. The reality is, there are many, many words you probably won’t have to worry about producing in conversation, and when it becomes necessary is when you learn it, either by looking it up, or asking the person you are talking with to help you find the right word.
Finally, the next big part of this really is input (well immersion would be best, but many of us don’t actually live in Japan, so that’s not an option 
)… I also want to preface this by saying I am still a very big believer that input doesn’t have great returns until you have a grasp on the foundations of the language, somewhere between N3 and N2. Your time is still better spent laying a good foundation rather than floundering through light novels and manga.
I thought for awhile about a a personal example for this, and the best one I came up with was distribution:
配布, 配分, 分布, 配給 are all translated as “distribution”, but have very different usages and meanings.
I struggled with them, and may still get 配布 and 配分 a little mixed up from time to time, but I came across 分布 while looking at the Pokedex. It refers to the distribution of species across that region. Now, I have a strong mental pathway built and understand the actual context of the word.
配給 is something you will come across in news articles and the like, and is pretty specialized, referring specifically to rations, so that takes care of that word as well. I’m not totally sure I can recall it, but I’m also not sure I’ll ever even need to.
TLDR: Keep slogging away, don’t be afraid to switch some reviews from cloze over to translate, and especially at your level, consume as much content as your schedule allows.
Find a real world example that resonates with you and anchor yourself to it.
Example:
Whenever I think of N1: すら
I think of this song: 祈り - Lyrics and this phrase:
神も仏も悪魔も知らんぷり
そこにはいないの 生まれてすらいないの
Before this, すら was just another forgettable grammar point.
I try to get around this with mnemonics
意図 = 
Your toe pointing at a target → concrete plan/purpose意向 = 
Your heart’s compass → personal wish/inclination
Think: 意図 = WHAT you’re aiming to DO vs 意向 = WHAT you WANT to happen
But it takes a lot of effort. And it’s an additional layer of scaffolding you have to remember and it doesn’t always work.
Renshuu.org has community sourced mnemonics for kanji. It would be nice to have some sort of community sourced system for word mnemonics. That way people could vote on the most memorable versions.
But that doesn’t help with interaction between similar words. Homonyms, synonyms, homophones, etc
Translating sentences has been incredible for me since I started doing it post-N2. It blends the repetition of SRS with the context and variety of immersion very well. Fully agree that you don’t need to practice output for every word, but it’s still valuable to be mindful of useful expressions you might want to learn.
The main challenge at lower levels with translation is that there’s so much unknown vocab / grammar that you’d need to have a very deliberate and steady progression for it not to be frustrating. Even at N2 + N1 there’s many unknown words that you have to infer from context.
Yeah you gotta get rid of those. Leeches beget leeches.