How to master these words?

Japanese
#1

These are not adverbs or interjections. I’m not sure what they’re called but I have a hard time remembering their meanings. I hear or read them often and have added them to my Reviews when I’ve found them on BunPro. However:

  • a lot of them feel similar that I have a hard time keeping them straight.
  • even with their kanji, it doesn’t help me remember them. e.g. ちなみに = 因みに (by the way) where 因 = cause
  • some of them are N1 in BunPro so the sample sentences that show up on my review are N1 and it still doesn’t help me understand the vocabulary because I don’t understand the whole sentence at all. So adding these to a custom review deck may not be all that effective.
    Wondering how everyone else has managed to remember them.

やはり
やっぱり
ちなみに (因みに)
更に
かわりに
ずっと
すっかり
きっと
びったり
さっき
ぜひ
ちゃんと
きちんと
はっきり
さっぱり
ぐっすり
しみじみ
ところが
ところで
やっと
やった - these last 2 just sound so similar I get confused. I’d been studying grammar for a while (before I found BunPro) and only knew about する and was a bit shocked/confused the first time I heard a conjugated form of やる

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#2

I think it’s about understanding them and not remembering.

Understanding them can come from seeing them in many context or diving deeper into each of them.

If you know the nuances of one and another quite well but have trouble differentiating them and you really want to remember them, you could learn a reference sentences for each. Better if that sentences is from real word, where you know exactly what is going on, and can catch the nuance from the situation and intonation.

Learning sentences is by itself one of the greatest tools I’ve found working well recently

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#3

やっぱり、through reading/listening with a healthy dose of SRS. Having context for when and why a character might say it, or a mental image is, I think, more important than a specific translation.

I always seem to have a dozen or more of those hiragana words at various stages of forgetting and re-learning through SRS. Some of the latest offenders being:
あっさり
じっくり
ざっと
うんと
ずらり
ぐんぐん
and more.
Just failing them in SRS and trying to establish a mental image once again, that’s it pretty much my whole strategy.

Some of the words on your list, e.g. ちゃんと・きちんと are frequently explained by language youtubers, so maybe one of those videos is memorable enough to finally make them stick.

Some, e.g. ぐっすり might come up in manga as sound effects, maybe those scenes are a fun and memorable visual anchor.

And if you have any specific sentences that don’t quite make sense, I’m sure many fellow learners would be happy to chip in if you post them.

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#4

all of these are really common in reading. i wouldn’t bother with them too much now, if you have trouble getting a feel for them. just skip them and add them back into the srs when you encountered them enough times in the wild. they add a lot of flavor to text and speech and you will just pick them automatically then.

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#5

I went through something similar yesterday, with zettai ni and kanarazu.

What I found helpful was I watched a couple of youtube grammar videos that addressed these words, and wrote out some extra notes in long hand on a piece of paper.

As @homa said above, once i tried to understand these words, rather than trying cram a rote answer into my head to pass the SRS, I felt more confident.

Writing out the definitions, similarities and differences and example sentences in longhand also helped to reinforce it.

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#6

Those are in the categories of Onomatopea, and in my opinion, one of the worse vocab section to learn. There is a Bunpro deck for Onomatopea. You can look for that, also there are a lot of cool shared Anki decks about this.

Moreover, I really suggest that you learn this with context as many onomatopea has multiple meanings.

If you are planning on taking JLPT, then learning these is necessary as vocab section can have up to 3 questions of these.

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#7

Yup, this is important. The more you read, the more you will get a feel for these words. These kinds of words I think benefit most from exposure in context

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#8

I usually don’t immersion bro anybody, but this time I gotta.

“Just immerse bro”

These are so common in spoken language and reading, they really cement themselves through exposure and context since most of these are almost never used in isolation.

If you don’t want to “immerse bro”, then it’s probably better to memorize full sentences using these words, cause learning them in isolation isn’t very helpful.

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#9

Oh yeah, here is a very detail guide about this, if anyone interested

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#10

I will say that several of these words took me AGES to understand. I knew the dictionary meaning, but it didn’t make sense to me in context. It just too exposure and finally one day they started to click and I got the meaning. Some words just aren’t used in ways that we commonly use them in English, and the only way to get them is to see/hear them often enough that you get it.

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#11

So most posters say read more, which you are already doing. Add the ones that aren’t N1 to your review queue and add to anki example sentences you can actually understand, either from the books you are reading or another resource like JLPT N3 例文：〜かわりに

The following is my vibes for your list
やはり、やっぱり are different spellings of the same word. Feels like a ‘yeah’ to me
ちなみに、ところ、更に all give me linking verb vibes. Like ‘then’ or ‘so’
ぜひ is a ‘yeah’- learned this one in genki
ずっと is forever
Have you heard the story “kit kat means certain victory” きっとmeans certain きっと勝と
すっかり、さっぱり、びったり, ぴったり are all the all in ぴったり分からない I don’t get it at all
代わりにis a negative, like otherwise or instead バナナがなかったので、バナナのかわりにりんごを食べた。
やった I know from videogames. When I win a combat “やった!” “Did it!”
ちゃんと、 きちんと、しみじみ are like ‘properly’, seriously as in “he studies seriously” not seriously as in “You’re seriously going to eat that?”
やっと, 結局、とうとう、あげく are like ‘finally’ as in ‘you’re finally here’.
はっきり is clearly like in speak clearly or clearly evil
さっき I remember it sounds like 先に and has a similar meaning

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#12

Thank you so much, everyone!! Thanks for all the tips and additional resources.

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#13

ぐっすり
when it be night time and you take 薬 you get knocked right out!

正々
not just exactly as you say, it’s exactly as you say say - that’s super accurate!

きちんと
clean the kitchen properly or you’ll get special warts known as the kitchen toe!

やはり
hari is right again, as expected, so I always say, ya hari! the sky is purple? ya hari! and it’s blue as well! that’s a rainbow!

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