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

1 Like
#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

#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.