I think this is down to each persons pronunciation. Some people make the stress obvious on double vowel sounds others don’t. I think generally it probably doesn’t matter too much unless you get similar words like おばさん (aunt) and おばあさん (grandma).

It’s common to encounter words that are harder to remember than others. Some stick with you the first moment you learn them, others take longer. Don’t worry too much. Making your own sentences using the vocab you’ve learnt helps a great deal too.

What I do with words that are giving me trouble is, I initially review them in my TextFugu vocab deck. If there’s quite a few from the same deck I have a hard time remembering, I make a a temporary new Anki deck with that same deck that’s giving me trouble, and review them by constantly hitting the soon answer. This initially drills it into my short term memory. I then take longer breaks between studying them. So I might go 10 mins, then 20, then 30, then an hour, two hours, six hours, etc. I do this until I’ve learnt every word in that deck. I then take a days break and then look at that same deck under my TextFugu vocab. Usually I’m able to recall every word.  So basically what you’re doing is using the temporary Anki deck as a physical deck where you keep going over the same words. Then you switch back to the SRS method.

Haha, tell me about it. Whenever I use one, I get frustrated by missing keys or pressing the wrong ones. Never happens to me on my Android phone though.

@ Neil

It’s Nouny Adverbs. Yeah, they’re a crazy bunch of words.

@Neil

Yes, I meant the mnemonics but also all the amount of Kanji. Using both Heisig’s mnemonics and TF’s will probably end up causing confusion. Vol 1 of RTK covers over 2,000 Kanji where as TF only has 388 Kanji at the moment. Vol 2 of RTK teaches you the readings but a lot of students say there are better resources out there (often free) that do a better job.

I agree that the variety of vocab we learn is very varied and there’s no real order to it. In the end, all those words will be beneficial though. If fluency is your goal your going to need to learn thousands of words. Even some of the most advanced users on here are always encountering new words.

Everyone is different so there’s no right or wrong answer to determine if you’re going too fast or not. As a general rule, if you can retain all the information you’ve learnt without forgetting anything or as little as possible then your going at the right pace. As for Kanji and vocab, it’s important you do learn these as much as the grammar as they’re used in example sentences in chapters. When you hit Season 5, the vocab load increases so it’s best to get a grasp on it now before it gets more difficult. Everyone does eventually slow down in pace at some point. At the start everything is easy and you feel like your whizzing through the chapters, but that will change. Just remember it’s not a race. It’s much better to take your time and retain what you’ve learnt, then to skim through and try to finish as quickly as possible. It will only hamper your progress in the long run.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by  kanjiman8.