Comments

Unable to Recall Multiple Parts of One Card — 9 Comments

  1. Do you have any tips on remembering kanji during reviews? I’m using NEXT and am only 50 or so cards into Kanji Kingdom. Some kanji click, but other ones I just can never recall, even when I write them out.

    • For kanji I still use radical names and pnemonics or stories to remember them. Like rtk or wanikani. Otherwise i have to force remember it by just seeing it a million times. The benefit for me using kk is I get to see the kanji a lot so I end up knowing them very well so it’s a lot of practice. But for me remembering them still requires radical names to come up with stories. Sometimes.

      • I used Wanikani for a bit but couldn’t afford the price. I might get back to it when I save up, cause I remember the mnemonics helping most of the time. A lot of the kanji in KK I can usually make up some way to remember it, whether by radical or its shape or something. But other times I just draw complete blanks haha.

    • You are still early on, so over time you’ll find them sticking better. Most people create their own little personal mnemonics as they go through them (based on what they think they look like).

    • There are a couple things I’ve found that help me (which may or may not help you). I try to pay attention to the stroke order when I’m learning the Kanji. I don’t grade myself on it on subsequent reviews though. I write them down multiple times (but not more than 3 or 4 times each, don’t want to get carried away). I study them in the groups they are presented. What I mean by that is each Kanji Kingdom card has a set of 3 or 4 Kanji grouped together. I make sure I learn the entire group before I move onto the next. I grade on a sliding scale depending on my mood and energy levels, which means I don’t always expect perfection and don’t beat myself up if I can’t remember.

      It sounds like you are a beginner and if so, keep that in mind as you progress. It will take time before all the shapes become familiar and you start seeing them over and over. You are also planting the hooks to which new vocabulary will grasp onto in the future. With that said, it is possible to learn Kanji using other methods, and I’d be surprised if you didn’t use a couple different methods by the time you reach your goal. Enjoy the journey.

  2. If the problem keeps happening I might suspend the card first, and when I have time, create a new card for each troublesome individual word. Next I’ll make a new identical card to the problematic original and delete the old one. I might even edit the content to remove a word if I’m confident enough the sentence will still make sense afterwards. This effectively resets the card and gives me the tools to understand it. I might sometimes just delete the card if constantly failing it is starting to get on my nerves!

  3. I think I’ve actually tried that once. I kept forgetting 2 words in a sentence and no matter what I did they didn’t stick. I struggled so much that I just gave up and focused on a single word. It really stuck in my mind and when I saw that sentence again there was only 1 word I didn’t know. At the time I didn’t really pay attention to that method. I don’t think I ever used it again. Maybe that way of doing it is more useful than I thought.

  4. I found some information about this very problem in an article on the website of an Anki competitor, but basically, with flash cards the most effective thing to do is limit the amount of knowledge you are trying to remember per card to only one thing. So in the example Adam gave, you can do that by making three separate cards for the same sentence; for each individual card you could highlight the word you are trying to remember and then put on the back of the card only the meaning of that one word, or you could make a cloze deletion card (blank out the word you are trying to remember and put that word on the back).

    I’ve found that when I am having trouble with a flash card I made, it’s usually either because 1) I am trying to remember too much information all on the same card, 2) I don’t know one of the kanji used in the word yet, or 3) I know the kanji, sort of, but the word I’m studying uses a less-common reading of that kanji that I’m not familiar with (or I sort of know the kanji but in a hazy, not fully-cemented way). Once I find what the problem is that’s making it hard for me to learn that word and fix it, then I can memorize the word.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>