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Flipping through a never-ending stack of Anki cards day after day had started to become difficult. Each card was a Japanese word (kanji + reading) on the front and an English translation + a kanji-ridden example sentence on the back that I hardly ever read. My “Japanese word collection”, as I called it, was an Anki deck I created months ago to simply keep track of all the Japanese words I know. I’ve also been continuously add new words I’m learning to it, so it’s not the deck as originally planned; I would have never made an isolated-word deck for trying to learn new things. But I’ve been doing it anyway, and many of them fail to stick.

Why? Two obvious reasons:
1.) The words have little-to-no context
2.) I don’t use the deck often enough (because it isn’t working well anyway)

I’m a firm believer that context is required for vocabulary retention. That started to make me feel a bit strange, though, when I shifted strategies by imagining elaborate scenes for each word. I’m learning newly encountered words via isolated-word flashcards. Unthinkable for me. Before I’d at least back it up with a solid memory, but not so much anymore. And that kind of strategy only goes so far anyway, being reliant on repeated exposure regardless, I suppose.

So, the imagination bit: An imagined person would use the word in some sentence or another, not that I knew what the entire sentence was usually, in a way that made sense for the scene. There were visuals, camera angles, and interesting ideas as if pulled from a novel anime. (Yes, anime. It’s Japanese, what other imaginary context should there be? This way is the most vivid and interesting. Odd and vivid situations are best for memorization, so anime is best. Fight me on this ye scallywag I dare ye (No fight needed actually, fascination is subjective (are these enough nested parentheses? (yeah, probably))))

Rather than having a sentence or video/picture to give me context, I invented the context myself. And based on how strong these situations can be in my head, they are perhaps even more strong context than the standard supply of sentences or pictures. Perhaps it’s more optimal to study words in isolation due to the convenience and training of your brain for this kind of memorization skill.

To give you an example of how this works, take two words that until today I couldn’t reproduce if my life depended on it: “jikkyou” and “shuudan”.

Shuudan (group; mass):
I imagine a grayish scene of a large group of people huddled around something. The city around them is aged and broken. There’s something offputting about this congregation. Someone in the distance peers over at them, and they whisper or perhaps think: “That shuudan…”, as a shiver creeps down their spine.

This scene was generated by my mind in a flash. I thank all of the video games, movies, etc. that lent themselves to my imagination. I have an interest in art, storytelling, and worldbuilding, so this comes naturally to me more so than it might to others. In any case, it’s a valuable skill.

A previous attempt to memorize shuudan had me imagining sweeping dust into a pile, where the sound of sweeping was the “shuu” and the dust pile was the meaning of “mass”. This sort of worked, but it wasn’t enough until today. Perhaps its imagery and feel carried over though, now with a gray mass of people in a dramatic situation rather than a gray pile of dust. I believe both of these mnemonics formed a larger cluster of neurons (so to speak) in my mind, resulting in increased recollection.

A thought: Is this ad-hoc savant syndrome? I’m not exactly sure what the potential of this practice is, but I believe it’s very extensive. And I wonder, can a layman learn to approach the thinking patterns of a savant, or is this merely an innate position along some sort of spectrum for people? Another thought: Am I derailing this blog post?

Jikkyou (actual state of things; live on-the-scene):
Jikkyou is a funny word. I’ve been trying to get it down for probably over month to no avail. I could never think of a great mnemonic for it… but then today, I nailed it. I even recalled it hours after last seeing it when writing this post.

For jikkyou, I imagine some newslady; I see the colors in her face and hair and clothes, in a room somewhere in front of a door to the outside, mentioning how this breaking piece of news is so exciting (perhaps it has something to do with that shuudan somewhere outside?). I can hear her unique voice and tone as she says the words. I ponder her own view of this situation and motives behind what she does.

This kind of imagination gets complex enough to resemble actual dreaming, I feel, and perhaps that’s why it works so well.

For the next while, I’ll use this strategy on individual words, trying to haul a fair 20 per day. My study times should reduce, as well as the anxiety I’ve been having for using the flashcards in the first place.

I’m not editing this post for quality. Have you noticed? Probably yes.

Tshow.

If you asked me about how to use flashcards not too long ago, I would have advised you to never learn individual words all by themselves. I’d say “Hey, you, derpface! If you use flashcards, you must use entire phrases! No isolated words! No context, no learning!”

But see there: Context. You can, in fact, learn isolated words with context too. That’s what this post is about. I know how to learn isolated words successfully now.

Making sentence flashcards can be a serious pain, so it’s a lot more attractive to just throw individual words into Anki or whatever instead. (No sponsership here, but the Takoboto dictionary app is a godsend for Japanese. Incredible in every way, but more relevantly for this post: You can click a button to send a word + reading + phrase straight into Anki!)

Now, this blog isn’t for revenue or anything, so I don’t care about bloated SEO garbage. That makes for pretty awful reads. So, long story short:

If you have an experience tied to a word, it unlocks your ability to successfully learn that word through future repitition with flashcards, even if the word is in isolation on those flashcards. An entire memory is now tied to that word, and it sticks out in your mind more easily. Simply recall that experience each repetition, at least for a little while. Sentences are always helpful, of course, but not absolutely required in such cases.

I’ve started collecting Japanese words like Pokemon: It’s fun. It’s growing a collection. Whenever I have some interactions in Japanese with my tutor (sister), I get a few new words out of it and throw them into Anki. The experience of that interaction and the things that brought up the word to begin with are the context, the memory, that allows me to successfully study those words later without trouble, even when they’re the sole item on the face of a flashcard.

TL;DR:
1. Get (visceral) input via interactions, TV, etc.
2. Load words of interest into Anki
3. Study them with your experience as context

よぅい。