I use Anki and the MOST consistent reason a word lands in the leech pile is not because I can’t remember what it means, but because I consistently think it means something different than what it means.
So for, instance, I keep thinking French costaud means, “rib or side”, probably because I associate it with *costal" from anatomy class or costilla from Spanish.
What I do in this instance is make a Match Pairs card with:
- costaud matching “strong, burly”
and - côte matching “rib.”
This way I practice differentiating them and simultaneously learn the correct word for rib.
But I do worry that I’m unintentionally strengthening the connection by having them always together like this.
What do you guy do for these situations?
Edit: You may notice that a properly formatted card would include le/la to indicate the gender of the noun, which costaud, as an adjective, would not have but I am inconsistent and also don’t like depending on little tricks that only work in index cards, so for the matching card I do not write “la côte” because that way I could guess the card based on part of speech instead of definition.
Usually, mnemonics are my nuclear option if it gets to this point. I guess one could say I have a sliding scale with my vocab, where I step the word up if it’s problematic:
Here’s an example. A while ago, for some reason I constantly mixed up 転ぶ (to fall down/over, pronounced korobu) and 運ぶ. (to carry/transport, pronounced hakobu). hakobu is a very high frequency word, so even seeing/hearing the word wasn’t enough. I initially tried a visual mnemonic with the kanji, which didn’t stick (and French doesn’t have, of course). Eventually I connected the word hako, meaning “box,” to hakobu.
hako wo hakobu. Carry a box.
It’s been much stickier since, although I still sometimes find myself sometimes briefly pulling up the binary choice and the mnemonic before selecting correctly. The association’s still there, but it’s faded a lot since I’ve put in more time with the language.
A lot of children songs have cartoons or dances associated with them.
The traditional German song Himpelchen und Pimpelchen has a little finger dance that represents the two characters climbing up a mountain for example (or for us Americans, basically a more German / different version of Itsy Bitsy Spider).
I got my start in German with Tschu Tschu wa, a song for maybe pre-schoolers thats like hands out, on the shoulders (etc. etc.).
So I guess what I’m saying is… I don’t really have mnemonics per se. I have dance moves or finger movements that represent different prepositions or verbs.
I have to imagine a lot of pre-school level (3 to 5 year old) songs have these dance moves. Like Baby Shark in USA had little dance things to represent the different sharks.
I’m old enough that I’m willing to learn like a 5 year old again. It’s an effective means of memorization!!
Nice!
Context sentences are good too.
NL --> TL is another option, I think, because the association might not be as strong in that direction.