I’ve reached a point where I have no problem with certain kanji themselves but am having a lot of problems with remembering the vocabulary. This is almost exclusively the conceptual kanji, or the kanji that has an concrete meaning but then is morphed into abstract terms in vocabulary. Items such as 感想 or 用意. Which for the latter, WK’s reading meaning is “You have an idea for a task”. Uh, huh. Not useful. Not working for me. Or feelings/concept. It feels like for half of those that use 感 WK will accept feelings, which doesn’t really feel like I’m learning the word. I know what Kanji means, and I think 思想 - but I don’t know what しそう is and that seems like a problem.
Any tips for getting over this wall? My apprentice/guru combined count has been problematic lately because of this. Stopped doing lessons entirely about 10 days ago.
I agree with plantron that exposure is key! But that takes a bit of time of course, because you will not magically discover articles that mainly contain the words you have trouble with… So for the time being, you might want to look up those words in a dictionary like jisho.org or (even better, but will take time at the beginning) in a monolingual dictionary. Or just google the word to see what others have to say about it: “your word 意味” is a good starting point. You might find some hinative discussions and the like that will slowly get you towards more understanding for those concepts.
(And don’t forget to add user synonyms to the words as needed, to help you with WK reviews!)
I basically always have a weblio tab open for this exact reason. Especially with words that have the “same” meaning but definitely different nuances that I just don’t know yet, I find that scanning through the sentences and phrases it finds helps me get a better idea of what situations the word/phrase/whatever is generally used in. It’s a pretty basic understanding at that point, of course, but it’s a helpful starting point for seeing it in actual content in the future!
用意 and 感想 are both incredibly common words which aren’t used in particularly difficult-to-grasp scenarios. So yeah, if you expose yourself to Japanese content, you’ll come across them a lot and they’ll be solidified in your mind.
It’s really no different than coming across vocabulary from WK when reading news, manga, etc. That really doesn’t have any sort of negative effect on the SRS.
I think what is generally discouraged is just doing a pre-review review fairly close to the item coming up in your review queue.
If you could get a random assortment of good sentences, that would be good I think, but the problem with using WK sentences with reviews is you might start to recognize the sentence rather than the word itself.
As a tiny aside this is kinda my issue with Bunpro and its limited amount of example sentences. I think at a certain point I’ve started to be almost robotically answering only because I’ve seen the sentence over and over again. This is why having a wider exposure to content is always beneficial.
I might favor using sentences that I’ve generated rather than the WK ones. That of course runs the risk of reinforcing my bad grammar (even though I’ve completed Minna 1 and 2 in classroom settings I still screw up sentences unless I follow the example patterns in the books exactly).
Yeah that’s why I favor using sentences pulled from various native sources instead as I encounter them. That way you aren’t necessarily writing ungrammatical or grammatical, but unnatural sounding sentences as your references.