Need advice for leech squashing 😣

I used the leech detector to spot my leeches. Unfortunately they’re way too many and I didn’t even include burned items. Does anybody any advice on how I should get started squashing those leeches?
I’ll post a picture of my leeches underneath this post.

Thanks in advance :blush:

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How could a burned item be a leech?

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@Kumirei I burned then a long time ago but I still got it wrong many times. For example 下がるand 下げる

If you got it wrong many times but eventually burned it, it isn’t a leach anymore. If you burned it but now can’t remember it all, that seems a bit strange to me, but that would be a leech.

This has happened to me with various kanji. I learn one distinctively shaped kanji and easily memorize it–and then 10 levels later learn a similarly-composed kanji and fail to differentiate the two–both make their way back to apprentice and stay there until I can sort them out.

Leeches require active, special attention! You might need to make a special spreadsheet or do some practice using them in context to squash them.

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@tmahrt Ok thank you. The problem is that they’re so many. What would you advise me on how to decimate their numbers. For a month or so I additionally use kaniwani. I noticed that it really speeds up my kanji learning. But unfortunately there are still those leeches from before that just won’t stick. I wanted to post a few Screenshot of them but unfortunately I don’t know how it works sry :sweat_smile:

I took off four months this year to do nothing but squash leeches 40 levels of accumulated leeches.

A few tips:

#1 For kanji leeches, writing them out helps tremendously I find. It makes me focus on the composition of the kanji and the composed radicals, which is usually enough. I make a note of leeches after a review and write them when ever I have time.

#2 For leech vocabulary, I’m here to learn kanji, so with pairs of leech vocabulary, I first ask how much I want to learn the leeches. There are three different police station terms here (metropolitan police department, etc). I kept getting them mixed up. Finally, I put in a synonym for ‘police’ for each of them. As an L2 learner, I’m ok with that for now.

For leech vocabulary, usually just spending some more time reviewing them (particularly by looking through all of the vocabulary composed of similar kanji) is enough to squash them. It’s really helpful to review the different ways a kanji can be pronounced and the ways its meaning can be altered or replaced.

#3 Less about leeches but more about keeping your queue low, I use the ignore script to ignore stupid errors like if I make a typo in Japanese or get the part of speech wrong for a kanji–it’s very easy to abuse though. And I do abuse it.

Feel free to share some leech pairs.

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And I didn’t acknowledge it but not all leeches are pairs. Exceptional readings can be hard to remember and then rendaku can be tricky. But I find those kinds of leeches to be less tricky to remember than pairs that I get confused, although similar methods apply–drill, drill, drill. And maybe try to use them in context.

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