Remembering vocab

Hello everyone, I have question about Recalling vocab after learning them, I am having tough time to recall them if there is no visual Kanji, I think not only me few of users to face this, How do tou tackle this?

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Are you talking about words written in kana?

If it is, it’s not uncommon to be a bit confused about the meaning, though when facing vocab in the wild there is always context to help you decide what word it is you’re reading.

Upon further thought, if you’re actually talking about “production”, then you might need to work on that specifically. For example, use KaniWani rather than WK.

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Tx for the reply this is my first post here, I am talking about that I can read kanji and vocab perfectly and recall them once I see them. But the problem is English → Japanese with out kanji reference It is tough. Tx for your suggestion i have used kaniwani few months back due to time schedule i left that. i think i need get back to it and see if it helps.

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KaniWani often brought up as a good tool to cram English → Japanese. It’s its own thing really. ^^;

Though, if you read and encounter the vocab items enough times in the wild, they also tend to get a deeper connection in your memory - allowing you to pull them out of your memory without any aid. But, working on production directly is probably a much faster way to work on this. :slight_smile:

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Sry for not understanding, what do you mean by production?

No problem. You usually divide language studies into various fields, such as passive skills including reading, listening, grammar. Production is those skills that require you to create sentences of your own, so writing and speaking - which is usually the hardest skill to become proficient at. You just have to do a lot of speaking and writing really to improve over time.

And that’s linked to pulling up those vocab from memory with nothing to go on. Working on production will make those items to come more naturally to you.

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this problem is usually solved automatically by getting tons of input because input inevitably leads to output even if it’s not practiced. The problem is that it’s quite a prolonged period. If you need output now that you just gonna need a separate app for recalling.
People already mentioned kaniwani. I personally use torii.

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Alternatively, practice writing sentences, for instance in our Japanese Sentence a Day Challenge thread :wink: . Always tons of helpful people to provide feedback.

What helped me the most was writing practice - answering reading comprehension questions. The more I wrote a certain word spelled in kanji, the easier it became. Even if I could come up with several possible kanji “competing” for the same reading.

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I also have difficulties to remember the exact kanji, for example right now, kanji for calm and weapon, I know in hiragana they are both the same, but different kanji.

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It simple, but actually reading everything out loud instead of just in my head works, took me a while to realize though


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I used to be in the same ballpark trying to find a good way to recall from English > Japanese and earlier levels I started with KaniWani as other users suggested.

It quickly turned into a point of frustration because I couldn’t always recall what the system expected for many words like “girl”, “entrance”, etc. Despite adding “exceptions”, etc it became fairly tedious and demotivating.

When I started doing actual conversation lessons with native Japanese speakers I found that I really didn’t need to know how to recall the 3 different ways to say a certain word (like “circumstances” that we’ve done in recent levels as we’re both 17 at the moment lol) and 95% of the time only one of the words is used.

I’ve since stopped using KaniWani and find that most of my recollection and a better focus of what vocab I remember comes from regularly practicing conversation with others (how was your day/weekend? is work busy? what have you eaten? etc) and creating sentences on my own that could become a conversation topic with someone.

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