Similar Vocabulary bunched together

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Hi All,
I’m recently finding that many of the vocabulary I’m struggling with are sets of words that are very similar and appeared in my learning together. One such set I came across recently way lots of types of roads, 道路 (road), 路地 (ally), 山道 (mountain road) and 線路 (railroad). All are level 10 and came up for learning pretty close together and I ended up mixing them up for quite a while.

Another recent example: 一流 (first rate), 本流 (mainstream) and 流行 (trend) - all level 12 and appeared next to each other.

I was learning using the Flaming Durtles app, so I don’t know if it would have appeared in the same way on the website.

I’m wondering if that is a general experience and if there are ways to spread similar words out a bit more - either within levels or between them.

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It helps to pause and think about the individual meaning of each kanji:

道路 - both kanji mean road, so the compound vocab means ‘road’
路地 - 地 means earth, so the compound means ‘dirt road’
線路 - 線 usually seen in the context of railway or subway line names, so the compound means ‘railroad’
山道 - 山 means mountain, so the compound means ‘mountain road’

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Yep, that’s how they came up for me on the wanikani site. I also get similar vocab mixed up easily.

It can be frustrating but I also think it’s importing to hash those differences out early so you have a better understanding of how the kanji works with multiple words once you get it past the apprentice level.

I honestly wish I could group some similar verbs together again so I can practice their differences.

For example I always get these mixed up.

化かす - to bewitch
化ける - to transform

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I often think of getting the “struggle of determining the differences of similar words at the same time” as a blessing rather than a negative.

Remember that learning a language is a journey, not a race.

Though it can be a bit frustrating in the moment, the knowledge and perspective that you acquire by figuring out the differences can often help you make great strides in your linguistic abilities.

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I don’t know if this helps, but the way I finally got those two sorted out was thinking that かす sounds a bit like “castle”, so the witch is in the castle, bewitching things.

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Comparing バカ and 化け物 may help.

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That is a good way of thinking about it and I feel it is how it worked for me. It just took me quite a bit of time to realize the problem, then I think I passed the 山道 one first followed by 線路 and so on. It just took me so much longer compared to other words.

Yes, I’ll definitely remember those words now :slight_smile:. The reason I’m bringing it up is that I feel I could have learned 5 or 10 words in the same time, getting a better understanding of the language as a whole hence making it simpler to learn the other similar ones later on.

Another case is when very similar verbs pop up right next to each other. Such as active/passive transitive/intransitive verbs. It just requires so much more effort compared to learning them independently. Knowing the verb “to mix” really helps language understanding. But learning all the differences between “to mix”, “to be mixed”, “to mix something” and “to intersect” takes much longer and doesn’t help the language skills that more. If you read it you could likely guess from context and if you mix it up when speaking people could likely guess what you mean. I feel that if they came spread out a bit more and one was firmly committed to memory when starting to learn the next one it would be much easier to learn the next related one.

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There is research about this and yes, learning similar words together can take a lot more effort to learn (50% more repetitions from memory but I could be off). I learned that in Paul Nation’s great guide to learning languages

I don’t know if flaming durtles has this, but WK now has a lesson picker, so I think it is a good idea to use that to choose similar looking and sounding words to be learned on different days.

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Yes, the way I’ve dealt with this is by using the lesson picker. Instead of picking words from the big group of vocabulary horizontally (where all the words associated with one kanji will be grouped together), I pick them vertically which gives a better mix. You’ll still end up with similar things in your queue at some points but hopefully it helps a bit.

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True. That is a good workaround. I don’t have that in the FD app but it might just be worth using the computer to learn new stuff then.

Checking Flaming Durtles it does have a “shuffle after selecting items” switch in its advanced settings.

If there is research on this I feel that the default order should be optimized for it. I’ll have a look to see if I can find the original research.

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It’s on page 32 on the document I linked. Perhaps that can lead you to some good references.

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Ok… I finally had the time to do a bit of literature research. There is a lot of research out there looking at the learning of English words. And it appears that there learning in thematic clusters (think beach, sunny, swim) is helpful whilst learning in semantic clusters (think dish, bowl, plate) is not [1].

Another study found that splitting those similar words up helps a lot. This study loooked at Japanese perople learning english and they splitt the semantic clusters up such that there were seven other words inbetween. Doing so increased the recall after a week by a factor of 1.6 (from 17% to 27%) [2]. Sonds like even a little space between the words might help…

Now Japanese is different and those words that use the same kanji are not only similar in meaning but also in sound and looks.

I found a study looking at Spanish looked at both sets of phonetically similar (similar endings or starts of the word) and semanitically similar words. It found that phonetic similarity by it self is harmful to retention [3].

Sadly I didn’t find anything looking at Japanese and words with the same Kanji (or Chinese and Hanzi for that matter).

For my part I’ve started learning new words with the Lesson Picker which helps a lot (thanks again @mitrac). I feel it helps a lot in preventing this for me. But I feel that this has the potential for the big Crabigator to improve things for everyone.

[1] TINKHAM, Thomas. The effects of semantic and thematic clustering on the learning of second language vocabulary. Second language research, 1997, 13. Jg., Nr. 2, S. 138-163.

[2] NAKATA, Tatsuya; SUZUKI, Yuichi. Effects of massing and spacing on the learning of semantically related and unrelated words. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2019, 41. Jg., Nr. 2, S. 287-311.

[3] WILCOX, Amanda Elizabeth. Category Effects of Vocabulary Presentation in L2 Vocabulary Acquisition in Novice Learners. Auburn University, 2011.

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I could see that. I like to use new words to tell a story together. Something like “I went to the beach. It was a beautiful sunny day. It was fun to swim” would feel like a more accomplished progress in communication than trying to force “I put meat on a plate and fruit in a bowl. A plate and a bowl are both a type of dish”

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