Japanese Vocabulary

I just can't seem to remember any Japanese vocabulary

Everytime I try I seem to hit a brick wall.

Throwing me some random vocab, putting them in Anki and "trying" to remember them just doesn't work, even after 3 days I still forget them after 5mins, it's terrible.

I got Slime Forest, it's fantastic for the basic meanings of the Kanjis, I could do 50 a day. Then I tried the vocab, didn't work, couldn't remember them and it kept adding some without having mastered the previous ones.

I found out I learn better if I read it and translate it myself. Like I was playing Seiken Densetsu 3, on the equip screen there's a slot with nothing equipped. "Nashi", apparently it means "without". Here, I did this once and I still remember it. But here's the problem, I can't go translate every word because all of these damn Japanese > English online dictionaries are terrible, can't translate it 3/4 of the times.

So yeah, I need something better than "Watch that word and remember it!" because it just doesn't work. Taking classes are not an option.

Right now I use Human Japanese to learn some sentence structure and LiveMocha to learn some vocab (it does work, but there's not that much on the site plus they explain jackshit about the sentence structure... In fact, they explain jackshit about anything)

So, anybody have any ideas, tricks? Anything? My goal is to be able to play Japanese vidya.

Thanks in advance

>>6
How long have you been at it? It can take a while before you're recognizing them out of context. It's probably not going to be helpful to engage in extreme practice. Perhaps two or three ten-to-twenty minute sessions a day, and you can reduce the number of new cards per day to twenty or even fewer. Again, mnemonics will be very helpful. If you can make up a little story, no matter how stupid, it can be easier to remember things. I'm not sure what kinds of phonetic cues kanji provide, but if you're having more trouble remembering the spelling than the word itself, paying especial attention to those will help.