There is a story in every Japanese word You can get big studies out of making tiny sentences.

This insight was originally published on December 06, 2022, and transferred here later.

After learning enough Japanese, the list of vocabulary flashcards gets so big that words start blending together and lose meaning. When you get to this point, it becomes a pretty clear sign that you need to break up the monotony of how you learn new Japanese words.

While flashcards are great, and incredibly helpful at what they do, they just cannot do all of the heavy lifting for your language learning experience. Even the best flashcards are limited by the brevity by which they are meant to function; and because of that, they lack a lot of the context that brings a fuller meaning to the words you're trying to learn and use.




Words don't exist in a vacuum.

An astronaut floating in space, above the Earth. There are a set of giant UFOs floating above them. It looks like they are spelling the word 'WORDS'.



If you want to breathe more life into the Japanese words you learn, and deepen the context that they exist in, then you need to use them like they are used in the wild. You need to release your words into a story. Use your words in a sentence!

When you first started learning your native language, your parents weren't drilling you once a week with 200 flashcards in a sitting. You were listening and contextualising how those words were being used in order to better understand the overall gist of the word. And over time, you just understood what “broken” meant. A flashcard can't give you that; and it wasn't meant to.

Every word is a powder keg just waiting for the spark that ignites its story. You need to give your vocabulary an environment to be in, some motivation behind its actions, and supporting actors for the story to unfold. That is what a sentence and all the other words in it do for any given piece of Japanese you are learning.

Students in an auditorium for a theatre class. Several of them are sitting, observing another student recite something. A teacher is watching in the background. The students have a single Japanese word printed in red on each of their shirts.



Start making sentences as soon as possible

Stop what you are doing right now, and make a sentence or story in Japanese with a few of the words you've learned. Give your vocabulary items a world they can play in! Start doing that from now on when you've learned a new word. You can still use your flash cards like before, but make a story out of some of them to break up the monotony and expand the card's meaning. You will benefit from the little extra effort! Have some examples:

Example vocabulary:

  • Bathroom
  • Box
  • Cat
  • Moon
  • Jump
  • Night
  • Outside
  • Open
  • Ball

Example sentences:

  • Where is the BATHROOM?
  • Is that CAT playing with a BALL?
  • I OPENed the BOX.
  • The MOON is OUTSIDE at NIGHT.
  • The BALL JUMPed by itself.



What kind of sentences have you started making from your vocabulary? Feel free to talk about it in the comments section below: 👇👇👇