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General Something strange happening for me

Maybe it is your concentration ? Try to optimize your focus during your courses on memrise.

I couldn't tell a difference regarding my environment. I usually close other websites and I have no music in the background.

ikenaiAndi - unless we are lucky enough to have a "sticky" memory, most people have to work pretty hard to lodge things into even short-medium term memory. For each new word or item, try to find a mnemonic or some way to visualise the link between the new word and its meaning. Generally the more sensually vivid, bizarre or comical this is, the better it sticks. Do this for every new word. It takes more time and sometimes you have to be very lateral to find imagery that works, but it's well worth the effort.

Don't despair - in some ways this can be an advantage to be forced to work hard to remember things. Some people remember things easily and because of this they fail to take the steps to really "glue" new information into memory. Later down the line it becomes unstuck because it was never really anchored to anything. If you glue it solidly in the first place, it will stay in place (provided, of course, that you water your plants.)

I know I've just mixed a bunch of dodgy metaphors, but I hope that makes sense to you. If you want some ideas on how to create memorable associations, type "memory techniques" into a search engine and see what's out there.

Absolutely right. That's the answer you need. Good luck !

A couple of ideas that can sometime help me a bit.

Is your target language and Memrise learning still fun for you? I mean maybe just one day off doing something totally different might work

With kids what is fun and relevent gets attention and is remembered , and esssentially we as adults are the same ,though for quite some time we can keep going using will power and delayed gratification.

Maybe a brief change approach could work - watching a tv program in your target language maybe, or learning a song.

But naturally our learnng styles are varied and change somewhat over time, so there is no stock answer

"These words he speaks are true...". Keep it fresh and fun. I'm glad tonyyyy brought that up, it's a major point I missed in my previous comment. Learning should always be an adventure :)

I guess the biggest turn-off for me right now is the fact that there are hundreds of words due to be watered whenever I log it. That's a huge motivation killer.

I noticed that if I mix watering old words and trying to learn new words, my brain totally forgets the new words. The other day I was watering 50 words, learning 5, watering 50, learning 5.. It was a good system, but when I went to harvest those 50 words later my brain couldn't remember any of them. Which is weird, since normally I can get almost all of them. It's like my brain ignored the new words because it was still thinking about my review words. I think maybe if you are trying to water plants right before learning new words, this might be happening for you too.

I personally plant 20 seeds at a time, then grow them fully, then do that 4 more times (total of 100 words in a block) and then I water my old plants. I also listen to Chinese music while I do this, and I have about 90-95% retention after 3 days.

I think I will not plant anything for a long time. Every new word I do makes it more painful, as I have to fight bigger and bigger waves of due words. That's what I hate about SRS.

I had such a backlog, fortunately in European languages which are not so daunting. I found multiple-choice was a quick way to deal with them; the words got seen, which helped stop forgetting, it is quick, and I get most righ tso they dont come back quite as fast!. I think in Mandarin I have got to a temporary limit, and have stopped planting new words

Do you have native speakers to help put some of your backlog words into context. Actually hearing someone intuitively using these words in different ways might help to retain them

Well I chat with natives every day, a lot. It's sometimes problematic to use newly acquired vocab in conversations though. There's not much opportunity to use "manufacturing" or "sitting member" in casual situations. That's not a huge problem though - I had no problems keeping such stuff in my memory before and if I think about it rationally, learning more means learning more roots, which in turn means I'll have anchor points to connect new words with when I see them.

I think I'm just being overwhelmed by my repetitions now, after going at 100 words/day for some weeks. The repetitions caught up eventually and now bury me under their weight, making it hard to breathe.

I guess a longer repetition period is in order.. that's probably a good idea anyways, to digest all the stuff I swallowed.

I am new with Memrise, so take this with that in mind-

You sound slightly depressed - and you definitly shouldn't. There is nothing wrong with reviewing, nothing wrong with reevaluating what you are doing, and nothing wrong with remembering the 50% of the 100 words you were shooting for in a day __ (think about how impressive that is - 50 new words remembered a day).

You never know, maybe a week or two of not pushing new words is all your brain needs to get the other 50%. (Again, how impressive would that be?)

Let us know how it all works out - I am still trying to figure out how to use the program most efficiently for myself, and I appreciate any news of ideas with which you come up. __

I reduced the load from 800 to 380 per day now. This is still way too much to work with, but if I keep at it like this, it may get better.

I am behind schedule now, but it can't be helped. Everyone has their limits I guess.

I get depressed whenever I have waterings over 200, I don't know how I would deal with 800! I think that slow and steady wins the race. The faster that you learn something, the faster that you'll forget it. Unless you have a specific deadline (an exam or trip or something) then I think you should slow down and just enjoy learning. Learning a language should not cause you so much stress.

I'll marry and move over to Japan next year. I'd like to be able to comfortably converse by that time. I am basically conversational now, but not to a degree I could feel at ease with. Every conversation is a bit of a battle :)

In that case, my advice is to identify exactly what your problems are. Is vocab really causing a big issue? 4,000 words should be suitable for an everyday conversation. Perhaps time would be better spent understanding colloquial patterns and getting used to the pace of speech. The danger with memrise is focusing too much on vocabulary. Good luck!!

I know more than that. The problem though is, that Japanese needs a lot more words to get a message across. That's part of the language. While 6.000 is a decent amount to converse with in other languages, I'll need 10.000 to talk at the same level.

My listening comprehension is good, I chat fluently with what I have, albeit, there are still a lot of blind spots and situations where I lack just words to express myself clearly.

You're right of course, that vocab is only one part of the language - it's the most difficult to acquire part though, at least for this language. Not even learning the 2.000 Kanji needed comes close.

Thanks :)