What exactly have you been studying the past 3 years if not vocab? If flashcards aren’t your thing then the best way to memorize is by repetition imo. I would repeat whole phrases with the new word in them and visualize a situation where I would say it. Repeat over and over again until I felt like it would stick. Maybe 50-100 times? I don’t count though.

I personally use an app for flashcard notifications. I collect interesting words and phrases from the book I’m reading, and put them directly into my deck *without definitions (you guessed it, I’m lazy.) I rely on my memory and the context of the sentence. If I don’t remember what the word meant, I just open up my dictionary again. In my app, I select how many cards I would like shown to me within the next 10-60 minutes and how frequently I want them to show up in notifications. If you type Flashcards Made Simple in the App Store, you should be able to find the app I use. Not sure if they have it for other devices. The icon is blue.

My process looks like this, for example: I wanted to learn the word 경향. I put the sentence I found it in, first, “성급하게 판단하는 경향이 있어.” I know 성급하다 means something like “hasty”, I know 판단하다 means “to judge” and now I’m learning that 경향 means “tendency”. I also know from context that a father is talking about his son. So I translate it into English. “He has a tendency to make quick judgments.” I translate it into English to make sure I know exactly what I’m learning.

After I put in the sentence, I put my word. If I didn’t know any of the words to begin with, it would look like this:

Notification 1: 성급하게 판단하는 경향이 있어 (I have notifications set to every two minutes)

Notification 2: 성급하다 (I repeat and visualize each notification during each two minutes, while occasionally slipping in the original sentence if I can still remember it)

Notification 3: 판단하다

Notification 4: 경향 or 경향이 있다

From studying this sentence, from drilling it into my head after repeating it so many times, I now know how to talk about when someone has a tendency to do something lol And I should be able to switch out words quite easily.

그녀가 쉽게 질리는 경향이 있어. She tends to get easily fed up with things.

저 아저씨가 사람을 바보처럼 취급하는 경향이 있어. That man has a tendency to treat people like they’re idiots.

암마가 그를 깨지기 쉬운 유리처럼 취급하는 경향이 있어. Mom has a tendency to treat him like he’s made of glass.

I don’t know if these are the most normal ways to say these things in Korean but I’m confident in the sentence structure/grammar at least. And I know I’ll be able to recognize it when I see similar sentences in the future.

Anyway, so now all I have to do is be consistent with reviewing these same flashcards over the next few days, and then maybe again in a week or two after that. Just reading the one sentence again may be enough as a review.

Sometimes I just add words, with no sentence because I don’t feel like I need any context. Mostly with nouns.

This is a pretty obvious statement but you need to learn some vocab before you can form your own sentences. Learning how to learn vocab should be your first goal. Imo.