Slots are used for storing Jewels, and is done through the blacksmith, via the decorations menu. All Jewels give you an increase to at least one of your armor skills, and some will even decrease a skill.
Jewels are crafted through the same interface as weapons and armour, and require various monster parts or other miscellaneous items, plus a base jewel. You can get the base jewels from mining nodes (Aquaglow, Sunspire, and other Jewels), which then have to be crafted and attached via the blacksmithing interface. The blacksmith is also able to remove jewels from an item, which is non-destructive (you can swap jewels between armour sets).
While mining, and occasionally from quest rewards, you may receive a Mystery Charm. At the end of the quest you're on, you will be given a second menu after dealing with normal monster loot - the Appraise menu. It will reveal what your Mystery Charms actually provide, and allow you to select one or more charms and send them back to your equipment box. Charms are equipped in a sixth slot, independent of regular armour, and can sometimes carry +10 in a single skill, allowing you to quickly tack extra skills onto your equipment set.
All weapon attacks are performed by using the A and X buttons with directional keys. The combo you're talking about is most likely what is called the "Alternating Slashes" combo. This is performed after an Upswing (Down + A) by hitting Up or Down.
Note that you cannot chain a side-step after this attack, leaving you somewhat vulnerable. If you have enough to time to perform multiple Alternating Slashes, it is probably more damage-efficient to use the charging thrust of the Sword Form.
A good guide for Switch Axe combos can be found here.
Best Answer
To answer this question, we need to look into the way MH3U appraises your charms. Your charms are pulled off of what is known as a "charm table", a collection of different charms with different specific stats. This system was present in Monster Hunter Tri as well, though less potentially game-breaking (for certain values of "game-breaking").
Unlike in Tri, where a charm table was assigned when you started the game, your charm table is assigned to you at character creation. Once you create a character, that character can only receive charms from the roughly 20,0000 charms present on their specific charm table. Unless, of course, they are assigned a "cursed" charm table.
"Cursed" charm tables possess only ~800 possible charms, dramatically fewer than the 20,000 in a normal charm table. While this may acceptable, or even preferable, if those charm tables had one or more "god-tier" charms, most cursed charm tables have a horrible selection of charms. One table is even devoid of 3-slot charms.
Now, how do you avoid getting a cursed charm table? Luckily, most games are absolute rubbish at approximating randomness, relying an easily manipulated psuedo-random number generator. The specifics are not necessary, but what you want to know is this: What charm table you get can be determined by the time at which you created your character.
Forcing a specfic charm table is acheivable in a few easy steps and only requires a few items.
Items: Your 3DS and MH3U (obviously) and a stopwatch (although this is only strongly recommended unless you have an absolute impeccable sense of time)
If you already have a character, you can determine your charm table by following this link and the instructions within.
The times for the charm tables are as follows: