As I was reading the mnemonic for this vocabulary word I was thinking all the time about ‘bake’. I know the pronunciation is something like /beik/, but read it as if you were reading hiragana; ばけ.
Now, we know 化ける means ‘to transform’. What happens when you bake (ばけ) something? Just that. It transforms.
Imagine you are baking dough into a pizza. Holy shit. The dough transformed into the best pizza you ever tried. Time to eat the the pizza in order to transform it into energy to study more kanji!
This might have helped you, or maybe not. In any case, just procrastinating here, don’t take me too seriously.
It’s always fun when you just come up with your own ways of remembering some stuff, and yeah, mnemonics don’t need to be so strict, so the “beik” bake difference isn’t that relevant, since knowing the romaji to hiragana to saying it in hiragana should be no problem at that point.
If you’re a weeb another way to remember it I guess is that “bakemono” are yokai that transform/shapeshift!
