土 and 内 confusing mnemonics

I’m confused by 土 and 内. Both have similar mnemonics; for one it’s “two cheese” and for the other it’s “oooh cheese” and I can’t remember which mnemonic is for which kanji. Do you have any tips?

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Come up with your own mnemonic. In the end, though it sounds like a tautology, the mnemonic that is best is the one that works best for you. If it ain’t working, toss it out.

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I thought of that, but couldn’t come up with one. I’ll try to think more but I thought that maybe someone will give me one that’ll work for me.

You know, you have CHI inside of you, so it is [u]r [chi] inside. You can take a [nai]fe to check it, but I don’t suggest it.

Also the soil has cheese on it, [tsu] [chi] slices in fact, your [to]e stept on it.

I put in the on’yomi and kun’yomi in the same phrases, it helps me remembering both. I hope it helps you as well.

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There’s no guarantee anyone else’s mnemonics will work for you, unfortunately. The default one works pretty well for me, so I haven’t gone searching for others. There is this script that lets you import mnemonics from KanjiDamage and this script that lets you check community-uploaded anecdotes–it might be worth taking a look at them.

Thanks, it looks good :slight_smile:

You make it sound like it’s the mnemonics fault that these words sound very similar :wink:

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I won’t call them bad, but they don’t work for me.

内 うち “ooh cheese” – what you say when you’re inside and are excited because there’s cheese (who wouldn’t be?)

土 つち “ts, cheese” – you’re really not impressed with the two cheeses you just dug up from the soil. They’re dirty, you don’t want to eat that. Put them back in the ground with a disgusted ‘tsk’ noise.

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I don’t know if you’ve ever watched/read Naruto. But the second 土 came up for me as つち, my mind immediately went to the Tsuchikage (土影).
Can’t think of a good mnemonic for 内 though.

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I was confuse too for few level, now I get a better grip of it :

Inside : うち: oh cheese!! I opened somebody’s body to find his heart in cheese ! Oh! A heart cheese! I am very surprise!

Soil : つち : 2 cheeses, the soil can grow a lot of things, even cheeses and always in a lot of number (so 2 cheeses) I am not surprise, soil can make grow too many things, 2 cheeses is really nothing

I’m only lvl 15 but have already come across quite a few cheese mnemonics. Bleeding, earth, soil and inside, off the top of my head. Also Theresa May trying to poison Jeremy Corbyn with poisoned cheese, but she won’t get away with it because I know her plan. Batteries are made of cheese too, you know. I’m sure there are more to come. It’s like Mrs Cho, Charlie Sheen, Koichi, the coyotes, Hard Gay. There are many mnemonics that share the same characters and objects.

At the end of the day, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. You’ll get it wrong and then it will come around again, and again, and again, until you aren’t getting it wrong any more. The SRS system works, it’s just that sometimes you need more exposure to the difficult to remember stuff. Don’t worry about getting something wrong, even burn reviews. It just means you need to see it more.

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Something that helped me was remembering:

内 うち (u chi) has the mouth 口 くち(ku chi) in it, but the 人 has taken the ‘k’ away.

I remember 土 as つち because of the tsuchigumo, a Japanese yokai whose name translates to “ground spider”.
Tsuchigumo is also an old insulting name for other local clans, and is the name of a clan in Naruto if you watch it :stuck_out_tongue:
It’s not a usual mnemonic but if you look up the folklore of the tsuchigumo it might help you remember, I find if I’ve come across the word before learning it through wanikani (so already have something to associate it with) then I remember it easily.

I know that’s pretty random but I personally find I remember vocabulary of anything I find interesting, even if I originally only know the word in romaji :slight_smile:

I just think of it like this. the second kanji consists of the head and person radicals, if I’m not mistaken. So I just think “there’s a person inside my head”, and then for the reading, I remember "No, there’s nobody inside my head. だれもいない

Aye, a lot of my mnemonics come from the kanji being a part of a word that I already know. Actually, I tend to find that if I don’t know any words that feature the kanji, I often struggle to remember the reading…

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