I’ve discovered that if you’re able to store a kanji as a very distinct image of something, in other words as a scene, (not, say, as a story or an arrangement of concepts), then you can memorize it MUCH easier. I learned this thanks to how Wanikani has you memorize radicals. This method works particularly well for kanji that describe something physical.
For me, one very interesting one that I use is for 橋. In the picture, I see a tree, an overturned log, and a pagoda like building on the other side of it. The overturned log is, of course, a bridge, which is the meaning of the kanji.
So, are there any kanji like this for you guys?
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Seeing the pictures in kanji was what got me into Japanese as a kid! I thought it was so cool. I really loved diagrams like these
Getting into really complex kanji makes it hard. Even wanikani struggles to come up with a story for things with a billion radicals, so those ones I just resort to rote memorization for. But I prefer to try to see pictures!
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A tree, a log and a pagoda
A scene indeed, but also an untold story within
You need the bridge to cross from the tree to the pagoda.
That’s very nice, I liked it
But as Strideer says once you go from the pictogram ones to the ideogram or semantic ones it gets foggy.
I think I ve forgotten pretty much every kanji within the last ten levels here because of that.
Thanks for sharing
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Yeah, the further in you get the more common that becomes, unfortunately. ):
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I also like viewing kanji in a pictorial way like that! I have a few pictures planned that I’d like to do someday based on a couple of kanji, but we’ll see when I get to them.
Have you seen this thread? It seems like something you’d enjoy.
(They’re admittedly mostly drawings based on the mnemonics, not images based on the kanji shape directly, but there’s also some original mnemonics there. And having a picture drawn out for you of the mnemonic is nice too.)
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