I recently decided to try reading my first Japanese book「小さな森のオオカミちゃん」I chose this one as it was covered by the Absolute Beginner Book Club on WaniKani in the past i.e. there was a vocab list for it (and also since I thought it looked cute). I then proceeded to download all the vocabulary and turn them into Anki cards, as thats my preferred study method for vocabulary.
However as I began to study with those Anki cards I quickly realized that without any sort of context or mnemonic it was way to difficult to learn the vocab. Therefore I decided to create a python script that will auto generate mnemonics for your Anki cards using AI!
Features
I wrote a detailed guide how to use the script on my GitHub (link above) so that here I can instead focus on presenting what you can achieve with it. Basically you can add AI generated mnemonics to a .tsv file with your desired Anki cards. For example if these are the vocabs you want to learn:
Kanji Kana Meaning
聞いて下さい きいてください please lisen
書いて下さい かいてください please write
読んで下さい よんでください please read
...
You can then use my script to add a mnemonic to each line resulting in somthing like this:
Kanji Kana Meaning Mnemonic
聞いて下さい きいてください please lisen Keen ears (きいて) please! Listen up when you see 聞いてください.
書いて下さい かいてください please write Imagine a kite (かい) writing (書) a note—please write (ください) it down!
読んで下さい よんでください please read Imagine a librarian saying, “Please read (yawn) the book” — よんでください.
...
I particularly like the first Mnemonic the AI (in this case OpenAI GPT-4.1) came up with. Keen ears (きいて) please! Listen up when you see 聞いてください. After you have added Mnemonics to your data you can generate Anki cards from it using the same script!
Usage
I personally used this tool to create over 1000 mnemonics - one for each vocab - from the vocab list provided with the Book Club. And even though OpenAIs API is not free to use, I paid less than a single dollar for it. Considering there would have been no way to do this by hand, thats a fair price to me.
I also create my random vocab cards with this tool now. I.e. if I encounter some word I didn’t know I quickly write it down in a .tsv file I keep for this purpose. Then once a week I generate all mnemonics and Anki cards from it, before importing them to Anki.
Thank you
Okay thats all. Hopefully somebody besides me finds this useful aswell. Thank you for your time
If this is helping you, then by all means continue, but… from the examples you’ve provided, it kinda sounds to me like your issue is not so much learning vocab, but rather learning verb conjugation.
i’m mystified by this entire AI memonics genre because part of the process of memorisation is coming up with meaningful memonics/imagery in the first place… mind you i don’t even like wanikani’s provided ones, so idk
A pattern I see a lot with many learning related things is that the most effective method is effortful, someone comes up with an easier/faster way of doing the thing which generally removes the effortful part, the method is then less effective, people trying to use it blame themselves or think the entire thing is ineffective.
I suppose we can say WaniKani is doing the same thing since it does provide mnemonics, although like you I tend not to use them and make my own if I need one.
How do you guys remember anything without using mnemonics? For me they help a lot in making the kanji/vocab stick in the first place, while I usually end up forgeting them once I saw/used the kanji/vocab in the wild.
My motivation was mainly to create mnemonics for all the vocab from the BookClub. Since there are 1000 of them I figured there was no way I could do this by hand (or at least I deemed it ineffective of my time).
With a fair number of the kanji at my current level, I already know and use words regularly in Japanese that use them, so I remember them that way. For ones that I don’t have that association, I find it’s far more effective if I make my own menmonics. Any of the provided ones with cultural references tend to be useless for me. I also find the most effective ones combine the meaning and the reading into one shorter sentence rather than the separate ones WaniKani provides.
Great choice for your first manga! That was the first one I finished with the club and it was perfect. Feel free to post on the club threads, there will still be people watching.
Also, have a look at the links to manga kotoba and you can see which words appear most frequently in that manga which is super useful. You don’t need to learn all the words, just the most common few hundred would be plenty to make it a comfortable read. You do you though! I just wanted to point you to that project which is great
Around that time I also enjoyed reading Satori, which has great voice acting and really got Japanese in my ear.
Everyone learns differently though. I hope you have fun, see you around!
Hey thats cool, I might post some thoughts over in the bookclub then once I start reading. Also manga kotoba is a really cool project (I really like stuff like that haha), thanks for pointing me to that site!
Introduction
Features
Usage
Thank you