In like 90 percent of cases I feel the need of having to come up with my own Mnemonics because the ones given by Wanikani are not up to my standard of what a good mnemonic should be like.
The most common reason are when reading-mnemonics just vaguely resemble the actual sound but are spellt differently.
I learned this very early when they gave me “He-man’s Toe” for “一つ” and I misspellt it so often until I managed to mentally replace He-man with Hightower from Police Academy.
The second reason is when the relationship to the topic is just extremely arbitrary and thus very difficult to remember that connection.
The one that just triggered me to create this topic was:
“This sound isn’t just loud, it’s familiar. Finally you place it: onions (おん)!” for 音.
Adding something as arbitrary as that in the reading-mnemonic, which wasn’t to be expected from the meaning-mnemonic, just doesn’t seem good to me.
For me it’s ideal when one single Mnemonic covers meaning and reading.
Here’s my own mnemonic for 音 for sake of comparison:
“A giant subwoover is standing ON the sun. And of course it is switched ON. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hear it’s awesome sound throughout the entire solar-system.”
Another one that I remember from recently was for:
元 => gen (origin/source)
WK wanted me to connect it to some guys’ name. I’m like: How about GENesis instead, which is already extremely well related to the words’ meaning anyways?
Also if the mnemonics start with phrases like “for some reason”, I can already tell it’s going to be a bad one.
There are some good ones. It’s the ones that have full conviction in presenting their story.
One of my favorite default ones so far was the one about the Triceratop trying to dry itself and only being half-dried because he can only face one side towards the sun. Then Han-Solo came by and because Han is opposed to such inequality, he had to slice him half.
Of course often my private one’s wouldn’t be fit for public because they are often based on personal memories or are not politically correct.
But I’m pretty sure that in a lot of cases coming up with something better than what is used could be done quite easily.
I’d say it’s not that WK mnemonics are bad, it’s just that it’s easier to remember a mnemonics that you’ve made yourself.
So, I treat WK mnemonics simply as examples of how it can be done.
For myself, I prefer making simple one-sentence mnemonics. For example
黄 – blackjack is the reason that the fins turned yellow.
Or
受 – cleat, forehead, stool… Accept, you, fool!
Or
浮 – tsunami, cleat and child
are floating in the wild!
But, as I’ve said, the mnemonics that you make yourself always work best!
Use no mnemonics, just try to integrate the word/kanji/reading/grammar/whatever through sheer exposure and repetition. I don’t force myself to have one mnemonic per item, I don’t even understand how you could hope to scale this to thousands of entries. Mnemonics are a crutch, if you don’t need them, don’t use them.
If I still struggle, try to build my own mnemonics, ideally using other words/concepts of the target language. Not English-based mnemonics. This way I reinforce the language by associating with other elements of the same language, not completely artificial (and often inaccurate) mnemonics. I associate 丁 and 長 (both read チョウ) for instance, thinking of a “long street”. Wanikani invokes “Mrs. Chou” instead, which is not nearly as useful IMO.
If everything else fails, look at what Wanikani has to propose.
I found WaniKani’s mnemonics useful very early on because at that point I didn’t know enough Japanese to build Japanese-based mnemonics and since everything looks exotic and unique at that stage, it’s hard to build an intuition for it. I still remember how the カ reading of 下 involves a buried CAr or something like that for instance.
By the time I reached the end of the course I wouldn’t even glance at the provided mnemonics most of the time.
Also the #1 thing I would change if I was in charge of WaniKani would be to build later levels on top of phonetic components when available. It’s baffling to me that the course currently completely ignores those. Not only do phonetic components make it easy to guess and memorize the reading of many kanji, they also reinforce the readings of earlier kanji in the process.
Specifically, the example you mentioned —> sound 音/ → on — stuck in my mind immediately . Every time I see the kanji, I almost hear an onion sizzling under the sun. I usually try to imagine the stories very vividly in my head.
That said, I’m not a native English speaker, so I sometimes add custom notes to the reading mnemonics, using Spanish words that sound similar and linking them to a story. It also helps if the story is a bit spicy or inappropriate . Some of the original stories are just too boring for me, so I end up making my own… though I get the feeling the WaniKani team knows this — some of their stories are suspiciously easy to turn into something inappropriate .
I’d say, don’t worry too much about it. The exercise of creating your own mnemonics is already great — though not always necessary — and for me, mnemonics are REALLY helping with remembering both the readings and the meanings.
Hmm kinda agree. For me I pretty much ignore a lot of the mnemonics since they don’t make much sense. I suppose it does have humor, sometimes it’s funny when I get the joke/reference, but even when it’s funny it’s not always effective. I just treat it as a bonus not a real way to really remember the kanji/word tbh.
This is much closer to what the old mnemonic used to be! back when I learened it it had to do with a sound being “On” like a speaker or radio or something. Don’t remember for sure. The old mnemonics were definitely better in my opinion, though often violent, graphic, etc. so a lot of them were changed over time.
Yeah, I do agree. At this point I’m mostly using WK because of fear of change (I was like 40 before resetting), and I don’t think I could remember many of the kanjis I’m otherwise familiar with through tangential studies.
Especially for readings, if you know a decent amount of vocab you can just infer the reading from the fact the kanji is making part of that word. There are many visually similar kanjis that share a on-yomi reading, too ; I wish WK would put more emphasis on that rather than straining to invent a story.
Still at the end of the day, mnemonics are really just here to support your learning - if you keep learning japanese, you’ll eventually forget them but not the reading.
Yeah, they are actually a hindrance & some of the worst mnemonics I’ve seen. They are the one thing that irritates me the most as at times they seem deliberately designed to make you get it wrong.
having bought the lifetime license early i feel especially deceived since the early level mnemonic (at least back in 2018) used to be more creative and actually helpful.
I think the creators are really holding themselves back on the limitation that one reading can always only be covered by one recurring character like Joe for じょう eventhough a much more fitting mnemonic might be available.
Why this is bothering me is that we are using a quite expensive paid service where the mnemonics where a unique selling point over just using a free anki system but they for higher levels the mnemonics are getting so lazy that i doubt that more than a minute of thought went into most of them.
So its hard to let the defend of “just come up with your own mnemonics” slide when you are paying so much money.
Because of this i have stopped recommending wanikani to beginners a while ago.
$200 is small change in the scope of what you get from wk. Lifetime kanji literacy skills. Its the primary reason why people fail to learn the language. I’m gonna enjoy reading Japanese books for sure. It will boost my life so much. There’s so much literature that’ll never make it west. Every culture has their legendary level literatura And when i can finally get on japanese forums and image boards and read funny whacky nonsense itll be worth it. And japanese twitter!
I value it at $500 easy compared to other methods. I’m happy to make my own mnemonics and it’s even encouraged because then it’ll stick even better.
I didn’t find much use in the mnemonics provided for kanji. My method for retention was pretty similar to some of the suggestions made earlier by @simias. I did however find value in some of the mnemonics suggested for some of the rarer 訓読み used mostly only in or involving verbs.
For example, 45 levels later, “Toto no!” still sticks with me (ととのえる).
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that personal mnemonics will always be better. Subwoofer works great for you, but there are a lot of people who didn’t grow up with stereos and have zero idea what that is.
. Every time I see the kanji, I almost hear an onion sizzling under the sun. I usually try to imagine the stories very vividly in my head.
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