So first off, I think your pictures are really high quality and this is a cool thing that you’ve clearly poured serious effort into… but do you have any real plans beyond this? Someone’s already pointed this out, but as for the question “should Wanikani adopt this?” – the answer is no. I mean, Wanikani has in total several thousand written mnemonics and they are a significant part of what the website is. They aren’t going to re-orient their entire teaching method, and if you seriously wanted to discuss adding something like this, you should more directly contact them (though you’d likely have to be prepared to provide every single piece of art and even then, I doubt they want to do something different). What you are doing is entirely its own thing, related to Wanikani only in that you have posted this topic on these specific forums so… do you want to make your own teaching method with this? If so, more power to you, but that’s a whole other topic. I don’t mean to be overly harsh, but in truth I don’t think bringing a sort of proof of concept to then suggest they run with it to the extraordinary degree required is realistic.
All of this strikes me as really large claims, the kind that would require dedicated research or heavy citation, and for the sake of argument I’m just going to take you at your word on it, but even after doing that, I think this is an exaggeration. Your method’s end goal is still to turn the kanji into words. You go image (kanji) → image (mnemonic) → word (meaning). That’s still “crossing over” by the time you get to the meaning, so I don’t see how that’s faster at that stage, even if we accept that such a thing is both true and meaningful.
This part sounds true, but I’m not convinced I want to do that? Rapidly reviewing lists over and over is a very traditional learning method most of us are trying to avoid. I mean, most people on the forums talk about moving away from the mnemonics as soon as they can get the kanji lodged well enough that they don’t need them, and in the majority of accounts, that happens really early. In my experience, after putting in some time letting the SRS do its thing for a bit on Wanikani (first built on their mnemonics), my mistakes are occasional either during the SRS or in real reading, and when they occur, I usually only need a brief glance at the real meaning to refresh my memory. If I really can’t recall seeing it at all (pretty rare) I return to the mnemonic, but that’s on a single item basis when it happens. Thus, I’m not reviewing the WK mnemonics when I have to review; I’m reviewing the single word meaning.
Perhaps all of that together just gets at my feeling that you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, from my perspective. But learning kanji is hard, so more methods are certainly appreciated. Just, in my opinion, if you’re serious about this, there is a lot to be done, and almost definitely none of it will involve Wanikani (unless you, as someone suggested, want to go the charitable route of creating a user script).
