some of them give misleading pronunciations because they’re “close enough, but if that pronunciation makes you try to remember another step
考える
e.g conga line = かんが, and not こんが then it opens you up for mistakes. E.g maybe this conga line could’ve been can-can dancers in a conga line inside your brain.
the reading and meaning would be nice keep to the same story for single kanji. Additional onyomui and konyumi can ideally be extensions of that story, rather than being new stories based on the English meaning.
For example: 立
Imagine Ryu [りゅう] (from streetfighter) standing as the doorman to the Ritz hotel [りつ] saying “ta!” [た] when you walk by.
The Kunyomi could always be in the second half of the story. Of course not all the onyomui and konyumi can be included, and WaniKani doesn’t try either until you need it.
Late to the party, but for some reason when I need to remember 認める I think of Lady Gaga’s meat dress she wore to some awards show, and how I can easily recognize it. xD Just that specific word but there ya go.
This is my primary complaint as well so far. My primary example is 友 which they use the mnemonic, "you"ths. My mind instantly recalls the bolded “you” and types that out instead of yu-u. I did it about 4-5 times in the same session before I forced myself to break the habit - matter of I type faster that I read/think sometimes. Just having it written as "yuu"ths instead or something would have been nice.
Just got bit by another one today: 狩猟. For some reason, they use the mnemonic “shoes” for syu here, even though shoe always means syuu everywhere else. I even knew it was syuryou, but I second guessed myself and put in syuuryou instead due to the mnemonic.
Perhaps it’s a consequence of not using all, or even most of the mnemonics, but when I did use them it didn’t even occur to me that a particular keyword would be exclusive to a particular reading. I always just used them as a way to jog the general shape of the word. Most of the time that was enough to bring the whole thing back.
If I subsequently got it wrong, I would chalk it up to lack of exposure and search for examples in the wild to drill the full word in more solidly.
Because I have been studying in a language school on top of WK, I have been using WK mnemonics for levels 30-60 for a few hundred kanjis, so that’s maybe why these inconsistencies are also very striking to me
So far I’ve guessed that either the WK team didn’t deem consistency too important, or they thought it was important but did not take the time to enforce consistency. Neither of these explanations is very satisfactory to me, hence me complaining, but I can feel not everyone agrees with me, which is fine
That’s a fair point As far as I am concerned, I am systematically using reading mnemonics. It should get less and less confusing as I get to hear these words more often, but for now these inconsistencies have been a pain.
To me, the point of such a topic is also be to say “hey WK team, here are some lingering issues that OP and other people deem important, can you please fix it?” At least that’s why I’ve been posting. I do believe this is useful: enforcing consistency did not seem to be top priority when some mnemonics were created by the team, so it may not been seen as a high priority now either. Alo’s latest messages indicates that inconsistencies have become a concern to them, though, which is a good thing.
It’s just that that’s not how they primarily take corrections, so anything here is just, as alo was saying, venting for venting. Unless someone follows up on it directly. It shouldn’t bother me if people want to complain to each other and not alert the team, but oh well.
sorry to bring back old topics. Dont’ know if anyone mention before but what you mentioned here is actually quite good mnemonic with some tweaks imo. Just pay attention to the ending sound (or whatever it takes like below) meat with ending ‘t’ will be meat toe, thus みと mead with ending ‘d’ will be mead does, thus みだ
Sometimes I think it’s just that the good people at WK don’t want to put anything rude. Although anyone knows that rudeness sticks best for mnemonics. Flies definitely like something that sounds like ka-ke. And it ain’t cake…
