I find a lot of WaniKani’s suggested mnemonics to be absolutely brilliant - and stuff I would NEVER have thought of, so they can be really helpful.
However, there are also a lot of them that seem so dumb that I just make up my own mnemonic instead. There was one where I even wrote in the reading notes, “Seems like whoever created this mnemonic really phoned this one in.” There are also some where I notice they missed a golden opportunity for a really obvious one.
Recently I got to “Hope” on level 14, where for the meaning, WaniKani tied the death + moon radicals to “Star Wars: A New HOPE,” which was absolutely chefs kiss. But then for the reading mnemonic of “BOU” I couldn’t help but imagine a little Ewok pointing his BOW up at an AT-ST or something like that instead of BOWLING like they suggested.
I’m curious if others do this creating their own mnemonics, or do you just go along 100% with whatever WaniKani says for the mnemonics. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to just go along with theirs even if I don’t like a lot of them, but I can’t help but make my own sometimes.
For a lot of them, my own mnemonics are much more understandable and memorable than the ones that WK uses.
I’ll admit that some of my own mnemonics are not ones that I can share in ‘polite company’ - but what’s important is whether or not they are memorable enough for me (and me alone).
That said, I’ve found that even some of the ‘pedestrian’ mnemonics (Koichi, Doughnut, Kyoto, Shogun, Tokyo et al) are good enough to do the job for me.
I think they try to reuse the same mnemonic words for the same sounds, so a lot of the ぼう readings are about bowling. I couldn’t tell you what the mnemonic for 望 is though, because I’ve never seen Star Wars the mnemonic never worked for me, but I’ve heard the word 希望 from immersion several times in anime so I was just matching characters to a sound I recognized.
In general I use most of them, but there’s a few that don’t stick, or I have to tweak them, or if I’m really excited about a word because I see it in immersion all the time then I don’t need the mnemonic.
I do a mix of both. Usually I’ll go straight for the Wanikani mnemonic, and try to come up with my own if I keep getting it wrong. Sometimes though, I can think of a much more obvious one right away, so in those cases I just go with my own mnemonic.
It’s mostly pretty random things though, that rely on knowledge of certain anime characters, or other languages (there’s a surprising amount of kanji so far where the reading sounds pretty close to the Korean equivalent, so when that happens, that’s an obvious easy mnemonic as I’ve already learned Korean), so I get why these aren’t used in the first place.
I have a tendency to remember/emphasize the wrong part of a mnemonic, which leads to me getting an item repeatedly wrong… So I try to learn things without mnemonics (I had some previous knowledge going into WK, plus I’ve been reading for nearly 3 years now, so even discounting the ones I already know, there are quite a few kanji and words that aren’t too much trouble for me to learn), but if I can’t, I’ll find some mnemonic or association of my own rather than use WK’s
I do a combination of WK and my own. So many of the WK mnemonics are so far out there that I can’t relate or they are very violent and I can’t relate. I started a list of the violent ones so I could approach WK about it but now I can’t find my list.
I only ever really liked the idea of mnemonics, as they helped me figure out how to make my own. Wanikani’s actual ones are kinda just awful for me. They don’t work for me at all and instead just raise more questions and things to trip over mentally than help remember anything.
The mnemonics stopped being helpful for me around level 12, now I just brute force it most of the time and review mistakes. Wanikani is also startingto give diminishing returns at this point so it’s taken a backseat to grammar lessons and immersion for the past 3 months.
I never make my own mnemonics, but I also don’t really use wanikani’s mnemonics in any significant way either. I give them a good look when putting them in the learn queue and review them while getting things to guru and then I do my best to chuck them out of my brain after that. I will then re-learn a mnemonic if an older kanji starts becoming problematic, but more often than not my goal is to be able to recognize a kanji with as little brainpower as possible so the longer I hold onto a mnemonic the worse it is I feel.
Yeah, especially the funny じゆうs mnemonics xd (If it works it works, not meaning to offend anyone, I make fun at everyone’s account equally)
I rarely use the Wanikani mnemonics anymore. I thought we were going to have a connected story and uncover more stuff like こういち lore level by level. I’m a little disappointed in that regard, missed opportunity.
I generally prefer using my own mnemonic devices (partly because I think it works better in general, partly because I’m not a native English speaker and therefore the WK mnemonics are very hit-or-miss for me) but I did find the ones provided sometimes useful, especially early on.
To this day I remember the “car” mnemonic for the reading of 下 for instance.
After the first few levels I would generally try to build on existing Japanese kanji and vocab rather than use the English-based mnemonics WK uses. If a new kanji shares a reading with a previous one I’ll sooner use that for instance. But of course when you’re just starting you can’t really do that…
I don’t use the WK mnemonics. English isn’t my main language so most references are quite obscure for me, and also I had already a sort of kanji culture before coming to WK, and the naming of the radicals and building blocks are just too alien and unrelated to my already existing mental images.
Sometimes however I have some weird mental associations, “mnemonic like”.
For example, each time I see 飼 I thing “eating copper”. The eating part is obvious, the copper comes from 銅. Strangely, I don’t associate copper with any other kanji having 同.
EDIT: actually 飼 is NOT 食同 but 食司. I realized it only when I started handwriting it. My mnemonic has been wrong all that time…
For 植える I think about 上(うえ), and associate it with plants growing up (and also the original pictogram of 出).
i always use wanikani’s mnemonics. sometimes i add stuff to the notes if i keep getting them wrong. i find that repeated mistakes are usually due to me forgetting the mnemonics and being lazy and not trying to get the mnemonic into my memory
I started off using a lot of the mnemonics but tbh they didn’t always stick, so a lot of the time now I just use no nmnemonics. If I’m struggling with some kanji (either on its own or for disambiguation) I might refer to them, but after a while they all just started blurring together.
mnemonics xd (If it works it works, not meaning to offend anyone, I make fun at everyone’s account equally)