i go through reviews quickly (takes longer than 3 seconds, fail), but for lessons, i take my sweet time.
vocab is usually quick, when i can read it and i know the word (like 結果, that’s an easy mnemonic for me).
for lessons, i take my time. one kanji session is 15-20 in most cases. taking an hour to look them all up, breaking the kanji themselves down, comparing them with similar looking ones and yes, reading and visualizing the wk mnemonics, maybe making up my own.
some carry the stench of failure from the beginning. you’ll develop a sense for that. when that happens, i hop over to Quizlet, make a little deck and drill them till they come out of my ears, as long and often as it may take.
i find it important to use all the tools and tricks at my disposal as weapon to bring down these bosses, and my reward is good accuracy on WK, and easy recall when i read stuff in the wild.
My end goal is to be able to ditch English entirely and recall japanese words by thinking in Japanese. I very rarely try to recall English words by using their French meaning after all. French and English have their own space in my brain, and Japanese will get its proper space in there eventually.
When you just start, there’s far too little information you can really use by going Japanese only. I will use English (or sometimes French) mnemonics by necessity, but once I know an item well enough they’ll often get ditched. There’s only so much mnemonics I can remember at once after all.
Also, I tend to be able to picture, say, 90% of a mnemonic’s story, but be completely unable to figure out how the hell it relates to the word I’m trying to recall. I put emphasis on the wrong parts of the story apparently.
I like mnemonics that tie multiple similar kanji together to highlight their differences though. They’re like the tricks you learn in elementary school to differentiate between homonyms. Based on English and how common the lose/loose and defininitely/defiantly mistakes are, those kinds of mnemonics should always have some use.
Half the point of WaniKani is to teach you how to use mnemonics to learn kanji, specifically BECAUSE rote memorization is such a painful and inefficient way to learn them. Language learning is definitely a case of ‘do whatever works best for you,’ but I think it’s straight up neuroscience that our brains are simply not wired to memorize random written strokes bunched together.
That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with tossing out the provided mnemonic for a radical/kanji if it’s not working for you or if you find it too lengthy/short. In fact I’d say that creating your own probably makes for a more memorable story that you will recall more easily when you encounter the kanji in reviews or in the wild. I have ADHD myself and I think mnemonics can actually be a huge tool FOR people that have attention problems, because it allows you to dig into your ADHD creativity/imagination in such a way that it helps you learn kanji. But those are just my two cents.
Edit: Note, I meant this more for the radicals and kanji/readings than for vocab. I’ll entirely admit I just kind of rote memorize a lot of the vocabulary unless I repeatedly fail a vocab word, then I’ll create a story. One that comes to mind is 乗せる – I couldn’t remember what it meant or its reading so I created a story: ‘Unless you PLACE the cake ON that dish, there will be NO SALE (のせる) today.’
I use mnemonics most of the time, but it’s usually my own. The WK ones are almost always too verbose to remember more than a few.
WKs reading mnemonic for 守 is: “The helmet you got for your head, though, did not protect. Imagine getting hit, and it splitting in half. In half a daze, the first thing you think is that you’re going to sue (す) the helmet company for their shoddy helmets.”
I try without first. (I read them, but don’t make an attempt to study them). The ones I fail a couple of times, usually trying the mnemonic works, but I like the SRS to filter the easy ones out for me.
Same, but I’m starting to run into more and more “collisions” where one that was easy to remember in the early levels (because it was pretty unique then) starts getting mixed up with a very similar later one. But again, I wait until it actually happens to worry about it.
one thing i’ve seen a lot, and here, too, is people calling their impatience ADHD. ADHD is a condition, and the people who have it, face real challenges in real life. calling your impatience and/or laziness ADHD makes light of those people and doesn’t take the whole thing serious.
of course, this is not directed at those who really have this issue. just a random thing i thought i’d mention. similarly for OCD - wanting something neat and orderly is not OCD. suffering from tiny things not being perfect, and in horrible ways, is OCD.
No but saying someone is lazy or “just not trying hard enough” is something ADHDers deal with on a regular basis so can we not? I can’t really change my brain chemistry at a whim. That is kind of the point.
That last pair, too… both have kun’yomi さか and I don’t understand what the difference is?
I wonder if one of them is the simplified version of the other, done either by the Japanese or Chinese at some point? I think they might both have the same reading in Chinese too.
I think this was a missed joke. 抹消/Erasure is a character from 僕のヒロアカデミア/My Hero Academia who can steal abilities from a target as long as he is staring at them.
I tend to read the mnemonics, but some of WK’s are too violent/gross for me. I ignore those because I don’t want disgusting imagery in my head when I try to recall kanji (unless the kanji itself is about something gross).
I just memorize most of them. I try to tie them to vocabulary words more than anything (e.g. 習 is 練習’s しゅう). For those that are similar, I’ll take note of what’s different (e.g. remember that this is not that because it has an extra line here or it uses X radical here) and that’s it. It works for me.
So at first I swore by the mnemonics that WK provided because despite how long it took to read them sometimes and how tedious it got, they really worked for me.
But ever since getting out the Pleasant levels, the mnemonics don’t do it for me anymore. Even after taking time to read through them all, I’m getting most of my kanji and vocabulary wrong the first couple times. I’ve actually taken to writing down the vocabulary in my critical condition page to see if writing it will help put it in my memory a little better. It works for some, not so much for others (so maybe I’ll keep re-writing them).
try making decks on quizlet for drills. might take 2-3 days, but it works. then just continue doing them normally.
WK doesn’t repeat often enough when teaching, i think it repeats them only once. that’s okay for the pleasant stuff, but might not always do it for the harder stuff.
This might be controversial but I think anyone who thinks mnemonics are worse than rote memorization doesn’t understand how brains store and retrieve information very well.
That said, coming up with your own mnemonics is a far superior method than reading an obtuse one that doesn’t click with you; because you’re adding effort by trying to remember the mnemonic and then remember how it links to the reading or meaning. Home made mnemonics are way more efficient but thinking of one takes time and a little creativity. Imo it also makes the lessons more interesting. Create a story that resonates with you about certain groups of radicals because it’s you that has to use it.
You won’t need the mnemonic after your 4th or so review but it will cement the kanji in your brain faster. You’re using visualisation to force your brain to store the memory of the kanji in more areas of the brain, and recalling that visualisation reinforces those connections making the memory stronger. Of course our brains throw out unnecessary information all the time so then you have to read or use the kanji in some way to keep it, but WK doesn’t use a radical/mnemonic based system for the fun of it, it’s a learning tool and I think it’s a waste to not use it here.
I can’t really change my brain chemistry at a whim. That is kind of the point.
