Congratulations on making it to level 60 Fioraaeterna-先輩. What a fantastic achievement indeed!
Thank you for emphasizing the non-optimal aspect of your journey. Sharing your experience affirms that doing what is enjoyable is a valid route compared to forcing yourself to do something that can turn unpleasant. I already think that way but it is really nice when a success story such as yours comes along and proves it!
All the best on your further journey with language. I am sure there is still much to see and learn about it. I wish you success and hope that I can attain similar levels when I get to that point.
Many thanks for your reply, that was very insightful
It is very interesting that you do not need to come up with your own mnemonics anymore. I am starting to get that also a bit now (my “kanji knowledge” being my WK level plus a few hundred kanji), but not that much yet.
With that said, don’t you need either to come up with mnemonics for non-obivous readings (on’yomi that cannot be inferred from the kanji radicals, and most kun’yomi)?
Apologies for all the questions! I am trying to project myself in a not-so-distant future, in which I won’t have as much time to study as now. I kind of feel that there will be some “lift-off” at some point, where learning will get easier and easier, but I cannot really imagine how it will be, so I am being very curious… Sorry again!
No need for apologies; these are good questions!!!
I mostly don’t come up with mnemonics for readings at all. The one place I might still benefit (but haven’t really bothered…) are really annoying long kunyomi words that are hard to distinguish from others in my mind, like 狼狽える or 彷徨う. But even those seem to have stuck after enough times seeing them. I’ll admit, I even stopped using WaniKani mnemonics towards the last 15 levels or so, at least about 80-90% of the time. I can’t explain why, but my brain seemed to tell me I didn’t need them, and as a result, my eyes just glossed over them. But most of the stuff has stuck. In fact, almost everything I’m getting wrong when reviewing L50-60 is word meanings, oddly. Maybe because my brain has been doing far less association between english and japanese words (due to hundreds of hours of reading), and so it’s actually trickier to associate the two than it was before?
Learning the kanji in context seems to help a lot and lessen the need for mnemonics. Not that I regret using WaniKani; it’s been an incredible way to stuff gobs of kanji into my brain at comparatively high speed.
Another thing that helps avoid the need for mnemonics is hearing words repeatedly out loud, or saying them out loud. For example, I heard ”みやこ" out loud a few times spoken by characters in cutscenes and never forgot the reading of 都 ever again. No mnemonic needed. There’s also the strong memory of sudden embarrassment that I had thought it was read と all this time (there’s a pro tip: channel your embarrassment and shame to form strong memories. that’s what they’re for! really!)
Reading has one nice advantage that it tends to reinforce things because, well, you keep seeing them! The main reason I still use SRS is to get past the first few days of learning (to avoid “looking it up for the 25th time” syndrome), as well as to spot when I’ve forgotten things.
Hi @fioraaeterna! What you are describing is super interesting. I finally get a vivid sense of what things may be like a little later on, esp. when I’ll have switched from learning kanji/vocab from mostly WK + lists from my Japanese classes, to mining real-life material.
I can’t wait to get there In the meanwhile, I’ll keep enjoying being able to read more and more of the stuffs that I encounter at random, which is already a great joy for me