Government? Public? Politics?

WaniKani
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I don’t know what should I do to avoid mixing up those words.
The review asks for the meaning of kanji [ X ] or word [ Y ], the world “public” comes to my mind and I answer the question with that word. Turns out, it’s wrong, the correct answer is “government”. Or I think “government” but the correct is “politics”, or any other combination.
I feel like those words are in the same “memory slot” of my brain.

By the way. I didn’t mention any kanji or word in particular, because that confusion happens to me with anything that has one of those three meanings.

4 Likes
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When I’m struggling with this, I take a look at the Kanji Composition section of the trouble Kanji and come up with a custom mneumonic sentence that tries to fit them all in, so that for any one kanji, I only need to recall the sentence.

If that doesn’t work, sometimes playing the audio or speaking them out loud helps, since the pronunciation might stand out to you later.

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There’s usually 2 things I do when I have an issue like this (my 2 biggest enemies are the circumstance-case and the police-police officer-police station sets) Make up a mnemonic for each of those items, that’s aligned to your own brain better or look at those 3 items side by side and basically say "oh, it has that kanji X in it, so that of course means Y, while this one has kanji Z, so it means W.

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If you are getting the reading right but not the meaning, focus on associating the reading with the meaning rather than the kanji definitions.

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Ohh lord for a second I thought this was a post about making political opinions…we don’t need that on WK imo…

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Some of the ways,

  • I used to do EN => JP, which was pretty much the way I touched higher levels.
    • I still make mnemonics sometimes; but now knowing what to focus.
  • Kana + Sentence Cloze => Kanji + EN (or J explanation)
  • Hear it somewhere before, outside the SRS. (Which is quite random and uncontrollable; but if you hear it enough, of course it works.)
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