Having aphantasia means "imagining" doesn't work

WaniKani
142

I tend to make up most of my mnemonics, if I need one. Most of them use more word play than the WK ones and describe the kanji.

Like these:
記, Keep up and write down what the snake says. Opposites
本気 , the Honki donkey is serious about the library. Rhymes
切, he cut me with seven sets of swords. Alliteration

These two refer to each other.
未, My mum told me that this is a bi-plane because it has two wings, that’s not yet a jet.
末, In the end his bi-plane crashed over Mastusmoto. Apparently the wings were backwards.

They all describe the kanji somewhat, I realise. Maybe it’s because I can’t really hold the shape in my head too well.

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143

Thank you! They work for me as well. Very well.
In the end I also take out as much as possible from the mnemonics.
Sometimes some of the explanatory words interfere into the meaning of the Kanji and that confuses me.

Do you write also?
Would you mind telling me how you recall them if you can’t remember how the Kanji should look like?

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This is how it is for me. Dreams are so real I usually never notice I’m dreaming, but I can’t picture things in my mind. That’s the phrasing I use because I still have an imagination, I just can’t visualize. The mnemonics still help me (though not as well as I feel like they help other people who can visualize well). It’s weird. Over time, I can’t recall what the story was so the sooner I get a character into the automatic recall stage (not relying on the mnemonic to trigger meaning or reading), the better.

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Mostly, I remember through repetition. Muscle memory from writing is useful, of course.

The goal is drill it until it’s unconscious knowledge. Then if there are parts I don’t know my mneumonic leads me to the answer.

Do you play games, Play Station etc? Have you ever passed the controller to someone and they asked something like, “Hey, how do you counter?” In this case without the controller in my hand I just can’t tell them.

If not, explain how to type, or where the key are on a piano. Maybe, a step by step guide on how to write each letter of your name? You know these things but you can’t really explain them.

The knowledge is so deep it’s not something you actively think about.

That’s kinda what it’s like. I can recognise the kanji but I can’t remember them. Attaching a story helps me recall which shapes and sounds match.

Best I can describe it goes like this.

・記 I already 100% know ‘how to spell mouth in kanji’ that’s drilled in deep.
・Say is mouth noise. Noise from the mouth is sound waves. So 言 .
・Now my mneumonic,
・“Write down what the Znake says.”
・The Z is drilled in deep, it’s the alphabet.
・However, because it’s kanji you cant just write it like a Z you’ve gotta do it boxy. So its 己.

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I think we work very similar when it comes to Kanji.
Muscle memory of course works like that, but it happens that I forget that as well and the I need a kickstart and that happens like your description with words.
When I have that memory back the muscle memory works again.

Maybe its like playing piano after a while, you want to play a song but you can’t remember where to put your fingers, so you have to sing the melody in your head first, but once you know where to place your first finger the whole thing is reproduced automated.

Why Znake? What’s the Z standing for?

Btw I was just talking about recalling to write, in order to recall the reading I have to ask myself things like, who was doing that, ah the Shogun! etc. that works well and in that case (recalling the reading) a visualization might make that faster and more stable.

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Z is for znake so that I know which way to write 己. Start in the top left and finish in the bottom right. If it was S for snake I would might write a digital clock 5.

If I’m just recognising to read, then I don’t really need the Z.

To me writing is kinda like hard mode recognising. Recognise it, without an it.

If you wanna practice on the go, Kanji Tree is pretty good. I’d get a stylus to simulate a pen rather than use a finger though.

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I am actually preferring 書道 to the digital world :grin:
Your mind really works exactly like mine.
When I look at the moon I also always remember how to know if it is (don’t know how to say that in English) becoming smaller or larger by comparing it to an a and old style z.

I think I will do some rhyming, that is so important for me.

It is, I also need to attach and reorder some of the mnemonic parts to recall a Kanji.

149

Same here! I think in words so I remember the words in the story, not a picture in my head.

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150

My mind works like yours? I’m sorry for your loss.

The moon in English is waxing if it’s getting bigger, waning if its getting smaller.
To misquote the Karate Kid “Wax on; Wane off.”

If it’s C shaped it crescent, nice and easy. If it’s bigger than half less than full its ‘gibbous’… like a big gibbon? (I got nothing )

I can’t do 書道 at all. I’ve got shaky hands. So unless I’m going for monk writing it’s just too difficult. So i use nice fat pens that i can smash into the paper like the foreign barbarian i am.

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151

Wow, thank you.

It is so awkward to admit, but I was absent in elementary school when they learned about East and West. So I had the feeling I will never know where east and west is and someone told me a mnemonic about it in German, which is basically saying Nie Ohne Seife Waschen (Never wash without soap) and I STILL have to cite that every single time I want to recall where east and west is. Or I do it even I wouldn’t need it, I don’t know.

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For me the compass directions are ‘Naughty Elephants Squirt Water’ or ‘Never Eat Shredded Wheat’ (not a popular cereal with children).

I kept trying to come up with one for the compass in Japanese but never could. So I gave up.

Don’t worry about doing embarrassing things like that. Ask basically any native speaker of English what is happening in their heads when they write ‘Wednesday’. Wed-nes-day, every time. I just did it then. I can’t spell Wednsday without saying it.

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Imagine what’s going on in my head when I am trying to orientate inside Ikebukuro station:
There is an east and a west exit, at the east exit is 西武 department store and in the west 東武 department store. And all kind of other things going on, so I am planning for years to spend an afternoon there with a compass and several maps trying to figure out how I can make something like a 3d model in my head not to get lost EVERY SINGLE TIME there. But it will never happen.
I would really like to know how other people orientate in train stations.

It’s strange, but for roman Alphabet words the visual correction works for me best. If I write something wrong, I see that the overall picture is “off”. Then I can rewrite is several times until the picture is correct. The only words I have to ALWAYS recheck with some kind of question are the words that have been changed to a new spelling when I was in high school.
Sometimes it also works for Kanjis, that I just rewrite it several times with mirrored parts and sometimes the whole thing emerges from somewhere. It is just not very slow and looks super clumsy.

Just found that. ツッチー先生ありがとう！ :yellow_heart:

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Yeah, I still do “Never Eat Soggy Wheaties” to remember how the compass goes in English.
For Japanese I never thought about doing that, though. Wouldn’t you need several mnemonics, though, for the different ways of saying the directions?

I am not aphantasic (though my auditory imagination is pretty poor), but I have never pictured Jourm or Koichi–though I did find remembering Mrs. Chou in the street in the town with her bird to be a helpful way to remember that all those words (when in pink) were the same. I don’t think I was visualizing it, though, just rewiring the neurons to fire off that pattern of associations.

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I find it pretty amusing he points them wrong at 0:35 :rofl:

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Haha, that’s really good, I didn’t notice that :rofl:
Guess what kind of people come up with the best mnemonics :grin:

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I think the idea of the video is quite good, works for me.

Oh no! I wasn’t reading the mnemonics in the beginning with a lot of concentration it seems. Didn’t know she has a bird.

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I don’t really visualize them at all, personally I don’t find it helpful. I don’t have any idea what Koichi, Gouichi, Mrs. Chou, Jourm, etc look like. Other than maybe Chou and Gou are just old. They are personalities to me rather than visualized things. Except for Hard Gay who is a real person so that one I can actually pull visualized things from. Luckily not cursed with aphantasia but I am not often actively making the scenario appear in my head. I’m treating them like really tiny stories and just recalling how the story went with piecing radicals together. I feel like it would be way too much brain power to think of 2000 kanji and 10000 vocab brain-visualized scenarios each rather than short (completely nonsensical) stories. Stories of which eventually I completely forget because the words in front of me just magically are the word I know over time.

For example my brain process goes like this, an easy kanji for example. The town 「町」 mnemonic. I’d start with just the radicals formation (two, rice paddy and street) and I will focus on just those aspects. I shove those into the radical part of my brain and try to just remember those two things in combination and what they mean together.

The supplied default mnemonic being “When you see both a rice paddy and a street in the same place, you have the makings of a whole town!” So when I see the Rice Paddy + Street radicals, it forms a town. In my head what is being visualized, specifically subconsciously is actually a bustling Japanese street, completely illogical to the rice paddy. So I just ignore what my brain is trying to push at me “visually” in my head since it’s vague an unhelpful in most cases for me personally.

Okay so cool, there’s Rice Paddy and Street, that’s a town because what town isn’t complete without a rice field…? What do I do with this now, what is so interesting about this town. Oh right it’s Mrs. Chou causing ruckus in the town, again. Maybe she is digging up the rice paddies or something.

This all becomes mostly irrelevant because by the time you’ve burned it, radicals for the kanji aren’t being relied on anymore, and the short story recognition is instant if needed at all.

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159

Until you start to write seriously :rofl:

I can differentiate between left and right but I know many people who can’t (otherwise clever people btw).
I came to believe that it is not connected with intelligence.
It seems we need a “tag” from some kind of authority we trust (family, teacher, Harvard professor etc.), in order to be able to recall things.
(My theory is that we can’t memorize or forget things, just experience and recall it or not recall it)
I can’t remember where is east and west but I CAN absolutely safely in ANY situation of my life, tired hungry desperate, like really in any situation tell you left and right.
East and west needs a crotch, always.

So I analyzed what happened as a child when I heard about east and west for the FIRST time.
That was after I came back to elementary school being sick for one day.
My friend (bad student, not really trustworthy when it comes to explanations about things we learned in school) said that I missed out on the North- East- South- West thing.
And he said to me, that now I will not be able to pass the test.
I was really desperate and told that to my parents and they told me that mnemonic I use since then. I just can’t recall east and west without that!

But I can recall left and right!

But it is basically the same thing. So I remembered the first time I heard about left and right.
That was from my funny grandfather.
I trusted him completely but he is a bit of a joker.
So he looked at me really seriously and said to me in a rhyme (works only in German):
Remember that girl: Left is, where the thumb right is!
And I was really impressed by that wisdom (he just wanted to fool me but I did not realize that) and from that point I remembered left and right. IF I would need to make sure that my concept is correct actually I would recall that rhyme from my grandfather first, then move my left arm and would know where left is. But there is NO whatsoever logical connection to that rhyme to my left hand.

So my theory now is, that we don’t need a logic to “tag” information about the physical world to concepts that exists in the mind. Maybe there is no logic between that two realms necessary. It works like magic.
It is more like whatever short (the more rhyme the better) is presented to you by someone you trust is working as that tag.
If we learn through WK that means nothing else than, we trust Koichi.
But as soon as we start to trust ourselves, we can make our own mnemonics for the same purpose.

For me I realized I don’t need logic, the more bizarre the better. In that sense for me it is exactly the same like for you. Ah, a rice field and a street, that’s what it takes to make a town, all right no problem, but that only works for me because it seems that I trust in Koichi to have an authority when it comes to learning Kanji.

Sorry for the long reply and thank you for your detailed description, it really helps to compare ways of recalling!
:sunny:

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I’ve always had problems with that, but then, I’m cross dominant. Left handed for writing, skateboarding, and boxing. Right handed for batting, throwing, and golfing.

I have no problems with NSEW, but that’s probably cultural. When you grow up on an island you reference things like the Westside and Eastside of the island and what direction the ocean is.

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That could be the reason why you have problems with left and right.
I think you can fix that.
Basically left and right is a phenomenon of the body and not of the mind, it is always personal so you have to tag it to your own body (that makes it fundamentally different from east and west) so while eg a memory tag for “onion” has to be a sense of visual, pain (in the eyes), taste or even conceptual (layers) left and right can only be a sensation. I think I linked the sensation of my left biceps to the word and concept “left”. You could actively move or activate a muscle on your left side and concentrate on the word “left” but it works better if you have a (bizarre) rhyme.
If that doesn’t work you could ask someone you trust to always know left and right to hit or bite you in your left (or right) arm and say a rhyme (that you hear for the first time) containing left (or right) after or before doing so :rofl: I think that must work because afterwards when you are unsure about where which is you remember that awkward and surprise and know which side of the body it was. You know like you always remember eg on which side of the body you had a broken arm even if you can’t say it was left or right.
Maybe.