In my current level, the vocab word for “branch” (枝) is えだ. The WaniKani mnemonic reads, “This tree consists of many branches. This particular branch, the one you’re looking at, is Eだ. Those others are other letters, but this is E…だ.”
Can anyone explain? What does だ mean in this example? I tried to look up だ online but couldn’t find a definition that quite fit the sentence. Thanks!
だ is basically the casual version of です. So when the mnemonic says is Eだ, it’s repeating itself.
ccookf attempts to read a WK mnemonic…
It hurt itself in its confusion!
I’ve seen some less than stellar ones posted to the forums, but this is a new low for me.
I reckon I would have used the Prose Edda as a mnemonic (that, along with the Poetic Edda, are the two main sources of knowledge we have about Norse mythology), though I guess it’s possible that not everyone has heard of it…
Honestly, it’s somewhat circular reasoning (given that 枝豆 is also a vocabulary word), but I just used edamame as my mnemonic for it. “枝 is the えだ in 枝豆.” 
Probably, unless you grow up in Scandinavia. 
For me, this vocab all bout connecting it to the beans! Edamame = 
and knowing it’s written with branch + beans. ^^;
However, if you read that sentence in English, Eだ would actually sound more like いだ.
飯田 
Which is precisely what I did when I came across this vocab item and why it confused me as well 
Also, not to confuse it with 板 
Using something that you already know is probably a much better idea than coming up with something new, especially if what you know neatly encapsulates what you need to learn. It’s probably also more relatable, since quite a few people have seen edamame, whereas ‘eda=branch’ is new to most people learning Japanese. Plus, you can imagine the edamame pods on a little branch, or the beans lined up inside the pod… ‘branch bean’ ends up feeling pretty logical. But the prerequisite is knowing what edamame are.
If I had to come up with something from scratch, I’d probably imagine three branches coming out of one bigger branch like this:
But that’s just me.
Side note: my phone threw me this kanji in the encoding for that drawing:
𡦈
Where did that even come from??? 
Seriously, for words I already know that’s exactly what I do. Way easier.
That makes sense, I think I can remember edamame as “branch bean” and えだ as the first part of that. Thanks!
Yeah, I would have preferred if the mnemonic had more Japanese, like, You see a beautiful painting of a branch. What is it? 絵だ。
枝の絵だ。
That looks trippy O_O
I can’t find a meaning for it either, so maybe it’s some obsolete kanji… or just something that was made up as a possibility at some point. I might need to dig deeper though.
It might be easier to come up with you’re own mnemonic when this happens. That’s helped me when I recall the mnemonic more than what its supposed to remind me of at least.
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