so i want to be upfront, I know the Wanikani method boils down to mnemonics with SRS attached. I have thus far been finding it incredibly effective as i go through at my pace which is admittedly not 15 a day, usually more like 5 or 10, sometimes 15 on a weekend. but now i feel like i’m in a bit of a pickle.
I have been brushing up on grammar and vocab with Bunpro and I want to start making my own mnemonics to help with that. Bunpro currently is all wrote memorization and i’m fumbling a fair amount of it (testing around 75%). admittedly some of this is because i’ve stepped away from it and come back, but comparing the two methods it’s clear integrating mnemonics is vastly superior. (WK: 100+ terms learned with very few mistakes, most often just a mix up of to similar terms that i get right on the second attempt. Bunpro: like… 30 terms, and I’m constantly mixing up vocab or similar terms like demonstrative nouns vs pre-adjectival nouns ( これ vs この etc)). I am also attempting to work through Genki.
previously I had taken Renshuu to about 700 words, so it is somewhat often in both systems i come across a term i already know.
my worry is from the Kanji standpoint WK uses specific radicals and builds into them, and seemingly groups these into stories to lesson the burden on learning. I am worried that if I start creating my own mnemonics for terms i’ve learned outside of WK that it will be detrimental. perhaps I’m just spooked by the foreword of RTK which i had attempted prior and didn’t jive with. It was effectively “RTK only works when you use it as your only system, attempting to learn things independently will be detrimental”
Mnemonics that you come up with and that mean something special to you are always going to work better than generic mnemonics created by third parties. At any rate mnemonics are only a temporary crutch that you’ll forget eventually as you manage to remember things without having to use tricks. It’s not that big of deal.
I’m a serial stopper that started 20 years ago (what can I say, I’m VERY good at stopping for months-years at a time) so I used RTK at one point - not for long, but enough that I still remember some of the Primitives.
I also used other methods, and have at times made my own mnemonics. Even for WK, I only read the mnemonics sometimes and when I do if I don’t like them I mentally make my own.
And I am learning just fine.
If mnemonics are working for you, feel free to use them for any other method.
However do be careful not to assume the only reason WK works is the mnemonics. It’s also the approach of breaking things down into elements, whereas things like Bunpro don’t really do that because they focus on fundamentally different things. I only use mnemonics for things I struggle with, but there are many that I learn just by looking at the elements but making 0 mnemonics.
If WK’s method works well for you, you can try to base your own mnemonics on similar patterns to keep things consistent. It’s normal to feel a bit scattered when using multiple resources, but as long as you’re reinforcing what you learn, it won’t be detrimental. If anything, creating your own mnemonics might help make things stick better since they’ll be more personal to you.