i have no problem with the meaning of them. rise and raise. lower and go down. but which of the pair is which???!!!
i have problems with pairs of things anyway. to figure out left and right i often have to mentally place myself on a specific mountain (where i originally learned left and right during a family hike), and face south, and then i know that the valley of village1 is left, and the valley of village2 is right. it’s fairly ridiculous, but for me it’s the only reliable way to remember left and right.
but my main point really was that we all have leeches, kanji and vocab we struggle to remember ^^
I remembered 上げる as “to raise” because it’s (for me at any rate, and I grew up in Maryland then in the western US with parents from Upstate NY and the Delaware Water Gap region of Pennsylvania, so your vowel sounds may differ a bit) the same vowel sound - げ and “ai” from raise are the same, so 上げる is “to raise.”
I have no memory of what I created for “to lower/go down”, which will be interesting when those come up for burning in the next couple of weeks…
How I learned 上げる–上がる, 下げる–下がる:
I believe 下がる was the first one wanikani taught, and with that one I added to the reading mnemonic (you know, the one about さing down the tree) that the が represented the tree falling down (see how it’s a bit tilted, and doesn’t quite look as vertical as げ?). Then, since が indicates the intransitive version for 下がる, I knew that が must also represent the intransitive version for 上がる, so that must be “to rise.”
I’ve also been working on a similar sort of pattern for す vs る endings for verbs, and while I’m not quite there yet, I think it’s helping.
I’ve found Item Inspector to be much more useful for leeches than the native Critical Condition items display on the dashboard. I’ve recently started using it and have managed to knock out a few of the worst. My brain just wants to see items at more random times than WK’s SRS system provides, and Item Inspector helpfully shows me who my worst leeches are.
Mhmm, that’s fair. I think it just confused me more when this 乚 did come up as umbrella, I think I would’ve used a different mnemonic like hook or something.
But I guess speculating about it will probably just make me more confused, lol.
Wanikani used to have a lot more radicals like that where the radical name was more like what it actually looked like, and then the kanji was just a completely different definition, but people people gave feedback that they wanted the radicals to be closer to the actual meanings of the kanji. Having gone through the first 20+ levels a couple of times now over the years, I definitely like it better now even though I had to learn the “new” meanings of the radicals.
If it makes you feel any better, I have gotten the cow kanji wrong about ten million times. “Cow” is still going to be on “apprentice” by the time I reach level 60 lol!
I felt that. That one and several others absolutely scrambled my brain when I started getting those. 「未、末、米、来、失、牛、午」and the “dry” radical had me on pins and needles for the longest time whenever they were presented individually. Combinations with other kanji or kana were a relief, but man, those all look so alike.
Learning the radical “names” on WK primarily serve to give you mental visuals to help build little stories to remember the kanji. Honestly, once you’re well settled into the kanji, the radicals don’t hold much power anymore. Adding synonyms to radicals-that-are-also-kanji, to match any meanings of that kanji, won’t hurt you.
I did that to 身 not too long ago, myself. It was a case of kanji coming first and it meant “somebody”, then it showed up at a later level as a radical… but it was called “someone”. That was fun to get wrong several times, then subsequently get confused at the kanji/vocab! (Thankfully, it seems WK fixed the radical shortly after).
Like others said, just add a synonym for the Kanji or Radical, that’s not cheating.
I personally added the synonym “money” for the radical, since that is essentially what it means.
The shellfish refers to seashells that were used as means of payment in the past.
‘Shellfish’ is pretty confusing, but a lot of Kanji learning apps still use that meaning. If you think of it as ‘money’ a lot of Kanji you’ll encounter later on will make much more sense.