I forced an AI to read dozens of WaniKani mnemonics and then write its own. Here's what it came up with

WaniKani
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Sorry for the clickbait title, but I did legitimately get OpenAI’s GPT-3 model to come up with its own WaniKani mnemonics by feeding it a bunch of examples (from the publicly available “legacy content” spreadsheet). Inspired by some of the other threads noting that some WaniKani mnemonics end up sounding like complete nonsense anyway. Here are some of the highlights (green for radicals, red for kanji):

  • This radical has a tree on the left, and then a tree on the right, with a line running straight through them, splitting them in half. You might be able to guess that this is the radical for “line.”

  • In the middle, you have a dog laying down. To the left of the dog is a bowl. To the right of the dog is a plate. In this case, the dog isn’t eating from a bowl or a plate, but from a bowl plate, a hybrid of a bowl and a plate.

  • This radical looks just like a sock without the toes. It’s a sock that someone has just tossed on the ground.

  • This radical has a big mouth, and a few lines coming out of it. In this case, the mouth is a mouth, and the lines coming out of it are the drool coming down from the mouth.

  • You have a cross, and then a circle, and then another cross, and then another circle. That’s why this radical is a cross circle. It’s a cross and a circle.

  • This radical looks like a pair of socks, and the only reason I know what a pair of socks looks like is because I’ve been wearing socks for all of my life.

  • You are the king of all fish. You are the king of all fish. Everyone else is just a little fish. No one can beat you. You are the king! You are the king of all fish! You are the king of all fish! You are the king of all fish! You are the king of all fish!

  • A crab with a horns on its head is just sitting around doing nothing because it’s getting tired of being called a clown all the time. It’s really not funny calling a crab a clown, so the crab is just sitting around being crabby.

  • A calculator is calculating the number of the beast for you. You don’t need to figure out how many the beast is, your calculator will do it for you.

  • A tornado is going to come by and blow a tornado on the ground and a tornado up your butt! This is a warning. There’s a tornado coming to blow something up. Hopefully nobody’s butt.

  • When a wasp flies into a tray of jam, it creates a pattern as it defies the laws of gravity! The wasp has defied gravity and has created a pattern of jam on the tray by flying around it.

  • The carp is the king of the river, and he is pretty happy about it. The carp is pretty happy about being the king of the river. He tells the dragon to go away, he says that he doesn’t need any help. The carp is king of the river. The dragon is not.

  • When you brawl with your son, you’re always the winner. No matter how hard he tries, he just can’t beat you. You wonder if he inherited your will to win or if you inherited it from him.

  • At the end of the day, you have to pay for your sins. You have to pay for what you have done, and you have to pay the price for it. As a result, you have to pay your fine.

  • You and your son are arguing over something, and you can’t even remember what it was. You just remember that he’s your son and you’re the father. You win.
    Your son complains that you aren’t doing your job as a parent, but you don’t know what your job as a parent is. You’re just trying to give him a good life. You wonder if you’re doing a good job.
    Your son is always playing soccer, and you’re always helping him. You wonder what it would be like if you didn’t help him. Would he be able to play soccer on his own? Would he be better than you?
    You are a single mother, and you are raising your son on your own. Your son wants you to marry someone, but you don’t want to. You want to focus on raising your son. You wonder if you are doing the right thing.
    After you make your son’s lunch, you hand it to him, and he says he doesn’t want to go to school today. He’s too tired. You wonder what to do, but then you remember that he is your son, and you are the parent, so you decide to force him to go to school.

  • This radical looks with a child’s eyes, through a child’s optic nerve, and into a child’s central nervous system. Alright, but it’s not a child, it’s a baby. That is a baby basically. It knows a lot, and only a baby would know a baby’s things, so this is probably a baby’s eye.

  • This is the symbol for both incest and “inside”. It’s two lovingly intertwined forms. It’s what you get when you mix love with love, and it’s only for those who no longer need to worry about such things as society or consequences.

  • You’ve finally made your time in the soup wars, and now you’ve got to make your way out. The only way to get out is through the soup court, but it’s enormous. It’s much more open ended than you’re used to, and you can get lost in all the soup (すう) they’ve been serving. They’ve also been serving curry (カレー) all day. Curry people, curry rules! Make your new empire!

  • If you have to admit something, admit it on facebook!

Could be fun to imagine what radicals/kanji these would be.

Update: I’ve done some more

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Well, now I’m starting to wonder if Koichi is actually an AI himself.

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Curry people, curry rules! Make your new empire!

:curry: :crown:

:rofl:

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This is hilarous

Me too, bot. Me too.

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Holy shit, these are amazing

I wonder if you could prompt the AI with the radicals, readings, and meaning, and have it come up with the mnemonics for existing kanji, based on that. It’s probably more effort than it’s worth, but it’d be cool

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It creeps me out a little how weird, yet oddly familiar and relatable they are.

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Somehow this is both poetic and hilarious.
:joy:

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If you had changed the title I would’ve thought that these were leaked mnemonics for unreleased radical and kanji items.

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This is the funniest post I’ve read on this whole forum

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:cry: Like dis if you cry everytim

Seriously touching story about a single dad-mom and their soccer son. I’ll never forget the make kanji.

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Mark this post NSFW.
I can’t stop laughing and am getting weird looks from my coworkers, help

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I haven’t laughed so hard in years. The dogs think I am crazy.

These are spot-on amazing and correct.

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Anyone know any resources for making your own kanji? I’d love to see some of these

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No, but we can probably make some ourselves based on the explanations lol. I’ll try to post a photo of my “line” interpretation later

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This is genius! :joy: :joy:

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Bravo! these are great :smiley:

with a bit more tweaking this thing might even come up with useful mnemonics :smiley:

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I imagine they exist, because someone created the kanji on this page (though perhaps it was just some graphic designer doing it manually by hand - the “how to enter” page just shows examples written in handwriting rather than giving links to programs that you can use to emulate printed kanji).

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That’s wonderful!
I always thought it would be great to have an AI that knows what Japanese words you know (WaniKani level and manually added words) and what grammar points you know (what level of Genki you are on) and generate random sentences so you can practice translating.

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Computers in general are really bad at making good sentences. It would be far better to have an AI that sorts preexisting sentences. Maybe something like YouGlish that can extract words you know (using a WK filter or something) and then further sort them by grammatical element. Still would be crazy difficult.

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Yeah, I didn’t want to have to go down that road because it seems like something that’d be pretty straightforward. There are only so many radicals and arrangements for things

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