I’m someone who relies more on the pronunciation clues (i.e. the highlighted words in the mnemonic, that remind you of the on- or kunyomi) rather than remembering a vocab with that Kanji inside.
The mnemonics help me a lot to remember it initially, until I only remember the highlighted word and finally don’t even need that.
At best every syllable would have only one pronunciation clue. For example かん always seems to use Genghis Khan and はん always uses Han Solo.
But then there are syllables that have different clues in different Kanjis. あつ being “At Sue’s” for 厚 and “achoo” for 圧. Annoying, but maybe unavoidable in some situations.
Even worse, different syllables, that have the same clue! Like 数 using “sue” to get at すう, but 守 using the same clue for す! That makes the clue completely useless to me, because on my journey from full mnemonic to only clue to just the syllable, I now misremember, or have to guess and that is death to me.
It reduces it to “just remember that 守 is す”, which renders the clue largely pointless.
A milder version of that is using a word with with two vocals in English as a clue for a long syllable in Japanese, i. e. sue for すう, but then not doing it for 祖, for example where the pronunciation clue is soap, but the onyomi is the short そ.
The last point is easier to forgive, but the second I think almost warrants a change to the mnemonic.
Not sure if this was addressed before, since I don’t know how to search for it. I just call it pronunciation clue here,
This can be frustrating, and completely sympathise. As I have been levelling up I find this has been happening more frequently. In cases where the default mnemonic doesnt quite “stick” for me, I sometimes make a new one up and add it to my notes for that specific vocab/kanji. I didn’t actually do this until recently, but I found that I had quite a few leeches from earlier levels for this reason specifically and decided that I needed to do something about it. Hope this helps ^_____^
Thanks for bringing this up to us! We’ve been working on making all the words/sounds we use across our mnemonics consistent with the Japanese characters associated with them. This takes some time though and it looks like we haven’t addressed these cases. I’ll share these examples with the team to see if we can get them worked on sooner rather than later!
I just mentioned this in another thread but will post here for visibility, but I was struggling with the exact same thing. I can understand having multiple clues for the same sound, but using the same clue for multiple sounds kinda defeats the purpose.
What really throws me for a loop is when the same mnemonic is used for multiple different readings as with the word ‘hawk’ being used for both ほくand はこ, which kinda defeats the purpose:
北: The creatures that use this technique to find north the most are hawks (ほく).
That said, I find most of the WK mnemonics to be very helpful and weird cases like the ones mentioned throughout this thread are few and far between IMO.
Lol, I sent an email to support about the exact same mnemonics earlier today because I failed them in my reviews. They did say they would look into it.
To minimise confusion, I propose that WaniKani writes all their mnemonics entirely in the IPA, which will by no means confuse anyone and will lead to complete global comprehension