This kanji right here. Again, and again I have been having problems with this one. The meaning is fine, but the reading is the problem. So, to help me remember that the reading is mata, I am publicly shaming this kanji.
Please join me in shaming this kanji to help me remember. If you don’t, then what’s the mata wif you?
Again and again, nothing 又’s. Again and again, I got it wrong too, but i’ll never get it wrong again.
Except for the time when I wrote まだ instead of また but I won’t do that again.
I can think of a few ways of remembering this. One of them is a bit rude because it uses a kanji that looks almost exactly the same that can mean ‘groin’, but whose more general meaning is ‘fork/split’ (叉). Both kanji are pronounced また, both low-high in terms of pitch. (It’s how they join to a particle that’s different.) 叉 is already a euphemistic way of referring to certain body parts, so on the bright side, the kanji isn’t all that rude. It’s not necessarily rude anyhow.
However, if you’re not familiar with that kanji or would just feel more confused with yet another similar kanji… well, there’s what @natarin suggested:
If you’ve watched anime or anything with casual conversations involved, you’ve probably heard「またね〜〜」at least once when people say goodbye, so I think this is a pretty good approach. Plus, it’s literally this kanji: you’d write「又ね!」if you wanted to use kanji for this (which is rare).
Some other ideas:
It means ‘again’, right? ‘Again’ has two As, yes? Well, so does the romaji for また. ‘A again?!’ At least that way, you have half the reading down, and you know that you’ll always have one vowel per syllable/beat, so you just have to remember the consonants.
You could… do a silly little dance (at least in your head): swing your arms out in front of you across your body so that they look like the two crossing strokes in 又. You can pretend that the horizontal stroke is your shoulders and collarbone:
ま left hand out
た right hand on top
ま left hand on top
た right hand on top
ま left hand on top
た right hand on top
etc.
And so you can do that again and again, with the lines formed by your hands intersecting and passing through that same central point again and again. If you’re having trouble imagining what that looks like, then… you could watch this, particularly the last motion where their arms cross their bodies:
(Sorry to inflict this on you if anime and anime-style games are not your thing. It’s just that this dance came to mind when I had the idea for that mnemonic dance.)
I tried so hard and got so far
But in the end it doesn’t even 又
I had to fall to lose it all
But in the end it doesn’t even 又
One thing, I don’t know why
It doesn’t even 又 how hard you try
Keep that in mind, I designed this rhyme
To remind myself how I tried so hard
Lol I keep giving my answer as stool for the kanji. But I know that again is mata. For some reason, the mnemonics for that one works really well for me.
You’re sitting again??? What’s the ma ta with you??