Hello, This isn’t really a post about learning, but maybe it will help some things stick for people.
It’s mostly just out of curiosity, what local slang do you use to remember Japanese words?
Personally mine is Red “あか”.
Where I am from if someone is angry they are said to be “Akka” and if they are going “Akka” then they are having a rage, shouting etc. This is local slang from the North East of England, around the Country Durham area.
This translates well over to the colour Red, because if you are angry you are also said to be “Seeing Red”, and the colour red makes Bulls Angry.
Well, when I was learning hiragana, it helped me that “mo” is just about the shortest greeting used in Finland. It’s hard to explain it’s connotations precisely, but I could see a Finnish action hero sneaking up on the film’s villain, saying nothing but “mo” in the most laconic way imaginable, and then… disposing of them. So, because も looks like a fishing hook, I imagine a Finnish speaking Schwarzenegger catching a fish and then saying “mo” to them.
Also, these are not related to local slang, but I have music related mnemonics for a couple of symbols. そ is “so”, because it kind of reminds me of the zoso-symbol in Led Zeppelin’s fourth, untitled album. And む is “mu”, because Steely Dan gave the name mu-major to this really distinctive chord shape they used all the time. I don’t know how it would relate to that symbol though.
And I remember that 4 is よん because I have a friend called Jon who is a bassist. I don’t really know why it’s four. Maybe it’s because most of his basses have four strings.
I’m close to the Scottish borders and in my accent ‘gan’ is to go and ‘ken’ is to know or understand. I use them in mnemonics everytime those sounds come up even if they’re sometimes more convoluted because they just…stick better? If it’s a word that you’re using regularly I think, especially if you think the mnemonic in a heavy accent and you go ‘ah, it’s one of those ones’.
I also sometimes use ‘tan’ which means two, usually used to count sheep, but that one’s about 50/50 because quite often I’d think of the ‘normal’ meaning of tan first and it’s decent for remembering already
