I’m working my way through Level 1’s vocabulary so I’m new to verbs. I haven’t yet learned any of the grammar surrounding verbs as I’m just starting Genki alongside WaniKani.
I’ve noticed that the mnemonics WaniKani provides for the verb vocabulary words often are just for the reading of the kanji before the okurigana. For example, with 「入げる」the mnemonic given is an eagle 「い」flying out every time you insert your hand into something.
That mnemonic doesn’t help me remember that the kanji is followed by the okurigana 「げる」for the vocab tests, so I started making my own to incorporate the okurigana as well as the kanji.
The problem that I’m encountering now that I’m seeing the verbs in context sentences is that I’m not sure if this is actually a helpful way of learning these verbs or whether I should just stick to the mnemonics for the kanji and just remember the okurigana by rote memorisation, as I know that the verbs won’t be in the same format in different sentences depending on conjugation.
Wanikani is rather one-directional. You learn to read japanese, not to translate from english to japanese (where you would need mnemonics for the verb complete with okurigana). In the direction japanese to english, you don’t need to memorize the okurigana as you are seeing it.
Aye, the thing about WaniKani is that it’s purely a kanji-learning system - vocabulary is included only as a means of helping you remember the kanji readings.
You’re free to come up with your own mnemonics. Sometimes your own mnemonic is the best mnemonic. Don’t be too discouraged by their usages in the example sentences - sometimes they can be a bit… over-casual with the translations of those.
If you just want to be able to recognise a word, I’d say don’t worry about memorising the okurigana too much. You’ll almost always be able to recognise which verb you’re looking at since conjugation doesn’t change the verb half as much as it does in European languages—or at least there are so few irregular verbs (you can count them on one hand even after a very unfortunate accident with a chain saw) that you’ll almost always be able to deduce what verb a word comes from.
That being said, in Japanese verbs very often come in pairs (transitive/intransitive) which share a kanji but are different only in the okurigana (入れる ‘to put in’ vs. 入る ‘to go in’). They share the idea of entering (入), but who’s undergoing the entering (the subject or the object) can be seen only in the okurigana. You’ll have to remember that… somehow.
Later on they incorporate some of the okurigana into the mnemonic. I actually prefer the ones that don’t include the okurigana since, as you mentioned, the verb endings can change. However, the meaning for verbs does change depending on the okurigana as does the reading, 入れる vs 入る, so it’s probably good for most people that they do.
As soon as @alo mentioned it, I realized 気に入る exists. So I suppose maybe it’s not commonly written by itself, since it would probably be read as はいる in that case. That would make sense.
Is there a common tactic to remember whether a verb is transitive or intransitive, or is it just down to rote memorisation and exposure to them in context?
