I guess that makes sense for reviews, especially if those things appear within the same review session. What I’m saying is that it’s probably a good idea to apply a unified logic to learning. WK doesn’t say that’s bad though, so I’m not going to add any criticism here. Nonetheless, just as a personal note, I can more or less guarantee that this is what would happen if someone asked me to use such a review system, unless I was really out of time/trying to see how fast I can finish my reviews:
- Answer the question asked
- Get myself to recall the element not requested for fun – if I haven’t already – just to make the review harder for myself and to provide an extra challenge
You could call it nothing but a silly, cherished belief, that’s for sure, but to me, that’s how it goes: I learnt these things together, and I will need to use them together, so I’ll recall them together as much as I can.
I think I’d start making changes here. If you’re wondering how, once again, I recommend reading the post I linked to earlier for the basic idea:
While I’m very much in favour of linking readings and meanings together, there’s one huge problem with needing to use the reading to recall the meaning: Japanese contains too many words (and kanji) that are pronounced exactly the same way, even if you account for pitch accents, which most of us don’t study very often to begin with. Case in point: I had a Japanese test less than a week ago. We were given a list of words, almost all of them in written only in hiragana, and we were told in translate them into French. (I’m doing my degree in France.) There was one word I couldn’t translate until an hour after the test started (I did the other questions first): しゅうしょくする. If I had only studied Japanese with this teacher, I would have had no problem. But because I already speak Chinese and I’ve noticed several rules that let me convert pronunciations in Mandarin into Japanese pronunciations, I was stuck. ‘Which しゅうしょく? What is it used for? There are so many words that seem like possibilities.’ I only came up with an answer after remembering that we did a chapter on life stories and milestones, which meant it was probably 就職=‘to gain employment, to get a job’. Point is, readings are far from unique, so how are you going to deal with overlapping, seeing as you can’t prevent it? Similarly, you can’t just link a reading to a kanji if your objective is to recall its meaning, because some kanji sound similar precisely because they look similar. (They’re pictophonetic/phonosemantic kanji (形声文字) i.e. kanji with a meaning component and a sound component.)
What I’d suggest is that you try to link both meaning and reading to the kanji at the same time, by having them cooperate in some way. Ideally, your memory should be something like a 3D matrix or an XYZ-coordinate system: knowing any two of the three elements (kanji, meaning, reading) should help you find the third. I’ll work with your examples:
Fun fact: in Mandarin, these two actually sound almost the same (one just has an extra G that gives it a more nasal sound, and they have different tones), so they’re even easier to mix up. I definitely mixed them up as a child. How can you remember them? A few ideas:
- Try learning words you can actually use/you’ve come across before that use them: 幸福（こうふく）= ‘happiness’ does not look like 辛苦（しんく）= ‘hardship’. 幸せ（しあわせ = ‘happiness’）does not look (or sound) like 辛い（つらい = ‘difficult, painful’ or からい = ‘spicy’).
- Associate them with real context that makes them memorable: you’ll probably find 辛 or 辛口（からくち）written in violent, rough calligraphy on spicy instant noodle packets, like this:
See if you can find a Japanese ramen place near you that offers such ramen if you really want to strengthen the experience. It helps with remembering other meanings too: I love spicy food, sure, but I’m not going to deny that it can be ‘painful’ to eat. Hahaha.
For 幸, I can’t think of an example right now, but I can guarantee you there’s a manga somewhere out there with 幸せ written in bright colours with lots of cheerful 〜〜〜〜 lines, possibly floating above characters’ heads as they relax in an onsen (or as they eat a delicious hotpot). - Play spot the difference: this phrase is favourite on the Japanese Internet when someone asks what the difference between two expressions is: ‘They’re different where they’re different, and the same where they’re the same.’ This may not be etymologically correct at all, but when you’re looking at two similar kanji, pretend that the reason they’re different is the parts where they don’t match, and then make up an explanation. For example, here, we’ve got ‘、’ versus ‘十’. You can pretend the dot (‘、’) is a drop of acid, and that it burns, so it’s ‘painful’; or that it’s a chili seed, so it’s really spicy; or that it’s a pebble that got thrown onto someone’s head. (Pretend that’s the rest of the character.) For ‘十’, it’s easy: it looks like a plus (+), so it’s positive and ‘happy’!
You can apply the same strategies here. I’m not going to go into detail though; I’ll just tell you how I differentiate them:
- 喉’s got a mouth (口) in it, so it’s obviously linked to the mouth somehow. The ‘throat’ is linked to the mouth alright. What about the reading? Well, it’s のど, and I don’t know about you, but both の and ど require me to round my mouth nicely, and if I freeze right after I say ど, I look like a goldfish. (I’m exaggerating a little, obviously.) What I imagine is that as I say ど – because my mouth is open and everything seems to frame my ‘throat’ nicely – I get one of my fingers and poke the back of my ‘throat’ like an idiot. (Ok, the truth is that I just concentrate my attention on the back of my ‘throat’ as I say ど, but it’s essentially the same thing: the pointing finger of my mental hand brings my ‘throat’ to my attention.)
- 候 tends to have meanings that are related to time or moments in time – waiting, serving, checking on someone/something, the weather at a particular point in time or in a particular season (a bit of a stretch, but you can see how these things are all somehow related to time)… What’s it got that the other kanji doesn’t have? A line: l. What now? You can pretend that’s a line on a clock (and I vaguely remember a teacher telling me that it was added as a symbol of something like that). You could also imagine it’s someone attentively waiting, as one would when checking on someone at home or in hospital, or when one is in line, like when one is a candidate（候補者 – こうほしゃ）for something.
There you go. I hope some of those ideas help.
It would be nice for them to do so, yes, but for what it’s worth, I remember being given a list of study tips by a neuropsychologist when I was younger and recovering from a head injury, and there was reference inside it to a study on interleaving. Everything was cited for people who were interested. There’s also a course on Coursera called Learning How to Learn that recommends interleaving, again with research cited somewhere in the course, probably at the end of that chapter. Studies on this exist, and while it would have been better if WK cited its sources, in this case, I can assure you it’s well researched, at the least if the medical community is to retain its credibility. WK isn’t pulling this out of a hat. I’m just too tired to bring up a study myself right now. If you want a rough idea of the research methodology though, typically, two groups of students were taught something and asked to review it in a certain way: one group working on one topic at a time, and the other mixing topics. Ultimately, the group that mixed topics did better. I believe the most commonly cited study discusses students doing maths problems. I don’t know if others exist though.
Agreed. Practice is key. There are Chinese characters whose readings I can’t remember for certain (or which I can’t write anymore) because I just haven’t needed them in ages. I’ve been speaking Chinese since I was a baby so… yeah, it can happen to anyone.