The inconsistent usage of negatives in mnemonics is messed up. I think it is an Herculean feat what Wanikani folks did with all these mnemonics, but I always get amused (and annoyed ) when mnemonics like this one come up:
天然 (てんねん). Meaning: Natural.
Mnemonics for reading:
One thing that definitely isn’t natural are nendoroids (ねん).
It is really hard to keep up which mnemonics are positive and which ones are negative.
In cases like this I know I will get stuck during my reviews thinking “what was that natural thing, again???” And might guess something like “テンバ” because BAnanas are natural @.@
In situations like this, I often try to come up with a positive mnemonics, but it is actually very hard (no wonder WK is inconsistent, if it was easy they most likely would have done it).
Ah, I hear you. Someone once taught me a mnemonic for remembering which side of a boat the red and green navigation markers go (also which side is which) - namely, “There’s no red port left”. However, since port is both the left side and the red side, surely there is red port left would be better.
Nendoroid. It’s a brand of figurines that look basically like this:
I’ve definitely had this problem with many mnemonics over the years, although surprisingly never with WK… Maybe because I only tended to use their mnemonics as a last resort, but you’re right. I feel like it’s an easy trap to fall into creating mnemonics as unless the negative is a core piece of information, you’re likely to forget it.
It’s almost an exercise in itself trying to think about whether a mnemonic could be misremembered or whether the core details make it explicitly clear. After all, when you remember a mnemonic, you’re not remembering it verbatim, you’re remembering pieces of it, or some kind of mental image of it. More abstract concepts like negation are kind of unnatural to our brains.
Don’t think about bears
You’re picturing a bear now. Your brain just completely skips over the word “don’t” and all bear-related neurons get fired. Mental images and memories will always take the simplest paths in our brains, which makes adding complexity to mnemonics detrimental, and unfortunately that includes negatives.
(I am not a neurologist or psychologist)
I don’t know if it’d be a better mnemonic, but something like this may be more explicitly clear.
If you’re ranking natural things, at number 10 (てん) is nen(ねん)droids. They’re definitely at the bottom since they’re plastic figurines.
Often times they do stick if the negation is easy to visualize, but I think a lot of mnemonics fall short of that. But like you said, it’s a tremendous task just coming up with all these mnemonics.
That’s is a very unfortunate job to come up with a set of mnemonics like they do.
They try as much as possible to keep objects tied to sounds. So changing the mnemonics of NEN from nendroids to 年, for example. Means that they need to change the mnemonics.
) when mnemonics like this one come up:
