Remembering the Reading of 人

Yes this is common “advice” but it’s still wrong. Unless people are just born as 才人. It’s a bit easier to look at the type of words like place + suffix is じん etc

For me, all “nin” are ninjas and all “jin” are people wearing jeans. I think it came up in some mnemonic and i like those the most.

What I do is mentally associate じん with something masculine andにん with something feminine purely as a mnemonic. Like for 犯人 I imagine a female bank robber or something, 殺人 as a male murderer (since the majority are). 両人 as female twins etc

It’s only “wrong” in the sense that it has exceptions just like everything else. From what I’ve seen it’s right a large enough percentage of the time to be useful.

See follow up post below.

In this case your “exceptions” are over 50% of the words that use one of those two readings. 詩人、ご主人、友人、美人、夫人、知人、新人、軍人、要人、求人、隣人、囚人、別人、愛人、恩人、客人、各人、一般人、有名人、傍若無人, are all just off the top of my head not “permanent” states. If I can come up with 20 off the top of my head god only knows how many more there are.

You’re more than welcome to use whatever you’d like, but bad advice is still bad advice.

I must have misread the original post you responded to, because this is what I had heard before:

じん: What a person is.
にん: What a person does

However, now that I’m really analyzing it and thinking of the examples where this “guideline” has served me well, it was really about occupations.

For example:
料理人: cook/chef - person who does cooking.
管理人: manager - person who does management
芸人: performer - person who does performance
役人: government official - person who does duty/service

Everything other aspect of what a person “is” versus “does” (just as with what is “permanent” or “temporary”) is too broad and subjective. Either of those (or something else like that) may very well have been the basis behind when to use じん or にん, but the perception of what is “permanent”, etc. changes over centuries. Or it could be something entirely different, such as when those readings and words entered Japanese from Chinese. Who knows.

Overall, small rules are probably more helpful than broad ones. Like everyone knows that じん is used for nationality. I searched through the first 12 pages of jisho for words ending in 人, and the にん for occupations pattern seems to hold up very well. Obviously this guideline is much narrower than the one the original poster mentioned or that I mentioned at the top of this post, but I think it is useful.

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I’m loving the gin-drinking/jeans-wearing and the ninjas.
What mnemonic do you use for words like 恋人、村人? (こいびと、むらびと)

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Since I have zero ability to make any mnemonic of my own, I just memorize and get used to the sound. After some time I can tell which sounds right.

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Unfortunately, I do not have any mnemonic for those ones. They just seem to stick for me for some reason so I have never bothered. I guess I hear/read them often enough that they just stick easily.

Maybe, びと turns into beat would be one idea. So for the こいびと、one of the lovers beats the other lover, and the police get called. Or lovers keep beating a villain until he believes in the power of love.

And for むらびと, the villagers tend to beat anyone who breaks the rules or disagrees with the village elders. Anyone who disobeys, they beat to death.

But the thing with mnemonics is, there is a variety of different choices, and some will work better for you than others.

Maybe びと could become a beet, and then the lovers are eating beets and the villagers are too.
Or a bee with a toe shows up in each story. You kind of just have to think on your feet and make up creative stories that capture that sound for you for words that are tough to remember.

I personally divide them by which of them like to play NINtendo.

Hope this helps, it’s a Japanese resource with some useful techniques to know when to use which 人:じん vs にん:Japanese Resource

Personally, I think the びと reading sounds really cute, so I always think of those words as cute. Obvious how this would apply to 恋人, but for 村人, I think of the villagers from Animal Crossing, because they’re pretty cutesy.

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I don’t have any particular way for remembering this one, but I always think of the villagers in Minecraft, and they are not cute xD

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