Share weird/ridiculous mnemonics

i lmao’d for like 5 minutes

this wasn’t intentional…was it?

Waiting for the “Tofu” word.


Well, at least it was funny for me.

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Most of mine are too embarrassing/incomprehensible for me to share. Here’s a simple one.

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Lol the Hang kanjis mnemonic is the best 掛

Taking a nailbat, you decide to create one grave and another grave, take two people by the toe, and hang them upside-down to beat them to death. Once the two people are dead, you can put them in the new graves you just made.

HINTS

Imagine hanging two people up by their toes and beating them with a nailbat. Hear their screams and pleas for mercy as you beat them over and over again.

After, you hang them up by their toes and then run into them with your car (か). No mercy.

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immaturity is the main source of the humour

its basically a straight reading from the kanji but the paragraph just caught me off guard for a second

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multi-track drifting?

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One that got me in a bit of trouble was 池 (いけ)which happens to use the letters found in the English name Ike. My friend and I often play Fire Emblem together and I caused quite a controversy by jokingly referring to Ike as いけ, and insisting that it is the grammatically correct reading of his name given the letters used. It’s also funny to image a serious warrior running around under the name of “Pond”. (Which is what 池 means).

I tried to memorize the mnemonic for 卒 (graduation) which involves a person with a lid carring a cross or something. But it’s easier to remember an emoji of someone happy ヽ(^ー^)/ plus a graduation cap.

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This one is mega weird and probably wouldn’t work with anybody except me… but I guess that’s what this thread is for huh?

生地 - kiji - material, dough, fabric (amongst other readings)

Because the readings are so weird for both kanji in this word, I decided to make a mnemonic for the entire word.

I imagine Sergei Prokofiev (who composed Lieutenant Kije) dressed in drag, wearing clothes made out of pricy fabric, holding an expensive purse, in general just being ‘materialistic.’ He is living inside the earth, right at the core. Perhaps preparing some dough to cook at the high heat and pressure down there.

I knew I wouldn’t remember this word at all unless I made a very elaborate mnemonic for it, and so far I don’t think i have missed on a review of it!

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And, I can’t help but add something that may actually help somebody out there, unlike my previous post.

Forgive me if this seems extremely obvious to everyone, but I also have a mnemonic for the concept of rendaku. That is, when a reading of a word uses rendaku, I include the concept of “handmade” in my mnemonic for that word. For example, for the word 青葉 - aoba - fresh leaves/greenery, I imagine a guy making some tiny greenish-blueish leaves by hand. I use the word “handmade” because this word itself uses rendaku, but also because it is pretty easy to take this mnemonic and just apply it to any word (probably harder to apply it with abstract concepts but for now I haven’t had a problem.)

And, when the word does not use rendaku, i simply don’t use this mnemonic and so I can assume the word is without rendaku if my brain does not conjure up an image of somebody making something by hand.

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I have one mnemonic I’m proud of that I’ve even shared with some of my English classes in Japan.

The kanji, 助(じょ). I had no idea how to remember this one, but it was one instance (of many) where I was grateful for WK’s radicals. A top hat and power plus a reading of Jo? I had to go with a JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure reference.

(A man in a top hat) gave the (power) to (help) people to ジョ-ジョ. Thanks Mr. Zeppeli!

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I used Kanji Damage’s mnemonic for this one. made it vary easy for vocab too. (though that mnemonic is very inappropriate.)

for 助, I have an image of Estelle from the Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky games. Estelle, using a jo staff, helping people with her strength (and I guess wearing a top hat, and very not happy about it).

Admittedly, now that I look it up, I realize I’ve always been pronouncing Jo staff wrong, but nevertheless it’s a very solid image in my mind. >_>

Another one born of my mispronunciations, Charlie Sheen just wasn’t working for me. I still don’t know who the guy is. So I use a more modern meme-friendly Shia Lebuff. I mentally mispronounce his name, so it works perfectly for me. And the wanikani Sheen mnemonics all pretty much still work 100%.

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Anytime a reading uses ほ, the various garden hoe mnemonics never work for me. I have to use ho instead. 他? I’ve got my regular car, but my other car is my ho car. I use it to pick up all my hoes. On’yomi for 歩? Sometimes you just gotta strut it out and do your ho walk.

I’m an incredibly nerdy woman who never uses the word ho irl but it’s the only thing that works for me on ほ readings :sweat_smile:

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What is going on!!!

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tremendous

While there’s a number of bright and well-working mnemonics (“someone butchered the clown” … “Of course, feel terrified by this. Clown blood everywhere. Kind of funny, but not. Stop that.” :joy: for on’yomi of 部 (part), for instance), there’s still a lot of other that are outright weak. Take, for instance, this: “This small lion’s name is Ken (けん). He’s really excited to rule his prefecture. His name is Ken.” (県 – prefecture). Who’s Ken? There’s nothing in this mnemonics that’s bright enough to be well remembered or to connect with something already remembered.

I don’t blame WK, it’s impossible for one team to make equally good stories about every kanji or word, but we have the WK community. I’m sure that hundreds of people already created better mnemonics, so maybe we can feature-request community mnemonics right in the kanji/vocab cards?

I read in the posts of people who reached lvl60 that very often they had to come up with their own little stories because the default ones didn’t work for them. They say names of celebrities work well. I can confirm that. For instance, in 県 I see a person sitting on the throne. I think this is the Grand Master Obi 1 Kenobi, the prefect of a time-space prefecture. I mean, this is decent enough to share with the community. But no one will find it in this thread :frowning_face:

I wish there was a button “Share your mnemonics with the community” or smth like that.

For 米 (bei) that could be rice or America I always remember that BEYoncé is American and eats rice …:sweat_smile: it’s so stupid but works!

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