Share your funny personal mnemonics!

弱 : means weak. there is a wooden door floating in icy water and here our weak hero Jack ( じゃく )
famous scene from a famous movie :slight_smile:

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Totally stealing that one! It’s great!

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夕べ - evening/last night (ゆうべ). My mnemonic: last night Kyuubei (from PMMM) did something so cosmically messed up that he lost two letters off his name. :smiling_imp:

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Here’s my latest mnemonic:

Police box: uses the kanji for MIX and NUMBER.

Now, the only police box I know of is a little blue box known as the TARDIS from Doctor Who. And of course we refer to the different Doctors by their NUMBER (Eleventh Doctor, etc). So that’s a pretty strong link for me personally being a huge Whovian. Mix is a bit more of a stretch but any Whovian knows not to MIX up the NUMBER order of the Doctors.

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I use the same thing, except that time is supposed to be a bunch of numbers in a series and the TARDIS can mix them up. If I want to mix up some numbers in a series, I can use a police box.

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excuSE ME we all know time is actually a ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey… stuff.

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I use a Fate Stay/Night reference to remember the kanji for rejoice (喜). I remember that the onyomi is き because of Kirei’s famous line, “喜べ, 少年!” (“Yorokobe, shounen!/Rejoice, boy!”)

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i have one for 化
its CHANGE ordinary stuff with KAmasutra
:slight_smile:

I’m only level 2, but one that I’ve come up with:
中 radicle looks like the radicles Mouth and Stick. So obviously when you stick something in your mouth, you Chew (ちゅう) it

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ーーーびとーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー ひと
The 人 is just the rendakuten-d version of 人。
(I don’t know how to do furigana so i’m using the small tag.)

My favorite from the last few weeks:

I will never forget the reading of 虫 (insect, むし) because of the absolute pest that Mushi Sanban was on Codename: Kids Next Door.

image

(Sidenote: is Mushi an actual Japanese name or were the writers just trying to insert easter eggs?)

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I just remembered my old meaning mnemonic for 朝: when the sun crosses the moon, that’s when it’s morning. When the moon crosses the sun again, it’s night.

And for 験: I have to test this thing to see if it’s a horse or a squid. If I don’t test it, I can’t know which one it is. Horses and squids are exactly the same until you test them.

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服 is one of the Level 9 kanji I’m close to mastering because of this mnemonic I came up with:

When I think of the word itself, “fuku”, the first thing I immediately think of Sailor Moon’s fuku that she transforms into. Conveniently enough there’s the moon radical right in this kanji, as well as a small stool and the Stamp radical in this case is more like a hook to hang clothes onto.

So I just imagine Usagi being unable to henshin for whatever reason, and has to put on her clothes the old fashioned way. She’s in a changing room, of course, so at least she can change her clothes in private.

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Doesn’t seem to be part of the WaniKani vocab, but
大使館
What does the ambassador eat when he has to spend the evening at the embassy? Thai Chicken (たいしかん)

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I used a bit of Welcome to Night Vale to help me remember the WK mnemonic for じょう.

Jourm Peters. You know, the farmer?

And for 川 I considered that one of those long straight river banks would be a good place to ride your Kawasaki.

somehow, journalist is working for me for jou sound. joker for jo…

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I don’t usually keep track of them when I do come up with a personal mnemonic, but one I’ve been using for a long time now is for 年:

Luke wanted to go to とし station, but uncle Owen wanted him to stay for another year.

Ngl I am kinda proud of that one :wink:

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I just got to level 22 and one of the radicals is 充 (formed by the symbol for trash and the one for legs) meaning allocate, to remember this I think of how nice it is to have a garbage collector so that you do not have to think about memory allocation.

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酔う are already drunk.

I often confused different versions of “great” thingies, finally came up with this

大した is “big deal” because した is suru in the past. Suru means “to do”. When you do something, you deal with something. Hence taishita is “big deal”

OTOH 大きく means “In a big way”. Key word is a “way”. When you walk some road on your way, you accidentally KICK things around.

Also being multilingual helps
不正 (injustice) sound reminds “ой, ну всё”. That’s stereotypical response of girls when they can’t be bothered to argue and wouldn’t admit being wrong, which does sounds like injustice in one way or another.

Also I’m still struggling with coming up with mnemonics for pairs like よう/よ. WK offers same for both of them and where it doesn’t, it’s not helpful(Kyoto vs short Kyoto)

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