After reading haiku mnemonic for 配 (BTW for 配る I go with Cuba: communism, distribution, duh) , so for words/kanji that I don’t remember I’ve started doing very grammatically-offensive poems
My latest hit is for 泉
Out of ((WHITE)) ((WATERS)),
/fountains/ do /spring/ from the ground
[SEN]taurs for [SEN]turies are [SEN]tered in them
線 And lines also drawn from threads nearby
Trick is to use the same mnemonic for reading/meaning and use as few words as possible not related to meaning or reading. E.g. I don’t want to remember by mistake that 泉 means “ground”. I’ve started just with just three liners, but now for fun decided to add other Kanji if they use the same components in the same order and have the same reading (like mentioned 線 or 腺 if it was on WK)
I’m going to preface this with a little explanation; I play a little fast and loose with the radicals if they’re also kanji, so I will frequently pull in related vocab meanings if they work better.
Anyway, I was having the hardest time getting the default mnemonic for 鏡 (mirror) to stick, so I decided to play off of the classic “mirror mirror on the wall”… and ended up with “Mirror mirror on the stand; ‘show me the money,’ I demand.”
I have two ways I remember the pronunciation for 白 (on’yomi and kun’yomi)
haku is the name of the white dragon in Spirited Away.
Shiro is the beginning part of Shiranui the white wolf which is from Okami
It’s actually funny both are more of associations with Japanese words I already had heard before
While I technically haven’t gotten to this kanji yet, I remember one of the readings for 茶 (cha) because its similar to chai (I drink a lot of tea so I have known this kanji for awhile including the reading and the history behind said reading versus “tea”)
I think it really depends a lot on the individual person. I have read a bunch of posts here about people saying “I use WK mnemonics because I have no time to come up with my own”, but for me, in at least 50% of cases (at least up until level 5 - maybe this will change with more complicated Kanji and vocab), it’s very easy for me to come up with some association (sometimes a song, sometimes a word in some other language than English, sometimes a historical reference, …) that works better than the WK one. I guess this doesn’t come as easily to some other people, though.
i use the WK mnemonics for almost everything and i’m glad now because they build on each other, which means i now have a whole ecosystem and that’s working well for me. this is also because i’m one of those unfortunate people who remember the stinkin mnemonics forever rather than quickly switching to memorising the reading and meaning by themselves. not much i can do about that.
however i indeed associate bits of song lyrics and a bunch of french words with some specific ones like anything starting with se or containing shitsu.
