Hi everyone, I have a genuine question for those who like me are learning (or have learned) kanji via mnemonics: do you ever move on from the mnemonics you associate with a kanji? I mean, when you find a kanji you learned via mnemonics, do you still recall the whole “stories” you made up to learn it, or at a certain point you just assimilated the meaning of the kanji itself?
Follow-up question: which direction should you follow? Should you opt for moving on from the mnemonic stories as soon as possible or should you keep them alive forever?
I think it comes naturally at some point.
I mostly not use mnemonics, but sometimes when I’m not sure which of the two confusing kanji I’m dealing with, recalling the mnemonics helps.
So, my advice would be to just study the way you feel most comfortable with and not worry about whether you should go away from mnemonics or not. Let it happen naturally
I second Trunklayerさん, I also don’t use mnemonics at all unless I get a Kanji wrong many times. It means I can’t stick it with the radicals alone etc, so I look at the mnemonics which are often quite weird, hence making it a weirdly good reason for my brain to remember it better next time!
Also finding your own is nice at the begin, and then it becomes automatic for me, like writing the latin alphabet for the common kanjis! It should be the same for you with time
I think in time you forget the mnemonics and remember the kanji readings with how they sound in the words or phrases you learned and you read them automatically. At least that’s how it’s like for me. And even while learning I can’t read the mnemonics that carefully anymore. I just skim through them. (Because I’ve started over from scratch)
When learning I always read all the mnemonics and when I get items wrong in my reviews I will read the mnemonic again.
I do find them very useful, but after a while you kinda just know the kanji and reading and I don’t bother to relearn the mnemonics then.
It’s different for all kanji, for some the mnemonics sticks beyond burned, others the mnemonic shortens into a couple words or it disappears completely.
Just like others in the thread, I find that I am not relying on mnemonics much at all any more, even for new kanji.
If there’s a kanji/vocab I’m having particular trouble with, then I sometimes use the mnemonics to help, but otherwise, I generally will try to remember the kanji by connecting it to either words I already know / have seen, or to other kanji I’ve seen.
Overtime, I feel like I just kind of remember the kanji without actually remembering the mnemonics.
Also I was curious and did a search and found a similar question/thread with a lot of responses:
Agreed with everyone else here. As you start reading, when you encounter words on and on, the path between kanji → mnemonic → meaning/reading recall then putting it together into words gets easier and faster until you automatically will be seeing it and saying the word in a single step. There’s no need to force it, if you keep learning your brain will discard the no longer necessary extra work.
