I have been using WK for around 6 months. I like the experience overall, especially the typing-based input system, but I have to say that some mnemonics/explanations are pretty lazy. I will provide only two examples now, but I have seen many such cases:
Kanji 履 (footwear), meaning mnemonics: A flag loiters in a black hole. This flag marks (in the black hole) where you left your footwear.
Word 内容 (contents), meaning explanation: Inside that form… there is something inside there. What are the contents?
That is just restating the components, without adding any causal link between them and the meaning. And there are even more egregious cases.
This criticism is meant to be entirely constructive though. I would suggest who is in charge of them to don’t be afraid of making mnemonics longer and construct larger scenarios in which it’s easier to get to the meaning. Same goes for readings.
I agree (and those two are examples I’ve personally struggled with). I will give credit that they are working on this still, as the frequent Content Update posts attest to, so hopefully it will continue to improve.
I’ve had this situation happen where they were totally forgettable, so I just wrote my own. This is actually the intended situation because your own are way better than the provided ones and they encourage you to write your own.
I wish I could find the ones I wrote to show off the vast improvement.
I agree that writing your own mnemonics is sometimes more effective, and I do that as well when the provided mnemonics just don’t click. That said, my criticism isn’t about whether it’s possible to replace them, but about expectations. WaniKani is a paid service, and part of what I’m paying for (beyond the SRS itself) is curated explanations and mnemonics. If I only wanted a scheduling algorithm, Anki would already cover that for free.
Keep in mind that I fully recognize the amount of work the staff has put into the platform, and this is meant as constructive feedback. I just think that in some cases the provided mnemonics are nothing more than restatements of the components, and could benefit from being more elaborate, even if longer. Users can always ignore them, but higher quality defaults would still improve the overall experience.
I have not written anything about the quality of mnemonics, rather I am pointing out the lack thereof. Simply spelling out the components of a kanji is not a poor quality mnemonic, is not a mnemonic at all.
Just to make things even clearer: if a kanji is made out of components A and B, and its meaning is C, then I expect WK to give me a reason for deriving C from A and B—a reason that may have to be longer and longer with the respect to how C already logically follows from A and B.
But what I am complaining about is that WK often proposes a mnemonic that is nothing more than saying “A and B… so C!” (obviously for kanji where the derivation is not obvious, like the example I provided in the OP). To me this is no mnemonic at all.
There are WK mnemonics I do not like or simply do not click with me, but I am fine with them, because they cannot possibly cater to anybody, what is important is that the overall mnemonics work for me. But I expect that I do get mnemonics, since this is also what I am paying for.
I think this is okay, it should indeed restate the components but it shouldn’t be required to logically follow from those components. In your footwear example, they give the components which is great and then state thats where your footwear are. Why the shoes are there doesn’t matter, the shoes are there marked by the flag in the black hole. Idk maybe the sun blew up and you left a marker on your VR headset of where your shoes fell in. Because you shot the sun with a gun in the winter and it imploded.
Do you have an example for the class as to how you would make it follow logically from components, loiter, flag, and black hole?
I finally recalled my mnemonic for 製(manufacture)
“you control the MANUFACTURE of clothes”
but the official one is:
In an attempt to control your clothes, you manufacture a mind control device. This mind control device will allow you to control the mind of your clothes and all that they do. You just need to manufacture it.
If the meaning doesn’t immediately follow from the components, the mnemonics lead you there by creating a (more or less complex) story or situation that is easy to memorize, by being detailed enough and providing a way to get there. This also means that sometimes the radicals should be a bit more distinct (WK already doesn’t follow the strict radical meanings, so that wouldn’t be impossible to do).
The mnemonics I came up with for “footwear” is this: “Under a flag there is someone loitering around a black hole. How does he not get sucked inside the black hole? He is hanging at the flagpole with all his strength, but the black hole is pulling him so strong that his footwear gets sucked in first.”
I’ll admit that I sometimes remember shoes instead of footwear, but the picture of the guy hanging on the flagpole shaking to not being sucked in the blackhole never fail to evoke the shoes getting in there.
