Thesauruses?
EDIT: Or for individual kanji differences, a kanji dictionary.
1 Like
Sorry, not sure if this is where I should post it; here is an example sentence for 「外れ」
かれはまち外れの小さないえにすんでいます。
He lives in the outskirts of town.
I’m sorry, but shouldn’t it be “He lives in a small house in the outskirts of town.”?
I’ve been reading some graded readers, and I came across this:
アメリカの人たちのお金で、みんなと一緒につくりました。(平和住宅がいいです)
To give some context, he’s talking about a house he built after hiroshima kaboom, and just before that, the mayor of hiroshima said that the house’s name was going to be シュモ住宅,
Literally it would be: by using the money of the americans, everyone built it together (peace house is good, as in it’s a good name)
I’d translate it to something like: Everyone built it together with the money of the americans
Is this correct ?
I’ve been using google translate to check, (don’t worry I use Jisho for words) yeah I should probably ask here, but I’m not going to throw 50 phrases here and scream 分からない everytime lol. It does it’s job fine, but on that one i got “I made money with the people of the Americans with everyone.” I guess it’s because the direct object isn’t told ?
plot twist: Google translate is right
1 Like
Possibly one of the worst translations I’ve ever seen. Hats off, google translate.
Your translation was fine.
You can’t use つくる for making money anyway. (that’s かせぐ)
6 Likes
If this is a WK example sentence, you should email them at hello@wanikani.com
They probably won’t see it in this thread, and if you’re wrong they’ll explain why (but I think you’re right).
(though “on the outskirts of town” sounds more natural to me than “in”)
Can someone help me come up with a mnemonic for 掛け算? I can never remember which math operation it is. The others are move obvious, but I can never remember this one.
Every time I check the dictionary for 掛ける, the number of definitions seems to have multiplied? 
Haha, not sure if that will help though. Of course every time I get the review wrong I see again that 掛ける means “to multiply”… Not that I can remember that either.
Not sure if you’ll find it useful, but this is kind of a more visual clue. In the region I’m from, natives used to count stuff with these hanging threads that had knots in them, called quipus. They look like this:
They counted with them by multiplying; each knot represented a different power of 10 depending on position and size.
1 Like
Essentially, multiplication of mxn means “add m to itself, n times”, and just look at how many plus signs there are in 掛?
2 Likes
Then can’t you just use the process of elimination? 
You can tell it’s a math operation and you know it isn’t 割り算 or 足し算 or 引き算…
Or you could look at the 掛 part and see that the grave has multiplied by two.
1 Like
Ah, I knew somebody was going to ask this. The others are obvious to my passive memory. The only one I remembered for writing up that post was 引き算. I had to look up “addition” and “division” in jisho to remind myself of the other two. But I know 足す and 割る, so I know I’d recognize 足し算 and 割り算 if I saw them.
So what do you put when you encounter it? Do you keep mistaking it for another operation?
Yeah, I inevitably put subtraction or division. 
(this time division since I finally have 引き算 in my active memory)
Do you forget the reading, as well, or just the meaning?
Nah, I got all the readings down.
In that case, you might be able to come up with a slightly NSFW mnemonic…
1 Like
Ah okay.
Sometimes the way I use my mnemonics are pretty vague or rely on getting myself to feel a certain way.
If it were me I’d focus on the graves of 掛 part. I’d tell myself to realize that there’s two of them. The higher quantity is important. Then it puts me in the mindset that it’d either addition or multiplication and go from there. 足す sounds like plus so 足し算 already cemented in my head so then it must be multiplication.
2 Likes
Since multiplication is all about increasing quickly…
1 Like