The mnemonic of 司 talks about a director of a movie: “Picture the creepiest director you know. Wearing a cloak and cackling as he directs your favorite actors.”
But apparently 司 doesn’t refer to a director of a movie, but to a bureaucratic director. In English these two words happen to coincide, but in other languages these concepts are denoted by separate words. So while to an English speaker they may occupy the same compartment in the brain, speakers of other languages would have to actively think in English in order to even find these concepts related.
What do you think about this mnemonic? Does it bother you or do you find it legitimate?
Now that you’ve mentioned it…
The more I learn Japanese the more I lament the lack of material in my mother tongue. Just think about how the entire conjugation conundrum of intransitive and transitive verbs is a no brainer when you already speak a language that conjugates and genders everything under the sun and doesn’t use pronouns in every sentence.
Sadly when I use english I’m in english mode which is completely separated from my mother tongue so it took me a second or two to think about that distinction.
I sometimes deliberately use the other meaning of an english word in order to remember a kanji if it fits in a mnemonic I make for myself, and I treat wanikani mnemonics the same way. Mnemonics are a memorization aid that doesn’t need to make sense, it’s just a marker (now this idea, you will need to translate in order to fully get what I mean), I mark the idea, it’s an approximation in order to remember the sound of the word, even when it is the meaning. The meaning itself is about context and reading how and when to use it, something wanikani sometimes mentions and sometimes doesn’t.
I’ve never tried it, but if the synonyms function accepts our language and it translates an item more accurately, it seems like a better way to learn. But again I have no idea if it does accept other languages.
Good point! I agree that after all, the true meaning only appears in context, so the mnemonic doesn’t have to be precise.
In the user synonyms you can type any characters you want, but I never add synonyms in other languages because then I’d either have to do it for all items, or I would have to remember which ones I did it for (and in what language).
It’s interesting to think about which aspects of Japanese grammar could be easier to learn coming from Indo-European or Semitic languages other than English. The first thing that comes to my mind is sentences without verbs.
この絵は象の絵です。
A speaker of English, French or German will look for the verb in vain, but a speaker of Russian, Hebrew or Arabic is used to the fact that there’s an exposition of what we already know - 絵は, and the rest of the sentence provides new information. Russian doesn’t even need an article or a は, both are implicit.
It’s also a good point about pronouns in every sentence, but in this regard I find Japanese an extreme oulier compared to most Western languages, because even the conjugation doesn’t give a hint as to what the pronoun should be.
お願いします
Who is making the request? In English you would need a pronoun - “I request”, but even languages that don’t require pronouns aren’t as extreme as Japanese: “pido” in Spanish or “прошу” in Russian or “אבקש” in Hebrew (this particular example doesn’t work in the present tense) don’t need a pronoun, but do imply 1st person singular, while in Japanese you have to guess everything from the context.
I do believe that the guessing game has to do with the difference between using a very ego centric language than a language that is very Hierarchy centric. There are verbs and nouns that will immediately give the full picture of who does what and where, it’s just that when you are not part of that society which put you in context from the get go it feels like you will always miss some initial information. It reminds me the of the chapter in the never ending story book were the hero encounter a society of rafters that share on consciousness, there are no individuals there but everybody know their part.
Note it is not 願います but an お+連用形+する form. That is an humble form of the verb, so you know that the subject is the speaker or his inner circle, as if there was an ‘I’ or ‘we’ in English.
Interesting, somehow it’s been easier for me to pick a particular language other than English in a few cases where the pronunciation mnemonic seemed like the perfect match. For example, 命 immediately conjured up an Italian squirrel, looking frantically for the hazelnuts (“i nocci”) that it stashed away, as if its life depended on it…. well, yeah, whatever works
… also the kanji itself looks like a hazelnut cut through the middle… if I squint hard enough
I do that too in the mnemonics when the pronunciation is literally a word in my mother tongue, and it happened several times with the long strings of of kana in some verbs that usually get a mnemonic with several words you should abbreviate to get the reading. But I’ve never used the actual translation in the synonyms because I find deliberately having to switch to a different language really cumbersome and not intuitive.
This will also give you more clarity with how the choice of verb indicates the hierarchy/relation of the speaker/subjects of the sentence. So it’s not just the use of a certain form (masu vs Te form, the whole polite, humble etc.) but also the choice words.
It could be the noun you choose, like お母さん/母さん/母/母親, but it can also be the verb like how you use to give and to receive.
Fortunately the synonyms function does accept other languages. I use it when the English term is hard for me to memorize; or when a term has several meanings. (e.g. “spring” can mean the season between winter and summer, an elastic metal coil, or a place where water wells up from an underground source)
My language has characters with diacritics and WaniKani seems to support that as well.
