Your Most Convoluted Yet Effective Personal Mneumonic?

WaniKani
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I find myself using the actually WaniKani mnemonics only about 25% of the time and coming up with my own the other 75%. Usually these are deeply personal ones that would only work for me really (for example, I don’t remember the movie Akira that well, so for a kanji liked ‘諦’ I would picture a person I knew from my life named Akira instead).

Some of my mneumonics are super convoluted and I have to play like a 5-second action sequence or story in my head to arrive at the meaning or reading. These would really not be effective for anyone else, but I guess due to the oddness and personalization of them, they often end up being extremely effective for me. Yet they would be absolutely useless for everyone else.

So this got me thinking: what is your super weird/convoluted mneumonic that is suprisingly effective for you?

I’ll start with mine:

• 袖 (そで, level 22)
• My favorite TV show of all time is the British Sitcom ‘Peep Show’. There is an episode where the main character, Mark, is on the phone telling a carpenter that his wall is ‘sodden’ (wet). So for this kanji, I picture a ghost with really long droopy sleeves passing through his wall, and the chilliness of the spectre leaves is what is leaving his wall sodden (そで).

So yeah that’s it. 100% correct so far. Weird as heck but it works for me.

How about you?

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I used to mix up 上がる and 上げる all the time. And I could not remember which of them is transitive and which is intransitive.

In the end it helped creating a mnemonics using my native language ( German )

上げる = げ => Gegenstand (starting with げ ) → Which means Item → Therefore I could remember that this is " To lift something "

And 上がる => が => Garnichts (starting with が ) → which means nothing → Therefore I could remember to go up ( intransitive because there is nothing )

I hope this was understable.

Best part for me that this pattern with げ for Item and が for nothing is mostly true for identifying transitive and intransitive use. :smiley:

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You’re not alone. I do this a lot, too. Although, for some kanji/vocab, I try to use as little mnemonics as possible because I do not have enough brain space atp. orz

However, I do link some kanji/vocabs together, especially the ones with the same readings. Here are some examples:

  1. Mrs. Chou

Mrs. Chou starts as the onyomi reading for the Kanji for street, 丁(ちょう). She’s described to be a big woman with curly hair, and exuding nastiness - added for dramatic effect in my head. Later on, I found out Mrs. Chou is actually a mayor of a town (kunyomi) 町(まち) and because of my hatred for her, I decided to burn that town to the ground with a match (まち) stick. She also roams around the the backstreets (kunyomi) 下町(したまち) of the town. On a moonless night, Mrs. Chou transforms into a bird (onyomi) 鳥(ちよう) for some odd reasons. Mrs. Chou also has a daughter, who is quite mean to other people town. This person is called Mean Amy because of her attitude and she lives south (kunyomi) 南(みなみ) of the town.
The daughter portion is something I made up because I need to link the “mean Amy” to a mother who is nasty - Mrs. Chou."

  1. Shih Tzu

Your husband (radical) 夫 has some faults, too, y’know? His fault (onyomi) 失(しつ) is getting that childish slide for your small garden. His other fault is adopting a Shih Tzu which loves to go to your room (onyomi) 室(しつ) and pee on your things.

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Perhaps slightly off-topic… Since my mother tongue is german, not all of the reading mnemonics suggested by wanikani are helpful, so I have to come up with my own. One method is to exploit coincidences in the readings. That is, if two different kanji have the same or very similar readings, I build a “bridge” between the meanings in some way. For instance, when I learned 明, I already new its meaning from my japanese course (it was explained when we learned the word 明日), and I had learned that 名 also occurred in 有名. Now, if you are an exceptionally “bright” person, you probably “have a name”, which made it easy for me to remember that the on-readings of 明 are the same as the ones for 名.

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It’s funny that you mentioned 諦. I’m using my own mnemonic for this one too. And it’s Akela from The Jungle Book ))) I remember a jackal chattering “Akela’s missed his kill, Akela’s missed his kill”. I imagine Akela missing his kill and giving up )))))