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I had a very difficult time remembering the kun’yomi pronunciation for 力, which is the pronunciation used when this kanji is written by itself. I noticed there wasn’t a little story or hint on how to remember this in the Textfugu Kanji section, but I could not pin down the pronunciation from straight memorization so I came up with a little story to go with this Kanji. If this helps any of you to remember it, then feel free to use it too.
Kanji: 力
Meaning: Power
Kun-Yomi: ちからHow to remember it: “CHIKARA tiger with her bare hands!”
Now if you pronounce it right with the Japanese R sound it sound a lot like “She caught a” in english. She caught a tiger with her bare hands! That helps me to remember that chikara means power! I could remember from the radicals that it meant power, but remembering “chikara” was the hard part for me.
The only note I will make is you will have to remember that in this example I came up with “she” is “ち” and not “し”, which is a closer match to the english word “she”. Using this little story I came up with, I got confused a few times and tried to spell it “しから” (which is wrong, don’t do it!), so if you have that issue, this might not be the best way to remember it for you.
Anyway, I hope this helps you guys remember the くんよみ for 力 !
★ ライオン力 is one of those words I’ve heard often enough in anime that I never had any trouble remembering the reading for it, once I learnt to recognise the kanji. It was less “what’s that word?” and more “ohhh, THAT’S how you write it!” 甘い is similar. 天才 too. Et cetera.
I was having a bit of trouble on the same thing. I’ve been getting better just brute-forcing it with Anki, but I think your mnemonic will help cement it into my brain. Thanks for sharing. :D
I would also say try just brute forcing it instead of learning mnemonics for vocab, when I was doing the ultimate vocab last year it felt like I was making no progress because I was just forcing myself to get 30 words per day into my short term memory, then I would finish and do nothing until the next day, I would either retain hardly anything or only some of them. A few days later I pretty much knew them all perfectly.
Even if it feels like it isn’t working, it actually is subconsciously, that’s what I have found personally. I think this works well for me because I seem to have a bad short term memory but a good long term one.
Well one thing I enjoy about the mnemonics and how they help you learn is that they are a good reminder for when you are first learning. It helps you to stick it in your head and make something completely new and foreign seem recognizable. I find that once you learn the kanji and vocab well enough you can drop the mnemonic story from your memory and the basic meaning of the kanji just sticks. For now, that method has been working well for me. :3
★ ライオン力 ー ちから
chi means blood and kara is from so how about
blood comes from power(Tried to post this last night, but it seems the TextFugu servers were having a spazz attack…)
The best place for mnemonics really is when you’re learning a word that has several seemingly unrelated kanji. Other than that, it’s best just to use either previous knowledge of readings or rote learning. The way I learned chikara was by the fact that it was probably the first word I learned that had 3 morae/syllables :D Made it stick out.
For the first while, actually actively learning readings can be useful, but once you’ve learned enough words, you get much better at both rote learning and “picking up” readings. That’s why I started out with TextFugu’s method but then gave up at around the 4-stroke mark. Now I just learn words as words. Once you learn enough words containing the same reading for a kanji, you just kinda “know” it, like for example: you learn 自信、自動的、自転車 and 自分 and without making a conscious effort to memorise readings, you now know that 自 can be pronounced じ (also し); so then when you see 自己, you can tell it’s probably going to be pronounced ” じ-something “.
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