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Assuming people make their own mnemonics for words, kanji, radicals, and etc., I thought we could share them in a thread. There is a thread about the word 力, but I thought it would be better to have a single thread for all such home-made mnemonics.
I guess I’ll get the show started with a few mnemonics:
おそろしい (Fearful, frightening) – “Oh, Zoro! See!” – If you’re a bad guy, seeing Zoro enter the stage must be pretty frightening.
しんぶん (Newspaper) – She burned the newspaper D:
おもい (heavy, serious) – “Oh my, you’re heavy!” – Imagining lifting a heavy person seems to help.
くらい (Dark, gloomy) – “Could I turn on the lights?” – Seems like a reasonable thing to ask if the room is all dark and gloomy.Hmm, I use radicals and then if a kanji is made up of 3 radicals I just make up some sort of association between the three, based on the positioning of each radical. I always try to keep it brief because the longer the story the more time I have to spend and even after that I usually forget the story.
I hope this doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass. I’ve started taking RTK seriously in the last 2 weeks or so and I’m ~700/2200 kanji in the book, so far my reviews are going really well.
Edit: 堆 <– for this I use "The turkeys are piled too damn high! (on the soil)"
Yah, I do something similar, Yggbert. Since the radicals can often show how the character is read, then memorizing by radicals is often helpful for me. For example, 怒る means “to get angry” and is read おこる. As radicals, it’s got a woman (女 = おんな) and a heart (心 = こころ), so there’s the reading. And women are kinda stereotyped as getting angry easily over matters of the heart, so there’s the meaning. =)
Even if the radicals aren’t directly helpful, then the character itself might form some picture that helps me. 重い (おもい, heavy) for example, looks like a giant dumbbell. 勉 (べん, as in 勉強, study) kinda looks like a guy sitting at a desk studying. 致す (いたす, the humble way to say “to do”) if you turn your head on your side, the left-hand radical looks like ITA in romaji.
They’re all kinda stupid, I know, but if they can help me to remember the characters until I’ve learnt them well enough to not need the mnemonics any more, then they’ve done their jobs.
Exactly! I find that after a few reviews the story or radical association stuff starts to fade and I just don’t need them anymore, when I review I refresh it briefly but it will soon get to a point where I don’t even need to do that. I am liking RTK a lot more now that it has stopped giving me stories all the time, it’s kind of just a list on every page now with 7+ kanji and the radicals listed, so much more enjoyable than sifting through all the stories!
I find there are occasionally some …holes in textfugu’s anki decks. with either a “n/a” or “dunno, lol”. <.<
Can remember one I had to make up….
豕 pig. It's an animal with ground above it, (pigs covered in mud) and it's wearing a wet piece of clothing (like the clothes radical). so you got this sort of Porky Pig lookalike wearing his jacket, covered in mud.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 7 months ago by
huw.
豕 is one of the ones I leant backwards – that is, I learnt that 家 is a pig under a roof (back when I was studying Chinese at school) and I’ve thus remembered that 豕 is the pig radical.
AnonymousKoichi’s mnemonics are really good, but I do sometimes make my own mnemonics to help me remember better. Here are some:
外 – This is the kanji for ‘outside.’ The on’yomi is がい. If you’ve ever seen the anime Naruto, there is a character called Guy-Sensei. He really has that kind of crazy and bright personality, so I thought I would use him along with Koichi’s mnemonic to help me remember. I was outside during the evening (the evening radical is in the kanji), and there were bad guys surrounding me against a wall. Suddenly, Guy-sensei jumps out of nowhere and beats them up! That’s how I remember that kanji.
尻 – This kanji means ‘butt.’ The kun’yomi for it is しり. I remember this by using Koichi’s mnemonic and my own to strengthen it a bit. ‘SHE REally has a good butt.’ ‘No she doesn’t, you SILLY pervert!’
叱る – This kanji means ‘to scold’. It is read as しかる. I remember this because there was one time where a bunch of people scolded me because I didn’t participate in class, and that became a SCAR in my life.
Good luck learning Japanese!I learned a bunch of readings from the kanji of Japanese actors names. Most (from what I’ve seen anyway) Japanese surnames are kunyomi (ie Matsumoto, Tanaka, Inoue, Kimura, Kitagawa, etc). And how can you forget Matsumoto Jun :)
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This reply was modified 12 years, 7 months ago by
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