Well said Aikibujin!
I’m  lousy at straight up  memorizing for the most part so I need a hook to start with. Fortunately with sentence practice the Mnemonic goes away and I no longer need it, depend on it or think of it at some point.
A past student of mine who is a nuclear engineer and spends a lot of time in Japan recently came home for a visit. He speaks Japanese to some degree and using simple stuff I was able to understand him mostly but forming a coherent reply did take a lot of brain power to dredge up some of the words and put them together.

I have a long way to go! ^_^;