Everytime I see someone making a 300 words comment about how they remember a kanji by breaking apart every single little stroke I can’t believe they’re serious… Aren’t you just making stuff harder by trying to memorize an essay everytime you see a kanji?? How is that going to help at all?
You can’t remember this kanji 踊 bro? Pfft, come on, just think about how in hogwarts, as you know there are some SECRET PASSAGES that you can access by saying the passphrase. But there are also some secret passages that only open if you know the secret dance. They created those because dumbledore thought that the student’s lifes were becoming sedentary as they don’t like walking or taking the stairs and just prefer taking the secret passages. So in order to prevent that the laziness continues to increase, some passages require you to move your FEET a little and do a dance.
No problem bro.
Real talk. You can’t do this with thousands of kanji. It’s such a useless strain. Recalling the meaning of a kanji doesn’t even qualify as “knowing” it… all of that for what.
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That’s some crazy mnemonic device, so many damn leaps.
The best ones are usually created by yourself through your own experiences and instantly retrievable.
I find that mnemonics are harder to remember than the Kanji itself.
Breaking down every single stroke order does sound pretty unproductive
Creating long stories might be not so good, but deconstructing on components isn’t so awful as you think. It’s mostly about writing, because when you write, you need to write each stroke. Easier to learn as 2-3 components than 10-20 strokes. And if you are going to live in Japan, writing is still essential in some situations.
Another point is that if you know components, you already partially know all kanji that use it and it’s easier to memorize. The way people learn kanji via reading is that we memorize some general shape in context, so when we see similar situation we can recognize it. Usually we don’t even know small details, only several key moments that help us to distinguish. But on practice we still learn thousands of kanji and several key moments, so it’s not so much different from learning with components.
So I can’t say that it’s useless, rather it’s about preference which way people want to learn and both methods work.
I see you actually made a more creative post! lol nice
another day another strawman
> Aren’t you just making stuff harder by trying to memorize an essay everytime you see a kanji?? How is that going to help at all?
As someone who did RTK. Yes. At first you’re recalling a whole novel to remember each Kanji. But eventually, you don’t have to use that mnemonic to remember that kanji anymore.
And then slowly you reach the point where you don’t need a mnemonic for any kanji.
> Don’t waste time with RTK, just immerse! Reading will get kanji in your head better
It absolutely did not for me. I tried. I tried for a long time and even though I would be like “I’ve seen this kanji a dozen times” it never clicked for me.
Those long winded mnemonics helped me wrap my head around kanji, and eventually those training wheels came off.
> Recalling the meaning of a kanji doesn’t even qualify as “knowing” it… all of that for what.
It’s an early stage for a lot of Kanji readers, that they will grow out of.
It’s cool that you didn’t ever need it, but do try to understand that these methods exist because other people just can’t brute force it like you did.
🙂 A lot of popular methods DIDN’T work for me, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t work for others. Peoples’ brains aren’t a monolith, that’s why so many methods for each aspect of language learning, let alone Japanese, exist in the first place.
I learned the meanings of 1000 kanji within 10 days with less than 20 hours of work using RTK. How long did it take you to learn the meanings of 1000 kanji?