LLearn Japanese

Using mnemonics to memorise Japanese words

Has anyone else found using mnemonics really helpful for memorising Japanese words? Compared to learning Spanish, Japanese is much harder to tie to words in English. I haven’t started learning Kanji yet but when I do I’ll probably need to use a lot of mnemonics for that too.

9 comments

  2. Only with words i struggle with. And even then it’s super simple stories that give me just enough to understand the word.

  3. That sorta thing has helped me.

    Like if you’ve ever played Mario the shy ghost enemy is called Boo in Japanese is Teresa and that’s a play on the Japanese 照れる (てれる) which means shy in Japanese.

  4. One I always remembered is “you may have heard of me” for ゆうめい (famous).

  6. I’m using Wanikani (and I strongly recommend it, especially since you haven’t started learning Kanji yet), and I agree that mnemonics can be a really useful tool.

    Some people often point out that you can’t learn mnemonics for the 2k+ kanji you’ll have to learn. And that’s true. However, they’re meant to be training wheels, not to be the main way of learning.

    First of all, sometimes the meaning/reading just clicks, because you’ve heard it before, or it somehow seems logical to you, and you just learn it effortlessly.

    But most of the time, it isn’t as easy. And that’s where mnemonics shine. It helps associating the Kanji with its meaning/reading, so the first few times you’ll encounter it, you’ll recall the mnemonic and deduce the info you need from it. And then, as you encounter it more, this process gets faster and faster until you bypass the mnemonic entirely.

    Also I found that this works best for me with single words rather that short stories. For example, I used to have trouble remembering the on-reading of 同. Wanikani has a long story about it looking like a doughnut, but I just remember the word “doughnut” itself, because it kind of looks like one, and it helps me remembering that its on-reading is どう.

  7. A commonly used method is to just substitute the new Japanese words into the English internal dialogue that you have running in your head all the time anyway. It’s silly as hell, but it does have the advantage of helping your brain treat it as just another synonym instead of a foreign word and makes both recognition and recall quicker and easier. After a while, as you get more and more experience, you’ll find you no longer need to do it.

  8. I think everyone has at least a few mnemonics under their belt, but keep in mind that part of what makes a mnemonic work is being *memorable*. If you try to use “a lot,” you’re almost certainly going to actually shoot yourself in the foot as they become generic and start blending into each other.

    As a rule, it’s best to try to learn words, kanji, grammar, etc. through usage — the magic rhombus of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing — and only bother with mnemonics either when an especially memorable one appears in your brain of its own accord (if it sticks around, you might as well use it, right?) or when you comprehend a thing but just can’t seem to get it to stick in your working memory.

    TL;DR: A mnemonic is a crutch. That’s not a bad thing unless you try to weigh yourself down with so many unneeded crutches that they get in the way of actually being able to walk.

  9. I use mnemonics all the time, for both kanji and vocabulary, and I find it super useful. As soon as you have “internalized” a kanji/vocab you don’t need the mnemonic anymore, and you will just drop it automatically. That’s my experience, at least. I’ve never had to actively think “I know this word now, so I will stop using the mnemonic”. It just happens without you having to make an active decision.

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