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Does anyone have any interesting image associations they use to remember certain Kanji? For example I remember milk (牛乳) as looking kind of like a farmer milking a cow.


Does anyone have any interesting image associations they use to remember certain Kanji? For example I remember milk (牛乳) as looking kind of like a farmer milking a cow.

25 comments

  1. Interesting, do you find this method truly enhances kanji memory? (genuine question)

    I don’t have a source myself but I’m certain what you’re looking for is out there, good luck!

  3. Actually if you know Chinese,

    子 from 乳means kid/child.

    It is a kid sucking the udders.

    To understand how kanji is derived it’s easier to look them up in Chinese.

  5. i remember 姫 as princess by imagining a woman trapped in a tower (the brick wall looking part)

  6. 牛 already look like a cow’s head. 乳 has 子 child in it and looks like mother breast feeding a child. This way, you get to learn two kanjis, possibly three with 子, instead of remembering one image specifically for milk.

  7. Most Chinese characters have a sensible picto-graphic etymology but they are limited to individual characters not compound words like this and the largest number of Kanji characters are semasio-phonetic meaning “one part meaning one part reading”.

    銅 for example the word for Copper. 金 means [something metallic] and 同 just means it is read like [dou] and has no bearing in the meaning of the character.

    This is what is important when learning Kanji, thank to this you can read 膀胱 if you can read 方 [hou, bou], 光 [kou] . You can’t just expect to remember vocabulary of thousands of words in any other way in my opinion.

    I sometimes see books made that ignore this fact completely and don’t even teach reading, to me that is unbelievable. This approach can only resolve in reading something like this 美川 as “beautiful river” while it actually is someones name.

  9. 石鹸　the second kanji first half looks like a soap despensor.

    君　spells corona when you split it into the コロナ

  12. Not much anymore but when I was first learning I remembered how to write 楽 as a Christmas tree, 木 on the bottom with 白 as a white light on top with rays coming out.

  13. I do that a lot too, but mostly like a mnemonic like wanikani, but my own.
    Obviously 火　looks like fire and 水 looks like a drop in the water splattering up.
    But I also do it in a bit with bigger/harder vocab.
    For example 結婚 for me is：“under trees the pope speaks that this woman will take your name.“
    It’s a bit of a stretch, but there is the word 紙 in there and you have to write your name on a piece of paper, so I don’t know it makes sense to me so this is how I memorize it.

  14. I have many, but off the top of my head Nekko for cat looks like a cat sitting and a tail behind it

  15. RTK has helped me quite a bit at the beginning of my studies. However, the more kanji you learn, it’s easier to retain. I think it’s easier to associate the separate meanings of kanjis when together. Like a little story, not imagery.

  16. Not sure if this applies but I use little ideas rather than images if that makes sense. Starting out I remembered 好 as a woman liking her child for instance. A weirder one I have is 聞 which reminds me of an amplifier lol.

  17. OK, fun story here.

    A year or two back, I had to do a high school English unit based around methods of memorization, because of course someone thought that this topic could hold the attention of thirty-some Japanese students… Had one entire article page dedicated to the method of loci, and similar stuff.

    So at some point, I made up an example of how I might memorize a kanji. It was mostly as a joke to try and get at least a few of them paying attention at the start, and for that I chose a kanji attached to a vocabulary word from a previous unit: 藍 (indigo).

    I drew 藍 on the board and proceeded to joke about how it was really an oni face, because it had horns (the grass radical on top), eyes (one open and the other squinty), and a mouth full of teeth (the plate segment at the bottom. I used different colored chalk to sketch in the outline as I went along.

    I swear that I do not remember noticing this kanji prior to that previous unit (though I’ve since noticed it in many students’ given names), and that I’d never attempted to write it out before that particular lesson. The thing is now stuck in my head forever because, hey, it turns out that free-association sketchwork is a decent way for me to memorize kanji…

    At least it fit the theme of the current lesson, though.

  18. Here’s a suggestion. Instead of remembering kanji with existing shapes in your mind, why not just remember them as the shape they are? One explanation I have for this as try to remember the way how you remember the faces of the new people you meet. How many shapes did you try to come up with just to ensure that you remember those faces? Maybe not that much? You just remember the faces AS THEY ARE, instead of trying to build mnemonics to remember how those faces look like. Treat kanji as REAL FACES. And the only way to remember those faces is to keep working with them, and keep seeing them often, because even we can forget faces.

    You can even try to remember each and every kanji as a unique pokemon of their own, using the entirety of the kanji as a single shape of their own. True, there is plenty of kanji that looked alike with a few differences, and those are the differences that you could eventually detect when you’re used to them. But ultimately, instead of imagining how a cow should look, imagine a world where cows are shaped like the 牛 kanji, where people are just shapes of 人 walking around.

    In short, don’t associate them with other images. They ARE their own images of themselves. Don’t de-image-nise them for what they already are.

  22. How do you guys remember Kanji using methods like this? I’m genuinely curious, cuz I found it super hard to remember them as like pictures of what they are supposed to represent compared to just memorising their meaning as they are.

  23. I see 乳 as a 子(offspring) feeding off the teets and the stroke on the right is the tail of the mother.

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