Hey fellow learners!
I’ve been doing Duolingo for <80 days and, impatient to build vocab, started aggressively working on [jpdb.io](https://jpdb.io) over the last month. One thing I noticed right away was the power of a good mnemonic. If I can link a Japanese pronunciation to similar-sounding English words, my retention increases immensely over rote memorization. This isn’t a surprise to anyone. RTK, Wanikani, etc. are all built on strong mnemonics for Kanji.
However, not every word pronunciation is easy to make associations for. I found myself racking by brain for some similar-sounding word or set of words to create a strong mnemonic image, and just didn’t have what I needed in my palette. If I couldn’t make a mnemonic, I would default to rote SRS repetition, which meant that abstract words like ように and ような have been clogging up my review deck.
I kept thinking, *if I could just make images for each kana, then I could apply them to difficult words.* I’ve never used a PAO (Person-Action-Object) system before, but I’m familiar with how they are used for number memorization, and I’m happy to jury-rig it for this purpose. Many Japanese words are three syllables or less, so an Person, Action, or Object image for each one would give enough material to encode each letter, and their position in the word.
My final product is a table showing each kana and a relate PAO image.
[A snip of the kana PAO table, with one entry redacted because it’s presonal.](https://preview.redd.it/einigt7d5y2c1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=c954e52eaaca78b998c68b65a111dfd0ae2fd4b8)
I just finished populating everything except for some really hard sounds to find good English pegs for (じ. ず, つ, ゆ, and を have some stragglers! ideas welcome!), but earlier I took my half-filled sheet out for a test drive, and was pretty happy with the results.
I was struggling to find a link to ひつよう (needed, essential, necessary), but the image of **Hillary Clinton** standing at court, **suing** to get her essential **yo yo** helped me construct the word. I say “construct” because I don’t mean it automatically gave me full fluency, but instead of drawing a total blank and having to hit “Nothing” or “Something” in jpdb, I was able to recall it from memory, and hit “Hard” to make sure it queued back up. The fact that the next day, without any intermediate review, I was able to recall the kana and definition using that image demonstrates its value. The goal, of course, it to move beyond that kind of construction (externalized knowledge) into intuitive understanding (internalized knowledge). So far, the words I’ve applied this to have cut the SRS review quantity at least in half, if not more, and decreased the time to assimilate it into my natural understanding.
A few thoughts on building one of these, and next steps for the project:
* Use images that you already know and are easy to visualize. People and objects you can’t picture clearly in your mind, and actions that have nuanced definitions or could be confused with other verbs, should be avoided. I know about Tolstoy, but would need to memorize his appearance to use him in an image. If I use “go”, will I confuse it with “walking” or “moving” and mix up the kana?
* Each image should have:
* PAO Images
* Definition Image
* Kanji Component Images (if applicable, and possible, since piling 8 images into one scene can get confusing. Only you know your capacity!)
* If I use something other than the initial sound for the kana peg, will I confuse it with another sound? Will I confuse Mel Gibson for both め and ぎ? Or George Washington for ぎand わ? I had to use both first and last names to populate my list, and recognize that I might get confused. It seems best either to use only first or last names, or stick to names where the one not being used would be difficult in Japanese, like ones with double consonants. We’ll see how much this ambiguity drags the system in practice.
* I made characters for all kana, but not for syllables made with modifiers like しょ or じゃ or っ. At this point, to make the image table smaller, I am planning on just using smaller versions of those images to keep track of that, and potentially mix images for longer words. I think making a syllabary table rather than kana table is the way to go, but it took me hours to populate the image palette, and I’m not ready to do another hundred images.
​
[The lonely leftovers.](https://preview.redd.it/b1pclbb0fy2c1.png?width=462&format=png&auto=webp&s=cb39861f61cafbe29b314683364a42ef5a0cdbaa)
I would love to see if anyone else has tried something like this, is inspired by this, or has any ideas for my missing entries. (My ず person is “Zwingli”, which, honestly I’ll have to review what he looks like, and all of my ん’s are weird ones like “gnome”, “mnemonic-making”, and “gnomon”, to try and emphasize the “n”-ness of it all. I’m not really confident in all of these!) Let me know what you think!
2 comments
Interesting idea, although I feel like mnemonics are very powerful because they are paired with novel ideas. If you come up with a novel idea but then use it with hundreds or thousands of words, I kind of wonder if the novel aspect will still be there. Either way, GL on it, let people know how it turns out, as there’s always the chance it works well.
This will maybe help in the short term, but will slow you down in the long term. Mnemonics are helpful for Kanji, but eventually that all fades away as you start to just recognize the characters/vocab.
While methods like this are great for getting your flash cards correct during review, just keep in mind that Japanese takes place outside of flash cards.