[thestephen]

This type of learning, combined with applying the knowledge learned, is easily one of the biggest lifehacks I've encountered.

Growing up, I (falsely) internalized that I somehow had a hard time learning languages. However, with the help of Anki, that has an algorithm based on SuperMemo, I realized that this wasn't the case - just that the traditional textbook methods weren't for me when it comes to cramming in "arbitrary" information.

While living in Japan, I used Anki to supplement my recognition of kanji. I averaged roughly 7 minutes of studies for a year, internalizing the meanings and readings of roughly 1000 characters with a 95% retention rate.

Judging from my peers, the only ones that managed to pick up this volume were those that studied the language full-time. Of course, they learned the language overall at a much higher level than I did - this methodology purely focused on the recognition aspect.

Naturally, I got to put the characters to use living in the country, and I also spent time making up mnemonics for each character. Your mileage may vary.

[pbhjpbhj]

I'm curious what your mnemonics are like, could you give an example or two?

I'm not a student of Japanese, but AIUI there are pictographs and ideographs amongst the characters, presumably these are effectively already mnemonics?

[yorwba]

That might have been true of the original bone script characters, but over the millennia they have been stylized beyond recognition, and many new characters were created. Modern Japanese or Chinese is about as mnemonic as the typical icon set used in a GUI application.

However, most characters are composed of a few common components, called radicals, which can sometimes provide hints about the meaning. For example, the Chinese words 海 "sea", 波浪 "wave" and 渴 "thirsty" all contain the water radical ⺡. Similarly for 丝绸 "silk" and 缠绕 "wind around", which contain the thread radical ⺓.

Personally, I don't use any mnemonics, but I know someone who does, and he'd assigned each radical a memorable representation (e.g. the thread corresponds to Spiderman) and then he had a story linking a word to the components, so that 丝绸 would be about two Spidermen, one of which wraps himself in silk to use it as a ghost costume.

[pbhjpbhj]

Cool, thanks for the lesson and info.

[timerol]

I'm actively making my way through Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, and am currently around 650 kanji. Here's an example that I found funny, combining 立 (stand), with 里 (pictograph of computer - see the monitor and keyboard, though the actual meaning is different):

童 means juvenile. Imagine someone who is so childish that they jump on top of their computer in anger when it blue screens. I've always gotten this flashcard within 5 seconds with Anki, and generally chuckled to myself as well.

[thestephen]

I assign a mnemonic to a composite (usually radicals, sometimes combinations of radicals). timerol's example in this thread is excellent; here's another example.

脂: Meaning: Fat. Consists of 旨 (tasty) and 月 (moon). However, mnemonically, 月 occurs in many characters referring to "flesh" of some kind, and as such is what I often use as a mnemonic cue. This creates the quite natural mnemonic cue of "tasty flesh". As such, when seeing this kanji, my thought process when repeating the character goes something like "the tasty part of flesh - the fat!".

[chillacy]

In Chinese at least, most characters are not pictographic, but phonetic-semantic: https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-th...

> while pictographs are pretty and easy to explain, they only make up around 5% of all characters. Phonetic-semantic components, on the other hand, make up almost 80% of all characters