I’d love to hear more about how you used ‘memory places’ when learning the kanji
I’ve tried Kanken Premium and I got a little addicted. I’ll certaintly continue to use it, thank you for the recommendation
One other site I use sometimes is Richard Sears’ Chinese Character Etymology Site, which is linked to from this Handwritten kanji lookup site. Sometimes seeing how a kanji character evolved helps me remember it better. For example: Compound 埒
from potters-clay 土 tǔ and
phonetic two-hands 寽 lüè.
I learnt 600 or 700 kanji through the fairly ‘old school’ method of writing them a lot, with the help of the Basic/Intermediate Kanji book series and being in Japanese lessons at the time.
Along with that I did have SRS, Anki at the time, to help stuff stick in.
Beyond ~700 kanji, I think there’s limited gains drilling up to the 2136 characters, and far more beneficial, for me, was reading and learning vocab. Through this, I would guess I’ve learnt the same number again without having to think too much about it.
That said, one day, I would like to write through all the 常用, I think Asher had a thread on his experience and it did sound pretty beneficial.
Yes of course!
I don’t know a lot of main strategies that good palace makers are using but I can explain how I’ve started using them.
First of all after learning 800 kanji (I created vague mnemonic story for each of them, most of the times it was just a few words, generally much less and detailed then most written premade mnemonics) I realized that my brain placing them in some kind place that I know randomly, for example I noticed that a lot of kanji I’ve learned while resting on the see are placed in rented apartment, for example 貢 (tribute), It has shell + construction as a radicals. And it was build into image where there is a really-really big shell on outside of my house (particular place) and it has lyrics of one tribute song on it. This one as well 減(dwindle, decrease) water + all, I imagine that amount of hot water in boiler decreases (in that same house) and there are many of those unintationally made stories bonded to one place. As well as a lot of them are not bounded at all.
So after those 800 kanji I’ve chosen a tactic where I place kanji in memory palace and it bonded to key radical in kanji.
For example 米 is bind to “pit” on cs2 map inferno (it wasn’t intentional, I just cought myself running around this map while repeating some kanji), so here are examples of this memory palace:
- 粉 - I take grain of rice and cutting it until it’s so little that it become flour (the meaning) and I de it particularly in that place.
- 迷 (Astray, but I interpreted it as an adjective to my native language) - I take a sack of rice and going to ct and they ask me something like “hey what are you man doing here” and I say “ops, I guess I’m ”
There are a lot more, for example bamboo 竹 are all in one bamboo plantation nere the sea, all 糸 are in my room. 納 This for example is about threads in the shelf but for some reason bagged setteled inside of that shelf an now it’s their settlement.
The most fan are 人, there are 70-100 of them, I settled up a t-spawn on inferno map spefifically for them, and made a lot of kanji work together.
For example if this is a guys resting on the tree 休 then this one 伎 is cutting a branch the first guy is resting on, so it’s a bad deed (idk if this make sense in English, but in my language it does)
This way you can reinforce one by seeing another (not as good as I thought but well, it does this in some way)
This place is filed with guys that are doing something, and when I see that the kanji includes this radical as the main I instantly send my brain to that place.
Also there are kanji where main radical is not well defined, and it’s good to choose one that looks like main and adding this kanji to its palace.
I guess if you use koohii to understand how kanji grouped you can prebuilt your memory palaces for them according to radical + space you need in your palace.
Of course there are many tips I made up for myself, but I guess those has something to do with how my brain points out path of getting information.
Good luck and have a good day!
Thanks so much for the detailed explanation! I love how you group kanji by radicals and connect them to familiar places. I’ve heard of people using this method to memorize digits of pi, but I’ve never heard of it being used in this way!
1 Like
I never quite viewed them as clean. I’m sure the mnemonic for 隠す was ‘quick, hide your cocks!’ I doubt I’ll ever forget that word.
thats how i learned 角 because its the angle of the dangle.
1 Like