So I was reviewing はいざら (ashtray) and I’ve been having problems remembering it. I have learned はいいろ(grey, ashen) and おさら(plate); then it clicked. はいざら is literally ash plate. Just felt like sharing, important to celebrate even small victories.
I love it when I learn the kanji for a word that I’ve been struggling with, and then it becomes super easy to remember it afterwards.
I was having a bunch of trouble with かみ meaning paper, until I got to おりがみ and I was like. Oh! Duh.
Right? Kind of got the same feeling.
Kind of the opposite with kimono - basically everyone knows this word. But when I saw the kanji was basically “thing you wear” … 
I don’t know who needs to hear this - the な vsい adjective is 90% of the time 1漢字 訓読み vs 音読み 熟語.
The onyomi is the “chinese” pronouciation so they are ‘technically nouns’ because China doesn’t conjugate in the same way.
And 熟語 verbs are する動詞 because again- technically nouns It’s ジョギングする not ジョギンぎます, 勉強、掃除、洗濯 are all 熟語.
Teaching count and non count helped. Forgien words are often non-count,
Comics are interesting vs Manga is interesting.
Noodles are delicious. vs Speghetti is delcious
Snails are strange vs Escargot is strange
Moose are tall. Sheep are cute, Fish are wet ← these three are countable
to be clear, Chinese doesn’t conjugate anything at all 
I thought I over heard a friend who was studying Chinese 10 years ago say that, but I wasn’t confident- hence the hedging :shy:
It’s precisely these moments that make me love studying other languages. It even more special when song lyrics finally click when I’m out in public and I start crying because I’m so happy.
I know the feeling, or when you listen to a song you haven’t heard in a while, and you can understand more since the last time you listened to it.
I learned a lot of vocab words before I learned the kanji forms. I knew the word ちゃいろ very well, but when I learned the kanji form 茶色 my mind was kind of blown. Brown == tea-colored. But here’s where it gets really good: I ran to my Japanese partner to tell her about my epiphany, and she said she’d never even made that connection herself!
I’m not too surprised though. The native child vs adult education approach to learning a language is so different. She asks me questions about English all the time that I realize I don’t have a good answer to, despite knowing the correct semantics intuitively.
I hadn’t realized that myself yet, I just learned something. ありがとうございます
For anyone struggling to remember きのこ like I was…
必殺技
木の子
You’re welcome 
There are so many things like this that tickle me, such as conger eel (穴子 hole child) and badger (穴熊 hole bear)
I found it funny that 女 is く ノ 一 (ku- no- ichi) the same thing used for “female ninja” Since learning that, any time I need to draw the kanji it’s much easier.
I heard that the term kunoichi is derived from the shape of the kanji to begin with!
That’s what I was referring to- it’s also the stroke order because this kanji is a bit weird with it. just I’ve heard of a kunoichi, but I always struggled properly writing the kanji because of the different stroke order.
When something clicks
My knee joints after I play soccer with my 中1年生.