06. Jul 9th. My Memorization Technique

Today I'll write about what I've been doing to memorize all my Japanese vocabulary and kanji.
I learned all of this from a webapage called Textfugu.com and TheJapaneseProject.com. This is not a method they invented, in fact, it was Harry Lorayne who created it, or at least he has the credit for it.


This method is very simple, and it helps you to save a lot of time. How many of you have been repeating and repeating the same vocabulary list and in the end you feel like you didn't learn anything? And you forget the whole list two, five, or fifteen days later? Well, that won't happen with this technique. All you need is: imagination.


So you have a new word that you haven't seen or listened to before. It's something completely new for you, so you better associate it with something you know. Sometimes words in other languages sound like words or phrases in our own language.


For example, the word for "heaven" in Japanese is "ten". It sounds exactly as the word for the number 10 in English. Then, you create a little story, and you imagine that the number of people to probably go to heaven is only 10% of the whole population. I know, it's a sad story, but the weirdest, craziest or funniest the story is, the better. So whenever you want to say "heaven" you think about the 10% and then you say "ten". Pretty easy, right? (I borrowed this mnemonic from Wanikani.com)


These are called "mnemonics". A mnemonic is any learning technique that helps you memorize anything. It can be a song, poem, or a short story like the previous one. I've seen that when I create my own story, I learn the word better, because it becomes part of me.


This method has helped me amazingly. I needed to learn 17 lessons of my Japanese book in just a month. Of course, aside of from the grammar, I had to learn a lot of vocabulary, and I memorized about 600 words. Sometimes it takes 2 minutes to associate one word to something I know and create the story. And sometimes it has took me 10 minutes to think. But what makes this method so good, it's that you don't have to look at the words over and over again. With a good mnemonic, the word stays in your brain longer than you think. Just to reinforce my memory, I write the words in Anki, which is a flashcards application. It is very useful and according to your answers, it programs your daily reviews.


Hope you found this notebook entry interesting and useful. Thank you for your corrections.

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Your profile says your English is only level 3 out of 5?! Your English is perfect! Definitely 5 out of 5 and even better than mine I think. Great job!

And I'm also learning Japanese so I appreciate the advice on remember words/kanji. I'll give it a shot.

Good luck!