Mnemonics themselves are hard to remember

Language Learning
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Hi everyone. I’ve been learning Japanese for about 2.5 months. I’m using WaniKani which uses SRS to teach about 2000 kanji and 6000 vocab words. WaniKani relies heavily on the usage of mnemonics to initially recall the meanings readings of kanji and vocab words with the idea that once you’ve recalled the word enough times in the SRS system using the mnemonics, they’ll naturally fall away from your mind. WaniKani provides mnemonics but also suggests that you create your own when the provided ones don’t work for you.

My problem is that I often have trouble even remembering the mnemonic, particularly for the readings. I’ll give a few simple examples I’ve struggled with recently:

night: 夜, よる (yoru). Where do you spend most NIGHTs? In YO ROOm. When I learned this word I thought “Perfect! ‘Your room’ is so obviously connected with ‘night’ that this will be easy to remember!”. But then, when the first review rolled around, I remembered the meaning without any problem but for the reading my mind just drew a blank: “Okay, it’s night, uh… what happens at night… night is dark, um, you sleep, less cars on the road…”. The connection is obviously night → sleep → your room, and once I revealed the answer it was obvious, but I could not for the life of me make my mind go down that same path.

room: 室, しつ (shi tsu). This sounds like Shih Tzu, the dog breed. I don’t let my SHIH TZU into my ROOM anymore because it peed everywhere last time. Then when the first review rolled around, my mind just went “Room… room… you’re in a room and… okay, rooms have doors… rooms are spaces…”. It’s as if I’d never even encountered the word before. I didn’t have even the vaguest concept of what the mnemonic could have been.

Now hopefully I’ll remember these two words next time they come around because I’ve spent the last 10 minutes writing this post. But this happens to me so frequently that I wonder if there’s a more effective strategy that I’m overlooking. With some words/mnemonics, it’ll take me 3 or 4 times of failing them before I finally start to be able to even recall the mnemonic. My reviews take forever because often times I’ll just stare at a word for 5 minutes just going “uh, hmm, umm”, trying to come up with every possible avenue my mind may have gone down when first looking at it. And sometimes, after 5 minutes, it suddenly pops into my head.

I suspect that part of the problem is that when I create mnemonics, I’m going from reading → X → Y → word. But when I’m trying to recall the reading, I’m working backwards: word → Y → X → reading.

Actually, more broadly speaking, this is a question I have regarding all the techniques mentioned on this forum. For example, with a memory palace, in order to remember items X, Y, Z, you need to remember (a) the layout of the memory palace itself, (b) the list of locations, (c) the order in which to visit each location, and (d) which item you placed at each location. This feels to me like “to remember A, just remember B, C, D, and E, and you’re golden!”. With the exception of (a) (if you’re already extremely familiar with the location), these all seem like difficult things to remember on their own and then step (d) seems like remembering the original thing itself along with yet another arbitrary thing would be harder than just remembering the original thing directly. Now to be fair I haven’t ever tried the memory palace technique (it doesn’t strike me as particularly relevant to learning a language for the purpose of eventual fluency) so perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I ever do. But in general, when reading about these techniques, all I can think of is the old saying “you gotta have money (memory) to make money (memory)”.

But anyway, I digress… getting back to my original question, I had to crank the WaniKani settings from the default 15 new words per day down to 10. It seems that many people on the WaniKani forum learn at least double that per day, and according to posts in this forum, even more per day should be possible. I suspect that I may just have incredibly poor memory and recall ability in general, but maybe there are some approaches people use here that could help.

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This is likely a big factor, good job realizing it!

A big thing with mnemonics is to make the most direct connection you can using the least number of steps or data conversions to get to your intended information. And a really important thing to keep in mind is to start your mnemonic imagery or scene or situation with the thing that you will be given as your recall prompt.

In the case of your “room” - “shih tzu” mnemonic, a “better” way to structure your scene may be to imagine your room and then picture it actually coming to like and sprouting shaggy hair and a tail loke a shih tzu. This way when given the prompt “room” that prompt comes alive and leads directly to your answer, no steps in between. Another advantage with just a single active association is that if you’re trying to translate the other direction, you should be able to use that same scene to go from “shih tzu” to room because if you remember a shih tzu, you are only that one mnemonic animation recall away from remembering that it morphed from the “room.”

Try to find as direct and active a link as you can and see if that causes any improvement!

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So if laid out properly, the layout-list-order portion really should be effortless, requiring no active work to recall. This is why picking unique and distinct and most of all familiar landmarks along your path and making your path consistent is very important, especially when in the early stages of learning the technique. You want the navigational and spacial part to be second nature.

The phrasing you used here is interesting:

I bolded “placed” because a common thing with newer folks or folks who haven’t really “unlocked” the power of a memory palace yet is that they approach the locations as static stages or backdrops where their mnemonic imagery simply “is.”

When you use a memory palace to aid in recall, the location is THE thing that you KNOW you will accurately recall. So it should provide a clear, active, and memorable link to whatever your mnemonic elements are that you want to store there.

I like to use an example of a front door of a house as a location and a tiger as the image you want to remember. If you imagine your front door opening and there is just a tiger sitting there, this may not stick well. (Think about your room and shih tzu example… "Ok its my room. What was in it? What happened there?) With nothing clear to get you from door to tiger, it is a weak image.

Compare this to picturing your front door suddenly growing tiger striped fur and roaring as claw marks come scraping across it, then the door shatters as a tiger comes bursting through it. Now if you are presented with the door and need to remember what was going on with it, I think you are much more likely to recall that metamorphosis and action versus just the door opening and revealing the tiger.

Locations can be active participants and take a more direct role in the cause/effect animation of a scene that increases its memorability. Maybe give something like that a try with the elements that you need to be able to link and recall.

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What's the best direction for recall?
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Interesting. So your suggestion could be boiled down to “just smash the two words/concepts together in any way possible, logic be damned!”. I’ve definitely not approached it like that so far, I’ve always tried to find some logical path to follow (but clearly it doesn’t always work). I’ve been hesitant to rely too much on visual mnemonics as I’m probably a 1 or 2 out of 10 on the visual imagery scale (or maybe I’m completely aphantastic and I’m just tricking myself? I think I can see glimpses of visual imagery but they’re in this weird abstract thought-space and I’m not sure if they’re imagery or just the concept of imagery… hard to put into words). But I’ll give it a go, maybe even just the idea of a visual mnemonic will be enough.

Regarding the memory palace technique, that does make sense that integrating the mnemonics in with the environment could be more effective. So do “full” memory palaces end up being, essentially, familiar scenes with a bunch of bizarre events occurring? I was reading this thread (I can’t seem to include links but the URL path (after the domain name) is /t/many-and-i-mean-it-useful-tips-you-need-to-learn-massive-vocabulary-with-mnemonics/29486) where the author talks about using alphabetically-ordered memory palaces to memorize 15,000 words. For example:

So I guess it’s unclear to me what “keeping” words means. Of course, only the author can accurately describe their own experience, but would you expect this to mean that, for instance, on the table there are 13 unique little events/scenes happening that decode into words? How do people go about remembering that there are 13? I suppose at my table there are 6 chairs and 6 placemats so maybe 1 word per chair, 1 word per placemat, and 1 for the center of the table. I guess that could work?

But gosh, even when I do a mental walkthrough of a place I know extremely well (like my house), I wouldn’t describe it as “effortless”. Or I guess, it’s fairly effortless to do an extremely low-detail walkthrough perhaps? E.g. I walk through the door and to the right is a coat rack with four hooks and under that is a shoe rack with two levels, etc. etc. But I’m still actively having to recall these items, or put another way, I’m actively recalling facts. So if I decided that the first coat rack hook was storing the word, I dunno, “bat” or something, and so I imagined a bat hanging off the first hook, it seems like I would still have to actively remember that there should be a bat there… and what’s to stop me from just forgetting that?

Sorry, I’m definitely off-topic now, and I hope I’m not asking dumb questions that have been answered a thousand times. But every time I’ve read about the memory palace technique, I’ve always come away with the feeling of “wow, some people’s brains can do that?”.

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I think sometimes people make too much about the idea of “visualizing” or “picturing” or however this subjective experience is described…

I think when you boil it all down, memorizing and recalling something is based on “information retrieval.” Whether that is “knowing facts” or “telling a story” or “seeing” some kind of “imaginary scene” the bottom line is that someone is able to retrieve information.

There are different types of information and different types of things that people “know.”

When you talk about “imagining” walking through your house, it doesn’t really matter HOW you recall your path or the landmarks along the way. As long as you “know” it, you can use that knowledge and link it to new information.

Most mnemonic techniques are about actively considering the associations that are available to us and actively choosing or modifying or creating ways to make those associations “strong” and “memorable.”

What makes things memorable?

Thats the million dollar question mnemonics tries to answer and it will vary from person to person.

In a general sense, most humans have a strong spatial / navigational memory. You probably don’t need to reference a map to get around your house or need a turn by turn guide to get from your home to your workplace or school. When learning a new route you might, but usually if attention is paid to the route and landmarks, it can be learned well fairly quickly.

Learning new information generally involves linking it to some existing fluent concept. It is very rare that people learn and remember anything that is completely devoid of any prior connection to something else they know. So If “learning” new information basically involves linking it to some previously learned information, we can explore what kinds of links work well.

Unusual things are generally more “memorable” than mundane ones. This is why we regularly suggest making things exaggerated, violent, seductive, obscene, absurd… Because a bird sitting on a mailbox isn’t very memorable, but a giant bird that is on fire and having intimate relations with that mailbox is. (And this is true whether you can “see” that situation vividly in your “minds eye” or whether you just “know the story about it.”)

If you can get past the idea of whether you are visualizing something well or at all or good enough, and instead think about if you can “know” that certain things are happening that link two ideas, you can start exploring how to craft those connections.

The idea of “actively remembering” is actually a crucial thing that is required to successfully maintain your information and to push it into ling term memory. The more you work with your information and experience it via however you recall it, the stronger and longer the memory lasts.

A common misconception with memory techniques is that you just use this secret approach and then its stuck in there forever, to be pulled from your mind and recalled at will.

This isn’t how memory works. (For the vast majority of humans.)

To keep something in memory, you have to review it. Memory techniques can make it so that you don’t have to review as often as simply learning by rote, and they can make it a much more fun and creative experience, but you still need to do maintenance checks on the information you’re looking to hold onto. It will take longer to forget “the fiery bird f—ing the mailbox” than it would to forget that “a bird was sitting on the mailbox,” but if you don’t review it, it will fade in time too.

“Spaced Repetition” is something I’d recommend you look into. Its the idea that there are optimal times to review information to strengthen its memorability. Its what most of us here use to keep things fresh that we want to remember long-term.

Hopefully that clears some things up for you and gives you a few ideas on some approaches to try. Keep on exploring and asking questions!

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Memory palace with remembering the kanji would be a nice combination though. Imagine every kanji flowing from previous learned kanji in your memory palace. You just have to put them next to each other. And imagine how easy you could learn the readings by using a mnemonic alphabet. I am currently memorizing the kanji radical with major system and after that I will memorize the kanji in the same order as in remembering the kanji using memory palace and major system to remember them by number. There’s never been a better reasaon to use memory palace.

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Thanks, that was incredibly informative. Over the last few days I’ve been aiming to make my mnemonics less “logical” and more silly/weird/bizarre (like your mailbox bird one) so I’m hoping I’ll see an improvement in reviews and thus will be able to manage a bit higher word count per day. And fortunately, WaniKani has a nice integrated spaced repetition system so I’ve got that covered already!

I still have trouble coming up with effective mnemonics for some words, so I think a goal of mine is to come up with a number of different sub-types of mnemonics so that I have multiple approaches to draw from.

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So I’ve been trying to apply these suggestions for the last few weeks and the results are… mixed. More vivid, bizarre, and specific mnemonics do indeed seem to be a bit easier to remember. However, I still find myself running into the following problems:

It’s really hard for me to tell whether a mnemonic is actually memorable or not. Here’s a good example: the Kanji 通, which means “pass through”, has a few readings, two of which are つう (“tsu” with a long “u”) and とお (“toe” with a long “o”). For the first reading, I came up with a “bad” mnemonic: “I pass through TSU (too) a different location”. Not vivid, bizarre, or specific at all, and yet I had no trouble remembering it. For the second reading, I came up with the following: “Remember that level in Banjo Tooie where you have to pass through an area on your tip TOEs to avoid waking up a snake? You’re trying to be extra sneaky and standing really tall on your toes, which is why the reading has a long ‘o’.” Seems vivid (I know exactly what that area looks like), bizarre (really long toes), and specific, and yet… I failed to recall that reading 3 or 4 times. Finally, I switched the mnemonic to “remember tsu and then change the 'u’s to 'o’s”. So far, that second one (again, objectively worse quality) hasn’t failed me once yet.

Additionally, sometimes I’ll seem to have something down really well for a while, but then I’ll randomly forget it during a later review. For example, 交通, with Kanji “mix” and “pass through”, means “traffic”. The meaning made sense when I learned it and I kept nailing it every SRS review without trouble. I even used the word in a text to a Japanese-speaking friend. But today, that word came up again and it just… didn’t ring a bell. Of course, once I saw the answer it instantly came flooding back. Which is also an example of my next problem:

It often feels like these are not so much memory problems but recall problems. Almost every time I forget a reading (or meaning) due to being unable to recall the mnemonic, once I view the correct reading, I’m instantly reminded. So it’s still in my brain somewhere, I just can’t seem to retrieve it in the reverse direction (meaning → mnemonic → reading rather than reading → mnemonic → meaning). Essentially, this is what I described in my first post, but after trying to create more vivid mnemonics, this hasn’t really improved much. And even with vivid mnemonics, it’s still sometimes the case where the mnemonic will finally just mysteriously pop into my head after sitting there just “thinking hard” for 5 minutes. Annoyingly, sometimes (though not always) getting really frustrated with myself after failing to recall a word will make me remember it better in the future (but it’s annoying because I don’t want to constantly be frustrated!).

Finally, some Kanji or words are just really hard to come up with good mnemonics for, and additionally, there are just so many words that coming up with a unique and memorable mnemonic for every single one is incredibly time consuming and, honestly, mentally taxing. I generally don’t come up with mnemonics for jukugo words (compound words where if you know the Kanji readings/meanings then you already know the whole word’s reading/meaning) but occasionally I’ll forget them as a consequence (交通 as I mentioned above for example since the word’s meaning isn’t quite trivial from the Kanji meanings).

I don’t really expect anyone to give me foolproof solutions for these issues but I am interested in knowing what, roughly, is normal. Because to be honest, reading posts on this forum is kind of intimidating. It seems like everyone has this innate, reliable ability to just remember/associate things on command if they set their mind to the task, and more advanced memory techniques are just systems which utilize this ability in specific/organized ways. But I’ve wondered for a long time if I have some underlying memory disorder which will forever be the source of my memory struggles, and this worry has caused me a lot of psychological stress and feelings of low self-worth over the years.

I’d be interested to hear anyone’s answers to these questions:

  • Do the issues I described sound like they’re within the realm of normal human forgetfulness or are they a cause for concern?
  • When using mnemonics, how often do you fail to make the connection?
  • How “effortful” is recall for you? How often do you have to “strain your brain” to recall something?
  • Are you ever able to just learn/hear a word once and easily remember/recall it later without a bunch of extra mental work?
  • Do you ever have to sit there for a few minutes before a mnemonic comes to you?
  • How often does your memory lapse? i.e. you forget a word at a later SRS interval after passing earlier ones?
  • What are your SRS intervals? The ones in WaniKani after learning a new item are: 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 4 months. They cannot be changed as far as I can tell.
  • Do you ever get memory “interference”, where you’ve learned two similar things (e.g. similar looking Kanji in my case) and recall the wrong one?
  • Do you ever have to forget a word 3, 4, 5+ times before it finally starts to stick?
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Yes, it happens. Sometimes, I can tell why a mnemonic didn’t work. But sometimes, logical, clever mnemonics I like won’t stick, and others (which are « badly » constructed) work and I don’t understand why.

Honestly if you are using a large volume of mnemonics, it’s better to not lose time perfecting your mnemonics, better 10 spontaneous «quick and dirty» mnemonics, than 1 really well thought out. A certain number of failures is normal, I think. Just throw everything you can at the wall and see what sticks. Unless your retention rate is dramatically low, forgetting is perfectly normal (even if frustrating).

About repetition:
It happens quite often to me that I fail to remember a word or kanji several times, but then, after seeing/hearing it in another context, it clicks and I remember it. Don’t forget that giving the right answer to a vocabulary card only means you are good at answering that card. And that’s not actually that important. The repetition should happen not by seeing the card more often, but by seeing the word more often in other contexts. Then the card will be easier.

Maybe if you feel frustrated it’s time to do less cards (by all means do all the reviews but slow down new cards, even suspend the ones which are frustrating, that’s why the leech-function exists) and spend more time consuming content you like. More fun and less frustration leads to better learning.

I feel that for languages spaced repetition is a VERY useful tool, but it can also be a trap, if I get stuck in an endless loop of reviews, which leave me no time to actually use the language. Now, this is a personal preference perhaps, but I feel it is much better to have a more relaxed view of cards when learning vocabulary. If I forget a word several times, I just ignore the card. Either I will encounter the word in my reading/watching somewhere else and «review» it there. Or I will never encounter it again so I doesn’t really matter if I didn’t learn it, because I didn’t really need it.

Also don’t forget to vary your learning methods. I found that adapting my learning routine every few months gives better results. If kanjis frustrate you, concentrate on other aspects of the language for a time. I had a period where I hated kanjis and stopped actively learning it and concentrated on other things. Then last year I felt I was ready to have a go at it again, and sat down to think about what were the pain points, and made my own method to address them. Maybe some of the ideas / thoughts will help ? See My system for japanese kanji

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