I started doing this when I couldn't for the life of me remember the difference between 作る　and 使う　while working through Core2000. They sound similar, and both include Mr. T primitives. So, I decided to apply the same method as I used to remember the kanji. That method being stories.

I'm still not sure if it's a good technique or not. The difficulty is that you have a lot of things to link together into the story. You need the word's meaning, it's pronunciation, perhaps the RTK keywords to remember the kanji involved. It takes a long time to think of the story, although, sometimes it just jumps out immediately. That said, once i come up with a good story, it's all over. The spelling, the pronunciation, it's in my head. It is slow to pull it out at first, but it's there.

It'd be nice to have a database of 10k of these stories ready made.


Example:

使う - つかう　To Use.

RTK Story:

Mr. T uses the officer as a punching bag.

Vocabulary Story:

Why is Mr。T using an officer　as a punching bag? Because using two (tsu) cows (kau), skinning them for leather, sewing it all together is much too expensive.


作る - つくる　To Make

RTK Story:

Mr T.'s favorite magazine is Make. He loves to make things. But he's a purist: he only uses saws, no power tools.

Vocabulary Story

Technically, when making something, a saw can only create the pieces. Mr T. also uses two (tsu) screws (kuru) to bind each piece.

Anyone else doing this? Is there a better way?

I think the more you encounter it the better you will understand it. Are you going to be doing this method for all the vocab you don't know the difference of? That's a whole lot of work I think. I think with context over time you will get the meaning all worked out.

Here's my take: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...3#pid41343 - Essentially just recommends spontaneous, very short-term use of mnemonics based on kanji/keywords.

I've repeated that advice elsewhere, and others do similar stuff and I think the original Trinity project for this site had that idea in mind before Fabrice decided to focus on other things awhile? At any rate, personally I've come to believe it's just a temporary measure, because at some point, perhaps after I learned at least 1, usually more, readings per kanji/compound, and finished learning a foundational level of vocabulary, I stopped needing to go through the trouble and just pick up words easily (though my pace has slowed from what I cited there, for unrelated reasons).

I believe forum user Shakkun had mentioned--in a similar conversation, and I had hoped, something like that would happen, where you have a large enough mental repertoire that the associations come unbidden. And it did. But anyway, I'm sort of against the idea of doing for words/readings what we did for RTK, I think it'd be bad to concretize the process, rather than having it labile and idiosyncratic.

Short answer: No
Long Answer: Don't. You'd be totally wasting your time. Just learn the differences the hard way and by encountering them. Use and Make are totally different things... :S 作る　and 使う sound quite different as well. Once you hear the words in their different conjugations you'll get a better feel for them too I think. 食べ物を作った、 女を使った。

I think the method is good for the hard to remember words, but otherwise, you are spending too much time thinking of a story instead of actually learning the connotation of the word, where the word is used, what its typical conjugations are, etc.

I had exactly the same problem with 使う and 作る and it took me ages to get the hang of it :$

I don't use stories but I use visual scenes which is kinda the same thing, for example 渡る is a kangaroo bouncing across a river water - roo. This is only to remember the word in the first place, after a while you just know it.

liosama Wrote:女を使った。

おいおい・・・

Haha, you got to admit that, that example sticks into your head.

I think the more you associate words, the harder it is to distinguish them. What I mean is this: don't think when you hear tsukau or tsukuru, 'ow damn, what was make and what was use again'. I thought at the beginning that it would be easier that way, to repeat a list of lookalike words in my brain to distinguish them. It actually makes it harder, because when you see a word on the list, you think of the list instead of the word. My advice: learn the words separately, keep them in different boxes in your brain and don't worry too much, because when you will be hearing/reading them, you'll learn the difference soon enough. And personally I like it more to 'brute force' words. If you keep making the same mistake over and over, eventually the SRS will take care of it.
But this is just my experience.....

I think it's fine to use this kind of mnemonics if you do it very sparingly for difficult to remember words.
For the life of me, I couldn't remember the which was which when it came to あに/おにいさん and あね/おねえさん until I came up with the mnemonic that Italian plural masculine words end in -i (hence ani and oniisan are male), while feminine words end in -e (so ane and oneesan are female). Now I don't have any trouble telling them apart and I haven't used that mnemonic in years.

I don't think it is a good Idea to use Stories for every Vocab., but sometimes it could be use full.

I have very often the problem, that I cannot tell the translation of mazu, mada, mata and mou. I have no Idea how to solve it.

I use mnemonics for leeches.

Teskal Wrote:I don't think it is a good Idea to use Stories for every Vocab., but sometimes it could be use full.

I have very often the problem, that I cannot tell the translation of mazu, mada, mata and mou. I have no Idea how to solve it.

まず　まだ　また　もう
See them in context and immersion will correct this. And remeber don't always think that translating will mean you understand it in japanese. You will understand it in english, but in japanese that may not be the case sometimes.