When I see the kanji that make up a word, I recognize each of the characters but I usually fail to remember the reading which to my untrained ear is completely random.

How do you learn new words? Do you use mnemonics or just brute force it?

I used to brute force it a lot, but that was back when I rote memorized 1000 characters (now I'm doing RtK and feel a lot better about things >.>). I had a few beginner Kanji books and an intermediate one. They all taught between 1 to 6 readings for each character, but they also supplied many compound examples. A lot of my current vocabulary comes from these books, but there are also a few problems I had with doing this. The first and most common problem is that I would often forget the meaning of the word or the word itself. The second was a minor error: I would jumble the order of the compounds in my head while talking. Usually I would notice I said the wrong word and just reverse the order again and come to the right word again, but this would disrupt the flow of conversation and end in embarrassing situations occasionally. Basically what I want to say is that I wouldn't suggest brute forcing every word, but the occasional useful words might be an exception since it will most likely add to your short term memory, which is useful for my current strategy.

Now a days, I find myself trying to just use words whenever I have the chance, while supplementing reviews when I can. If I can use the word (not necessarily in conversation, writing can be equally helpful in my opinion), it usually reinforces my memory of the word. Sometimes it can seem silly when you keep explicitly making excuses to use the word in a day (and people might give you strange looks if it's a rare word or expression), but at least it'll make it easier to use the word from then on, at least for me.

On top of that I've been trying to SRS sentences that use similar words to reinforce my understanding of the word (to learn you need to understand, right), and eventually it just sets it in stone in my memory.

Maybe my success with remembering new words has a bit to do with the fact that I rote memorized over a thousand readings already, which contributed to my understanding of shared on-readings and the likes (although I still find some longer kun-readings to be a paaaainnnnn sometimes [承る and 著しい for example]), so I usually don't find compounds as bad as I used to it.

Anyway, as you can see, I don't really use either brute force or mnemonics, at least not anymore, but unlike a lot of people, I don't find brute force to be a bad idea as long as you're exposing yourself to the characters, and more importantly the words themselves, in other contexts enough.

Hope this gives you some ideas either way...

Currently I'm doing mass vocabulary cramming(50-100words/day) using Kanji Odyssey but ever since I a modified version of how KMDes for mass vocabulary acquisation and some old techniques I knew since I was a kid, a form of sound mnemonics where you associate the reading to something that sounds similar to a word in your native language(forgot what the official name of this technique is called). This allows me to recall the reading and meaning slowly through the mnemomic for a couple of minutes. Immediately test myself on the list of 5-10 words to reinforce the connection and retest after 10 minutes and 1 hour. By 1 hour I would have vaguely forgotten the mnemoic and the spaced repition of 10 minutes and 1 hour would have reinforced the reading the meaning by then. I spend about 30 going through a list of 50-100 words. Once I"ve done the whole list, I add it to Anki and test myself in Anki the next morning. So far I have a recall rate of 90%~ and crammed about 500 words in the last 7 days.

Take for example a word like 職業(しょくぎょう）　which means occupation. I imagined an occupation where the job was to shock girls.

@DevvaR Exactly! Well I am not forgetting 職業 now. Do you feel like sharing your stories or is it top secret? in total how much time do you spend creating mnemonics for the words you are studying?

Also, how does it affect your recall of the individual kanjis, like, do you get your RevTk stories mixed up?

I guess that after you have ~2000 words or so you will switch back to sentences. I mean, the point of all this is to have it easier when processing sentences, right?.

DevvaR Wrote:Take for example a word like 職業(しょくぎょう）　which means occupation. I imagined an occupation where the job was to shock girls.

I do this type of thing. The first word I learned in this way (in the very early days) was おめでとう which I "cued" for myself with the word "Mediterranean".

I find the native Japanese words easier to remember. I hope you know what I mean if I say they're fairly similar to something like Italian, whereas the Chinese-root words are not similar to any languages I already am familiar with, so they need some more help.

As I get used to Chinese sounds it gets easier because I have some similar sounds to refer to in my memory bank.

BTW Heisig does give a system of phonetic mnemonics in RTK2

I just want a list with the ON and KUN readings.

[Katsuo]

The Japanese government produces a standard list of kanji and their readings to be learned at schools called the joyo kanji (the older list of 1,945 characters was updated last year to 2,136 and the new list is often referred to as the "new joyo kanji").

RTK1 is based on the joyo kanji and the new (6th) edition of the book contains all 2,136 plus another 64 characters deemed to be useful.

The Government document is here: Download pdf file.
The joyo kanji and their readings are listed on Wikipedia.
If you would like the data with romaji removed and matched up to RTK numbers, then check out some of the spreadsheets I compiled by clicking on my "website" link.

Thanks Katsuo.

Hey Devvar so are you going to share your mnemonics?

My mnemonics arn't anything special, not as clear cut as RTK mnemonics. Most of them, I've forgotten within a few minutes of making it. It's just there to let me remember them until spaced repetition does it job and I can immediately recall the meaning and reading without needing the mnemonic.

Either way, I think it's better to make mnemonics more relevant to you. A lot of my mnemonics utilises a mixture of Chinese and English, which is relevant to me but, unless you understand my mother tongue dialect, wouldn't work for you.

EDIT: In case you're not clear on what I do.
1. Get a list of 50-100 words I plan on learning today.
2. Group them up in groups of 6-9.
3. Go through each word in the group, creating a quick mnomonic to remember it. I spend a couple of seconds on each mnemonic.
4. Once I"ve gone through the group of 6-9 words, immediately test myself on them. Any ones I can't remember, I take that word out of the group.
5. Set a timer for 10 minutes for that group to be tested again.
6. Move onto the next of 6-9 and repeat 1-5.
7. Once I've gone through the whole list, I go take a break/immerse in Japanese/something that gets your mind away from the list. Come back in an hour and retest myself.
8. Redo 1-7 for any failed words.
9. Once I've finished the words, I add them to Anki and do the words in Anki the next morning and let SRS do its thing. Any words I failed, I do 1-8 the next day. By this point, the mnemonic is vague at best.

One more thing, I'm doing mass vocabulary acquisation at the moment because my vocabulary is weaker than my grammar. At best, I probably know about 2000 words currently.

So what do you while the timer for the first 6-9 sentences is running? Learn the next group? what if the timer expires in the middle of learning the next group? I like your algorithm though, I will try to do something like that.

By the way, a few seconds on each mnemonic is incredible.

When the timer is running for 6-9 vocabulary words, I learn the next group. When the timer expires, I just keep learning the current group, then go to review the expired group. I'm not so strict on the timing, it's not like you'll forget it if you wait until 11 minutes.

This will probably explain it better.
http://kmdes.com/kms-japanese-blog/2011/...n-1-guide/
Also google Iversen method.
Also, this is used for learning vocabulary, not for sentences. With SRSing sentences, you're trying to understand the sentence, not memorising it. If there are words in sentences that you don't understand, take it out and use this method to learn the sentence. If you don't understand the sentence because of the grammar, that's another issue altogether. But this method is used particularly for memorising readings and meanings of words.

Has anyone used more advanced memory techniques, such as the method of loci or pegging, to initially memorize words?

Lots of people have, but not me, and I've not seen much if anything about it here. People that like complex learning methods seems to be at http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html ;

I read up on some of these 'advanced techniques' but they seem to require an initial investment in building up a mental structure to put your target items into. I can see the value in that for memorizing certain sorts of things that need to remain in memory for a few days or weeks, but I think some initial study technique (wordlist, mnemonic, whatever) with SRS to follow is better for the essentially unlimited set of information that needs to be permanently memorized to know a language. (If you have a sufficiently large vocabulary that you're not finding new words to add very often, you can start adding idiomatic expressions, or names that are important enough to be vocabulary, or whatever. It's an endless journey!)

Obviously, others disagree about the value of those advanced techniques, but I think perhaps they already had made that mentioned initial investment. If I'm wrong about the value of it, I'd be glad to learn why!

I've been puttering with a method like the above posted KM's method, or anyway, Iversen's method on the first day and then SRS for the long term. I'm not really learning more than a few words a day right now though anyway since my focus is on finishing RTK (I've been studying Japanese far too long to have any excuse to not know the Kanji inside and out, and yet I don't, they kept leaking out of my memory. RTK+SRS seems to be a win though!)

Before I started RTK my learning techniques were too haphazard and ineffective to be worth mentioning. :O