Try to only do this for those that are labeled common words. You don't have to go through the trouble with completely memorizing others. Many such 熟語 may only show up in writing, and you will become more able to understand them as you learn more (about) Kanji in general.

You're sentence is clever.

Try to think of separate contexts, though, that these words would be used in so you know what to interpret in spoken speech. If you can, try to also find out whether such homophonous expressions have different pitch. Some do.

With all the due respect yudan, you are dismissing mnemonic mechanism for the sake of doing proper japanese. I disagree. Before you do proper japanese you need to know the vocab and any way to get you to that point is ok - any wrinkles can be ironed later.

While I do agree that people should first and foremost continue to learn more vocabulary and a more accelerated rate than grammar skills--after all, you can't use grammar effectively if you don't know enough words to practice it--but I disagree that you should learn anything but proper Japanese. When you learn vocabulary, you should find out how the actual word is used and what it actually means. There are many words in Japanese with the same English gloss, but we all know that often times these seemingly synonymous phrases have their different shades of meanings, and I don't think it's smart to just iron them out later because by then it's not until you make an error and are informed of it that you'll iron out the problem in the first place.

You should not be learning vocab in a way that's not "proper Japanese".  There's no point.

The point is to become accustomed with something that is completely new to you and to make associations that help keeping these new facts in your memory.

And imagine how popular Heisig would be if all who became familiar with his method rejected that method on the basis that the provided meanings are not "proper".

I know you didn't do Heisig, but most of people here did/do and it would be interesting to see you arguing that studying kanji with Heisig hampers their japanese.

Inny Jan wrote:

You should not be learning vocab in a way that's not "proper Japanese".  There's no point.

The point is to become accustomed with something that is completely new to you and to make associations that help keeping these new facts in your memory.

Associations with what?  Why is associating Japanese words with incorrect English translations a good thing?  Heisig mentions in RTK 2 that it's a bad idea to try to create false associations between kanji on-yomi (like trying to link together which kanji have the on-yomi キン), and I think the same applies to this sort of false vocabulary association.

And imagine how popular Heisig would be if all who became familiar with his method rejected that method on the basis that the provided meanings are not "proper".

I know you didn't do Heisig, but most of people here did/do and it would be interesting to see you arguing that studying kanji with Heisig hampers their japanese.

Heisig is a different situation because no kanji meaning is perfect and I'm not aware of any meanings in Heisig that are just blatantly, flat-out wrong in the way that "Every 週間" is (incidentally, I still sometimes make mistakes with time vs. time + 間.)

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 October 23, 10:22 pm)

Thanks to everyone.

I forgot to set some important premises:

1)I am not a beginner (I already read a lot of real japanese on forums, books, ecc...)

2)I know that how I used the kanji in the example sentence is wrong.


The purpose is just to create a sentence that through context will prompt the correct meaning of the kanji in your mind. It's just a way to relate 同音異義語 together.
It's not even important that all the words are common, because by learning the sentence you have the chance to learn new words for free (so why not insert a lot of words ?).
By the way, 収監 is not very common.

I was also considering to do the same trick with similar sounding words like:
費用 and 異様 for instance.

I am using this method while reading articles on the web.
Let's say I find a 熟語 that I do not know.
I query a dictionary with his on-yomi reading and look for every 熟語  with the same sound. Then I create the sentence and I input on anki.

Last edited by Max.89 (2012 October 24, 5:08 am)

Wow thank you very much!
This seems really useful.
It's probably better to split long sentences into two sentences.