WELL, POOP.

Be glad you’re reading this post because I’ve just illustrated a bunch of holiday gift tags and postcards that you can print out and use! Send your fellow WaniKani subscriber/BFF (of the 5ever kind) a postcard of a jolly Crabigator making a SnowKoichi! Or creep your friends out by mailing them a Kumaman postcard! (Or better yet, send Koichi a Kumaman card!) Get those gift tags printed and stick them on yo presents (pets/annoying little brothers/etc, etc.)!

Have fun printing these out as I did making them, and I hope your holidays are filled with creepy Kumamen and SnowKoichis!

Gift tags!

[Download 1600x1600 Tofugu Gift tag]

[Download 1600x1600 Kumaman Gift tag]

[Download 1600x1600 Textfugu Gift tag]

[Download 1600x1600 WaniKani Gift tag]

Postcards!

[Download 4x6 Tofugu Postcard]

[Download 4x6 Tofugu Postcard]

[Download 4x6 Kumaman Postcard]

[Download 4x6 WaniKani Postcard]

Wallpapers

Tofugu Christmas Wallpaper
[1280x800] ∙ [1920x1080] ∙ [2560x1600]

Kumaman Christmas Wallpaper
[1280x800] ∙ [1920x1080] ∙ [2560x1600]

WaniKani Christmas Wallpaper
[1280x800] ∙ [1920x1080] ∙ [2560x1600]

I hope you all enjoy our version of holiday cheer! Have a great Christmas or holiday or late December — Whatever you celebrate or don’t celebrate!

It’s been more or less accepted in the field of educational psychology for decades that mnemonics help people learn a second language. Using mnemonics, you can learn vocabulary more quickly than through normal means.

But aside from all of the academic talk, learning with mnemonics usually feels a lot better too. Nobody likes memorizing things by rote, repeating them over and over and over until they finally stick. Using mnemonics is a process that makes a lot more sense and can actually be fun.

What Are Mnemonics?

Mnemonics are a different way of remembering things. It’s any kind of technique or trick you can use to better learn and remember something. You use something that you already know or can learn easily and connect it with something you don’t.

A mnemonic could be a word, a memory, a story, a picture, an acronym, a song, a dance, or anything else you can imagine. The important thing is that mnemonic is distinct, memorable, and strongly associated with whatever you’re trying to remember.

Confused? It’s a little complicated at first, but let me give an example to break it down a little bit.

A Colorful Mnemonic Example

Schools use mnemonics all the time to teach things like days of the week, the mathematical order of operations, or US states. If that doesn’t seem familiar, then try this technique that a lot of science teachers use.

There are seven basic colors in the rainbow, and they are:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• Green
• Blue
• Indigo
• Violet

Lots of teachers turn this initially meaningless series of letters (ROYGBIV) into a name: “Roy G. Biv.”

Your pal Roy G. Biv

It might seem ridiculous at first, but for most people it’s a lot easier to remember the name of this made-up person than it is to remember the proper order of the colors of the rainbow. Once you have that name memorized, it’s easy to work backwards and figure out why his name is Roy G. Biv and what that all means.

Using Roy G. Biv as a mnemonic might seem gimmicky and silly, but over a decade after I first learned about it in school, I’m still able to easily remember the name and what it stands for. That’s the power of mnemonics.

Types of Mnemonics and Techniques

Aside from constructing colorful, fictional characters, mnemonics are used all the time to help people learn Japanese. There are a lot of different types of mnemonics and technicques used in learning Japanese, covering everything from kanji to days of the week. Here are some of the more common and/or effective mnemonics used in teaching and learning Japanese:

Keyword Mnemonics

Keyword mnemonics are probably the most common mnemonic used to learn Japanese. Here’s how a keyword mnemonic works: you have a word you want to learn. You take something similar to that word you want to learn, and make a link between the two using vivid, memorable imagery. Take this example from our ebook Hiragana42:

There are lots of things you can do to make keyword mnemonics more vivid and memorable: adding in different senses (i.e. smell, taste) into the mnemonic, or overdramaticizing or exaggerating the mnemonic (like imagining the “ひ” nose as a massive, pimply, covered in warts, etc.), for example. There’s a lot that falls under the keyword mnemonics umbrella.

Pictographs

One of the most basic types of mnemonics used for learning Japanese is pictographs, or imagining a picture in Japanese characters. It makes a lot of sense, considering that early kanji were more or less pictographs.

The most common examples are kanji like 月 and 日, which mean moon and sun respectively. It’s easy to imagine 月 as a crescent moon and 日 as a sun.

It can be very effective early on in learning Japanese, but pictographs get hard once characters get complicated.

Songs

Several of my Japanese teachers have used songs in their lesson plans, usually to teach series or patterns of words. For instance, when I was young I learned the order of the kana (あ、か、さ、etc.) through a song. In high school, my Japanese teacher taught us the days of the week in Japanese using the familiar song Frère Jacques, and another song for days of the month.

Movement

For learning directional or physical words, moving your body while learning certain words can be very helpful. Many Japanese teachers teach their students different directions (右、左、前、後ろ、上、下) while encouraging students to point in the directions while saying them. You might touch your hands while learning the Japanese word for hands (手)—stuff like that.

Japanese Learning Resources That Use Mnemonics

Nowadays, lots of different books, websites, and apps use mnemonics to teach Japanese. The most famous example is James Heisig’s book Remembering the Kanji, which pioneered using mnemonics to learn kanji.

Since Remembering the Kanji was released in the 70^s, there have been a lot of resources that have built on that initial concept. Other traditional textbooks, like Henshall’s A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters have also used mnemonics to teach kanji.

More modern resources use menmonics a lot too. Tofugu uses them to teach hiragana in our ebook, Hiragana42 and to teach kanji on WaniKani and in lessons in TextFugu.

Besides all of the shameless self-promotion, other sites like Kanji Damage and Memrise also use mnemonics to teach kanji. Dr. Moku uses mnemonics to teach hiragana and katakana, and I’m sure I’m missing many other resources that incorporate mnemonics.

You don’t even necessarily need a textbook or a website to teach you mnemonics. Sometimes, the most memorable mnemonics are the ones that you create yourself. This can be especially helpful if you’re having trouble with a particular vocabulary word, phrase or kanji.

No one technique or resource will be able to teach you Japanese in its entirety, but if you’re serious about studying Japanese, then you should definitely have mnemonic resources in your arsenal. Take a look at any of the resources I mentioned above or at our list of Japanese resources and find which ones work for you the best.

Bonus Wallpapers/GIFs

Aya has once again provided us with some extra desktop backgrounds and animated GIFs. Enjoy!

Wallpaper (1280×800)
Wallpaper (2560×1440)

GIF (700×438)
GIF (1280×800)

I also wanted to announce this new (yet unnamed) product early because I wanted some help from any of you intermediate to advanced Japanese learners out there. More on that at the end of the post, but I was hoping you could tell me a bit about how you study your Japanese in certain situations.

Before we do that, though, here’s a little bit about the resource. We’ll call it “Kuma” because, well, I have no idea, but there are several bear pictures in the prototype version.

Intermediate / Advanced: Materials will be stories and articles in Japanese. Each will include an audio recording by the native Japanese speaker who wrote it as well as an English translation.

Variety: One thing that I thought was really important was that there was a large variety of authors writing the stories/articles. Right now there are about 25 different authors and well over 100 articles/stories, and I’m hoping for that number to grow for both of those things over time. As you become more advanced, it becomes more important to learn using different types of people. Men, women, younger, older, different viewpoints on life, different dialects… All these things are Japanese, and if you don’t hear and study with all of them, you’re only learning one type of Japanese. I want to cover many types of Japanese for you.

Flexibility & Simplicity: The goal of “Kuma” is to provide the materials. What you do with said materials is up to you. The more advanced you are at Japanese, the better you should be at knowing how you study best. I want to provide materials that allow you to study the things you need to study most. Need listening practice? Grab the audio and put it on your phone to listen to. Need reading practice? Go for it. Need to practice speaking? Why not try language shadowing? By keeping things simple, you have the flexibility to do what you want. TextFugu is more about hand-holding, “Kuma” is more about letting you do what you please.

It Is A Paid Service: Before you ask, yes, it is a paid service. Heavy discounts for early adopters. I haven’t decided on the final price point, but it will be similar to TextFugu when at full price. Probably will be a discount for TextFugu users, kind of like how WaniKani has a discount for TextFugu users.

Current TextFugu Members Get It Free: If you’re a Forever member of TextFugu before “Kuma” goes live, you’ll be getting a Forever account of “Kuma” as well. Obviously “Kuma” was supposed to be part of TextFugu before it grew into the monster size that it is, so it’s only fair that you guys get it for free as well. Monthly members at TextFugu will also be getting some free time on “Kuma” as well.

Bears: It will probably have bears. Bears are pretty cool.

I was really surprised to get as much of a response as I did from native Japanese speakers interested in making materials for advanced learners to study with. I was hoping to find one or two people. I ended up with around twenty-five. The amount of materials is still blowing me away, and it has caused this to become a very large project, much bigger than I thought it would be.

Right now I’m at the stage where I’m trying to create a template that will work for all or most of the materials, and this is where you come in (I hope!). Say you are given some Japanese text, the audio that goes with it, and an English translation… what do you do? How do you study with it? Let me know in the comments below for one hundred fugu points, redeemable for good karma at your local Buddha Bank.

Oh, and as for when you can use it… well, it will go something like this in terms of priority:

1. TextFugu Members
2. Wanikani Premium Members
3. Tofugu Newsletter Subscribers

So, if anything, be sure you’re subscribed to the newsletter so good things will happen to you. I’m hoping for the first invites to be sent out within a month. Don’t forget to tell me how you’d study with these materials in the comments below. It will help me to design a better lesson template!

All In The Name

Perhaps the hardest part about building WaniKani was coming up with a name. It seemed like every day in January we were just listing off name after name after name, trying to come up with something we liked. Here are some failed names:

• iheartkanji.com
• kanjikan.com
• kanjithehardway.com
• kanjify.com
• kanjimaster.com
• narwhalapp.com

Yeah. Those are pretty bad. On one fateful day, though, I opened a kanji dictionary up to the fish (魚) section (yeah, there’s a fish section, seriously) and wrote down all of the aquatic animal names since most of our stuff seems to be sea-creature themed. I was looking for two animals that had rhyming names. The only two I came across were a match made in heaven: Wani (alligator) and Kani (Crab).

Of course, the moment we tried imagining what the mascot would look like we were sold. CRABIGATOR. ALLICRAB. WANIKANI.

What Is WaniKani?

The idea behind WaniKani is nice and simple. Basically, we wanted to create something that we’d actually use to learn kanji and vocab. In order to do that, we would have to cover five main things:

1. Kanji Radicals
2. Kanji Meanings
3. Kanji Readings (we narrow it down to the most important one for you so you don’t have to learn a million readings per kanji)
4. Vocabulary Meaning
5. Vocabulary Reading

That’s a lot of stuff, but each item on the list is helped by the item before it. For example, a kanji’s meaning comes from the radicals. A vocab’s meaning comes from the kanji that makes it. Etc. Learn them all and you’ll be able to read Japanese. Although this constitutes a lot of items to learn, our goal is to give people to ability to learn all of these within a year. We’re thinking 50 weeks, actually. That way you can take two weeks off for Columbus Day, or something.

Mnemonics, SRS, & Simplicity

As you might expect, learning kanji on WaniKani involves mnemonics, SRS, and a few pounds of simplicity thrown in for good measure. The mnemonics are all made in-house, and also cover the vocabulary (which, I think, is pretty unheard of). When you’ve proven to the computer monster that you’ve learned a new item (radical, kanji, or vocab), it gets put into your review pile. Once they’re in your review pile the SRS kicks in and then based off your answers it will show you the question more often or less often. We’ll definitely be testing and adjusting the “spaces” part of our “spaced repetition system” too when testing begins.

The most important thing for us, though, was the simplicity and ease of use. There are a few similar things out there, but usually it involves combining multiple (complicated) resources into one giant rat king of kanji learning. While combining multiple resource types into one application is a good start, we also wanted to be careful not to let that over-complicate things. Every time we try to add something (Viet’s very good at this) we ask each other what it will do and if it is actually necessary. If it’s not, we cut it. If it is, we then try to shave that feature down to the bare minimum while not losing its purpose. We want to make WaniKani a pleasure to use, above everything else.

Find Out More!

Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting more about WaniKani, but mostly on WaniKani-related sites (sometimes on Tofugu too, though). If you’d like to know more about this project, be sure to follow us via your favorite following service.

Blog: http://blog.wanikani.com
Twitter: @WaniKaniApp
Facebook: http://facebook.com/wanikani/

You can also sign up for access to the closed Beta (don’t have a timeline for that, but it’ll be after the Alpha) by going to the WaniKani homepage and clicking on the giant 鰐蟹. It’ll then let you put your email in. When the beta is ready, we’ll let you know about it. Of course, if you are dying to get in a little bit earlier, getting a copy of the 30 Day Ebook will give you a link to sign up for the Alpha.

In today’s post, I only went over some of the broad, general details on WaniKani. I’ll be diving into specifics over the next few weeks, but if you have any questions in the meantime put them in the comments below and I’ll answer the ones that I can!