Learning Overview

Visualization & Mnemonics

The first key to our system is visualization. Humans are extremely visual creatures and visualization techniques to enhance memory have been available for thousands of years. We’ll be breaking kanji up into components (which we’ll call radicals), and then create a very visual and memorable story from them that has the meaning (or reading) as the punchline. Then when you see the kanji again the story will come back and so will the meaning. Over time the stories will eventually fade to the background and the kanji will be associated directly with the meaning in your mind. That’s the end goal.

The first person to popularize this technique for learning kanji was James Heisig in his 1977 classic book Remembering the Kanji, which is still often used today. Here we build on that technique - we include vocabulary and readings, we use spaced-repetition to ensure the memories stick, and we try to make it free for everyone to use and have access to regardless of economic status.

Sometimes the mnemonics will work very well for you, sometimes they’ll miss. I do my best but they can’t all be bangers. If you have an idea for a better mnemonic enter it in. It will show up for other users, and if it’s more popular than the original one, it will replace the original one — with attribution to your username as the author. We will be depending on you, the site users to help make the mnemonics better, and to help create them where they don't exist - especially as we attempt to build this site into every existing language on Earth. Mnemonics often don't translate well, and artificial intelligence is not yet good at creating mnemonics, so for this step we do depend on our human users to contribute their creativity to make the site work and be effective for users of any language. The only rule is we can’t use mnemonics that already exist on other sites.