Kanji Mnemonics: How to Make Characters Stick

Look at 休. On the left is 亻, the squeezed form of 人 (person). On the right is 木 (tree). A person leaning against a tree: rest. Once you've seen it that way, it's hard to go back to seeing six unrelated strokes.

That's a kanji mnemonic. You split the character into parts you already know, then tie the parts to the meaning with a small story or picture. It's the most common way adult learners get meanings to stay put. It also gets oversold, so this post covers how to do it well and the point where it stops helping.

Why splitting a kanji into parts works

曜, the kanji in the names of the days of the week, has 18 strokes. Nobody remembers 18 strokes. But 曜 is 日 on the left and, on the right, two ヨ shapes sitting on 隹. Three or four chunks are manageable, and the same chunks keep turning up elsewhere. 日 is in 明, 時, 晴 and 映. 隹 is in 集, 進 and 難.

The 2,136 joyo kanji are built from a few hundred recurring pieces. Learn the pieces, and each new kanji is a new arrangement of familiar parts instead of a new drawing.

A word on terms. Traditional dictionaries sort kanji under 214 radicals, and each kanji is filed under exactly one of them. For mnemonics it doesn't matter which part is the official radical. Any piece you can recognize is fair game, so most learners just say components or parts.

Worked examples

Start with characters where the parts add up almost by themselves.

These are easy because the parts really do combine into the meaning. Kanji like that are the minority. Most characters were built another way: one part hints at the meaning and the other was chosen for its sound. 時 (time) is 日 (sun, day) plus 寺 (temple). The temple is there because 寺 and 時 share the reading ジ. It has nothing to do with time.

That's fine. A mnemonic doesn't have to be the true history of the character. It only has to get you from the shape to the meaning. For 時 you might picture a temple bell ringing out the hours of the day. It's invented, and it works.

Stories keep similar kanji apart

This is where mnemonics earn their keep. Four common kanji have 寺 on the right and differ only in the left-hand part:

If all you remember is "the one with the temple", you'll mix up all four. If each story names the left-hand part, you won't. Look-alike kanji are the ones that most deserve a deliberate story, even if you skip mnemonics for everything else.

What makes a mnemonic good or bad

Most mnemonics that fail do so for one of a handful of reasons.

• Every part appears in it. Leave a part out of the story and you'll confuse the kanji with its neighbor, the way 待 and 持 get confused.
• Each part always has the same name. If 氵 is water in one story and rain in the next, the stories blur together. Pick one name per component and keep it.
• It's short. One sentence or one picture. A paragraph-long story is just a second thing to memorize.
• It's concrete. A person doing something odd in a specific place sticks. An abstract statement about harmony doesn't.
• It lands on the exact meaning. A story for 休 that ends in "sleep" will cost you later, when you meet 寝 (to go to bed, sleep) and 眠 (sleepy). Aim the story at the word you want to recall.

Ready-made mnemonics from a book or an app are faster, and they're good enough for most characters. When one hasn't clicked after a couple of reviews, replace it with your own. The ones you invent tend to stick better, but inventing 2,000 of them is slow, so save the effort for the kanji that keep slipping.

Mnemonics for readings are a different job

Everything so far has been about meaning. Readings are harder to pin down with a story, because the sound has no connection to the shape. The usual workaround is a sound-alike word. 休 is read キュウ in compounds, so you put the resting person in a queue. 明 can be read メイ, so the sun and moon are both out in May.

This works, up to a point. The trouble is that Japanese has a small set of on'yomi sounds and a lot of kanji sharing each one. Dozens of joyo kanji are read コウ, and one sound-alike word can't serve them all.

Two things do more for readings than stories do. The first is learning each kanji inside a word. 休む (やすむ, to rest) and 休日 (きゅうじつ, a day off) give you both readings of 休 with a meaning attached, and words are what you'll be reading anyway.

The second is the sound components already inside the characters. 寺 lends its ジ to 時 and 持. In the same way, 青 (セイ) sits inside 晴 (clear weather), 清 (pure), 精 (spirit) and 静 (quiet), and all four can be read セイ. Spot the sound component and you can often guess the on'yomi of a kanji you've never studied. Often, not always: 待 has 寺 in it and is read タイ. If on'yomi and kun'yomi are still fuzzy, this explainer sorts them out.

Where mnemonics stop

A mnemonic is scaffolding. In the first week it's your only route from shape to meaning. You see 男 and think: field, power, man. After enough reviews the route shortens and you just see "man". The story has done its job by then and you can let it fade. If you're still reciting stories for kanji you learned a year ago, you need more reading practice, and better stories won't fix it.

A story also teaches one keyword, and kanji aren't keywords. 生 means life, birth, raw or student depending on the word it's in, and no single picture covers all of that. Vocabulary does.

And a story won't survive on its own. Without review it fades like anything else. The combination that works is a story first, then spaced repetition to keep it alive, then reading to make recognition automatic. We go through how those pieces fit into a routine in our guide to the best way to learn kanji.

James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, the book that made the story method popular among English speakers, teaches meaning and writing first and leaves readings and vocabulary for afterwards. Learners still argue over whether that ordering is right.

Common questions