暑 Hot

Hot is Sun and Person, acting phonetically to express burn.

夏 Summer

How this came to mean summer isn’t clear. Presumably summer was associated with a particular dance or festival. Remember as the shape of crossed legs.

温 Warm

Some scholars take warm to refer to an act of kindness in giving a prisoner a bowl of water. Suggest remembering as “Sun warms water in a bowl”.

Japanese words via the West

Terebi - Sort of like ‘televi’ which is short for television.

Bideo - Video

Karaoke - Actually a mix of Japanese and borrowed English. Kara means open (as in karate, open hand) and oke, which is short for orchestra.

醜 Ugly

The devil and a wine jar form the kanji for ugly. It also has meanings of unclean and shame.

刈 Reap

The X comes from a pictograph of shears while the knife element was added to bring home the idea of reap. What surprises me about this entry is that it’s number 1092 in the Jōyō list taught in Japanese schools. It’s a higher level kanji meaning it’s part of the higher grade levels beyond 6th grade. My point is that it’s an easy-to-remember kanji. It has few strokes, a simple meaning, and easy mnemonic.

白 White

White is a sun with a ray of light. That’s how I see it. Some etymologies say it’s a mark pointing to the tip of a white fingernail.

O is for Ogre

 

Here’s a visual mnemonic for the the hiragana ‘O’. It’s important to know that this character is a syllabary that only conveys a sound. It does not mean Ogre. To me, it looks like an ogre which helps me remember its sound ‘O’.

Jitensha by Niceforo

 

A wonderful capture of found typography from Niceforo’s Flickr photostream.

買 Buy

 The bottom element started out as a picture of a shell but as an element means money. The top was once a pictograph of a net, which makes me think of having a net worth to buy stuff.

What’s interesting phonetically, is that it’s on-yomi reading ‘BAI’  バイ matches the English pronunciation, ‘buy’.

Kanji Mnemonic 193

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