EXPOSED! The Secret Mnemonics Hidden in Vocabulary

You've probably been thinking kanji are just fancy letters that make it hard to pronounce stuff, they 'get in the way' of the sounds that let you understand written Japanese words. If so, you've been doing it wrong. The words aren't sound-based. Instead, small units of meaning called morphemes, represented by kanji, are combined to make most of the words. You see the kanji as objects which trigger meanings. Reading in Japanese is driven by character meanings. Kanji add a new visual dimension to written language that alphabet-only folks have not encountered before. I don't mean that rhetorically, it's actually how the brain processes kanji. What you should be doing when learning most words and reading Japanese is learning to first look at kanji, as 'objects', and triggering the meanings you associate them with by sight, at first glance (leaving pronunciation for second glance), until the process becomes automatic: Because those kanji/meanings are combined with secret Japanese mnemonic techniques that have been built into the language, hidden from you by ninjas and your barbarian Western teachers. But I have journeyed far and stolen these techniques, and now reveal their exotic magic to you. Okay, but seriously: This deck features two-kanji compounds and their "word formation principles." (Source data) Two-kanji compounds make up ~70% of all Japanese vocabulary. The kanji, representing morphemes (meanings), form these words based on a handful of combination types, such as "modifier + modified" (漢字: China + Character = Chinese characters) or "verb + complement" (預金: deposit + money = [bank] deposit). Use this deck to master these principles and apply them to learn vocabulary, transforming your perception of Japanese. I've written up a few usage tips here. Pictures, background info, and references can be found here. Research indicates that "morphological awareness" aids literacy in many ways:

Referring to small units of meaning—morphemes, morphological awareness can be defined as learners' "conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure." This is a skill that's useful but often overlooked in English, where phonological awareness takes most of the focus. Morphological awareness in Japanese (and Chinese) is considerably more important than phonological awareness. Here, here, here, and here are a few studies on the topic. Japanese children and adults, through school and massive exposure over the course of years, develop an intuitive understanding of the ways kanji combine to make compounds so that it becomes automatic and mostly invisible as mental representations of the compounds instantly activate word meanings. But even native speakers and especially foreign learners can benefit from deliberately learning these techniques, scaffolding the process instead of waiting for statistics and long periods of time to do the trick.

My specific recommendation is to focus more on these 'compounding schemata' than general mnemonics. Use these principles as 'creative constraints'. I provided a hint field containing kanji meanings, as a supplement for the mnemonics—not to be graded on. Update 4: I added a KSG field and template so that you can learn kanji and words at the same time. See this add-on for more. See also. Update 1: Respectful response to deck review. Update 2: Fixed 'wrong field count' error. Update 3: Dear Anki reviewer who wrote: "As the title states. When I try to review the cards, there's just nothing there to review, both sides are blank" - I checked, and it worked fine for me.