Vibe Learning

You’ve heard of vibe coding? This is the next step of my vibe evolution…

Learning Japanese so far looks like a long journey that often makes me forget how much I’ve come so far, even as a complete beginner. One of the more useful things I’ve learned is the idea of attaching stories and mneumonics to the stuff I am trying to learn. This helped out a lot with learning the kana as I was using Duolingo as a simple flashcard review for the symbols.

What’s surprising is how absurd some of the connections I created to cement the symbols into my mind. For example I think of き as looking like Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen who is trying to sense ki (I know, it doesn’t make sense cause its cursed energy but whatever) or さ being a reference to that one Tom Cruise skit from Smosh where he’d say “SAAA” and doing a karate chop. Somehow, my brain catches on eventually and turns these ideas into vibes that indicate to my mind to recall the meanings.

Now take this idea and go one step forward into applying to kanji. Vibe learning is what I call my current method of learning these complicated symbols. The best way to describe it is like thinking of the kanji as emojis that you’re trying to do a pictionary challenge on. Except, my mind tries to tie pieces of the kanji together to make it look like something I can meaningfully attach to.

Admittedly, I am learning the kanji through component learning similar to what I assume Wanikani does which is learning the base parts and building up from there. For me, I am using Migaku’s kanji course and so far it’s been working out. I have to emphasize, that it is always surprising how my brain retains any of these kanji from the building of vibes. Here’s a good example: 食 is the kanji for food - how do I know this? Well it’s actually built from the kanji component for silver ingot with a dot on top that makes it mean good. With a sloped roof/hat on top, that makes it mean food… “Jesse, what are you talking about?”.

It just works. I hate how in the moment of learning these things I feel like I am not retaining anything. But after a little bit of time has passed on top of some repetition, it solidifies into my brain. That’s the beauty of the human mind I guess.