Welcome! First lesson: be careful with IME, because it’s こんにちは =)

あのう…「おきい」って何ですか。

Welcome!

Well, my listening ability is still weak as, so…

… But 時 doesn’t mean “bell”. It means “time” or “hour”. The bell is irrelevant to the mnemonic. And besides that, it’s not really a mnemonic, but more a historical and etymological fact. The mnemonic is just “time was once kept by the temple” and the bell is incidental to that. It could be marked by a cannon, or some guy standing on a tower shouting “it’s three o’clock and all’s well” for all the difference it makes. 時 is 日 + 寺 simply because time was once kept by the temple, and it was signaled by ringing a bell.

I don’t get why this is such a sticking point. Go make your own mnemonic if an etymological one isn’t working for you.

マーク・ウェーバー wrote:

And in many cases it doesn’t like

Ok, this is like me saying “just remember, I before E except after C” and you piping up with “actually, there’s more exceptions to that rule than there are words which follow it” – which, while technically correct, is (a) missing the point, and (b) completely useless as a handy mnemonic. “Also” means “as well” not “always”. But hey, let’s humour you:

曲 – I suppose you could say there’s a 日 in there somewhere, I guess. I wouldn’t use that as a way of remembering how to write that, though. I’d probably memorise that as one chunk.

甲 – That’s more like 田 than 日, really.

昌 – That’s 日 being a sun.

厚 – It’s read as あつ. あつい = hot. The sun is hot. 日 is the sun.

硬 – Yeah, this is another one which, technically speaking, has a 日 in it, but again, I wouldn’t memorise it like that. 便 too.

堺 – That’s 田 again. Are you the sort of person who comments that the Chevvy Nova didn’t sell well in Mexico because “no va” means “doesn’t go”?

（if you ever go to Osaka be sure to vist 堺市) – I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m there.

鏡 – That’s 見 squished down a bit for size.

湯 – That’s 日 being a sun. A hot, hot, sun. Besides, who doesn’t like to pass time in a bath?

I think there are more cases where it doesn’t have anything to do with time or passing of time ;)

You mean, such as some of the more obvious ones like 音, 意, 暗, 闇, 億, 白, 指, 映, 書, 源, 宿, 婚 or 混, many of which appear to have nothing to do with even the sun, let alone the passage of time? But hey, I wouldn’t use a “日 indicates the passage of time” mnemonic to remember any of those – 音, for example, is just “stand on the sun”. If you’re going to try to trip me up, there’s a thousand better characters you can pick without resorting to non-Joyo kanji, or kanji made of 田 or 更…

Wait, does Koichi never mention that?

Yes, the particle を is always pronounced the same as お. And in modern Japanese, the hiragana character を is only ever used as the particle を…

I dunno. I mean, it could be helpful, but Koichi introduces katakana so late in the lessons that you could probably infer that all of the same rules as hiragana apply to katakana too (aside from long vowels, anyway). Katakana’s also got some crazy combinations that only apply to katakana…