I’ve personally found mnemonics to be one of the most powerful study techniques, but I think they often work best when you make the time investment to come up with your own. A lot of the mnemonics I use play on personal memories or people I know so aren’t really transferrable. The key is to make them very visual and involve some kind of interaction. I also find the more ludicrous the better. Japanese is also an ideal language for using mnemonic devices as it’s quite a phonetic language. You can create mnemonic devices for each sound or common compound sounds and then chain them together.

Before starting Japanese I spent 2 years studying Chinese using the memory-by-rote “method” of writing characters over and over again. I only wish I had come across mnemonics earlier as they would have helped me so much with Chinese. I find I can quite easily learn 3x as many new words in an afternoon of mnemonics based study (you could probably just keep going too). I’ll then review once the next day and again a few days later – then it’s pretty much in there. Sure they take a bit more initial time investment but this pays off 100x in the long-term memory advantages.

If anyone is interested I’d highly recommend the book “Your Memory – How it works & how to improve it” by Kenneth L. Higbee. It’s full of not only memory techniques but also fascinating explanations of why these techniques work, and how the brain and memory work. I really think this kind of stuff should be taught at schools – learning how to learn is so important.