A lot of people find mnemonics helpful– things like the Remembering the Kanji or memory palace methodology where you come up with little stories for things to remember whatever you need to remember. Usually that doesn’t work well with me, because I find unless something sort of naturally comes to me, trying to purposely come up with a story results in me remembering the moment I thought to come up with the story, and nothing about what it was supposed to help me remember. Also it is just far too time-consuming, because I end up spending hours trying to come up with stories I’m going to either forget or that will make me forget what I’m trying to remember.

Mostly, I rely on my vague synaesthetic connections, which are some weird mix of colors and sensations I can’t describe very well, so they’re pretty useless to other people.

Occasionally, though, my brain actually does come up with silly mnemonics spontaneously on its own. Such is the case for 浅い【あさい】(asai), which means “shallow”. I’ve come to associate it with the açaí berry, pretty obviously for the similar pronunciation. I have no idea why that works for me, since there’s not really any actual link aside from pronunciation, and I don’t have a story to go with it to make it link. But somehow I’ve formed what seems to be a permanent link between the two that helps me remember the word.