Japanese Made Easy: Days of the Week
Japanese days of the week memory aids
Here is another of my Japanese vocabulary sets, with memory aids to help you to learn them. This memory training method involves the creation of images which connect the idea of what you are trying to learn with the sound. The sillier or more amusing the image is, the more likely you are to remember it. That's not to say that all my memory aids are silly or amusing, though...
By using memory aids like these, you should find that vocabulary will stick in your mind much more easily than it does with other ways of learning, but in the end, it's what works for you that counts. These memory aids may help you to come up with ideas of your own, and if you do, that's great!
Just as all of the days of the weekend the same way (day) in English, these words all end the same way in Japanese (-yoobi - pronounced 'yorbi'). So these memory aids are for the sounds at the beginning of each word, not the whole thing.
Monday is getsuyoobi (get-soo): 'Get Sue to take you to school / work on Monday'
Tuesday is kayoobi (kah): 'I'll take you to work / school on Tuesday in my car'.
Wednesday is suiyoobi (soo-i): 'Sue is taking you to school / work again on Wednesday'.
Thursday is mokuyoobi (mock-oo): 'On Thursdays I have a mocha on the way to school / work'.
Friday is kinyoobi. 'Kin you take me to school / work on Friday?'
Saturday is doyoobi (the do sounds like the word 'dot' without the 't'). 'I don't have to go to school / work on Saturday'.
Sunday is nichiyoobi (nitchy). 'On Sundays I feel an itchy to go back to school / work the next day'.
These memory aids can be just a starting point for you to get the idea of learning word sets in this way. You might be able to think up ones that work even better for you. I did try to make a sentence of the above words, for example, which went like this:
"Get Sue and Kay to make soup, mocha and some kind of doughnuts, Nick".
There is a quiz below to test how well these memory aids work for you. As with any Japanese vocabulary or other language learning you do, it's a good idea to come back in a few days or so and try the quiz again, to see if the words have stuck in your memory.
Have fun thinking up some memory aids of your own and feel free to share any really good ones you come up with. Let me know if there are any other memory aids for learning Japanese vocabulary that you'd like me to come up with!
Video: Japanese Days of the Week
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Days of the Week Quiz
view quiz statisticsJapanese Days of the Week Links
- Days of the Week in Japanese
The names of the days of the week in Japanese and their origins. A comparison with the names in Chinese and Vietnamese. - Japanese Days of the Week
In Japanese, the days of the week are easy to learn. The days of the week from Sunday to Monday all have one thing in common in Japanese: YOOBI or 'day'.
