benlehman

So I'm learning Japanese.

Today, I came up with a great mnemonic for how to write the object marker を (o). If you look closely at it, you'll see it's made of of three strokes: a horizontal stroke, a wiggly vertical one, and a half-oval.

Okay, so, the first two strokes (when hand-written) are nearly identical to the first two strokes of the Chinese character 女 (nü3 in Mandarin, onna and probably a bunch of other sounds in Japanese), which means "woman" or "female." That's the start of the mnemonic. But the last stroke is like a backwards つ　rather than a ノ.

So it goes like this: "Women are tired of being objectified (get it, object marker?) so they put their foot (the footprint like shape) down."

I figure that someone on my friends list will actually find this funny, rather than just confusing.