斥: axe it, reject it, repel it

斥:  reject.  It looks like the axe radical 斤, but with a strikethrough.  So:  I really reject this thing.  So I axe it and then strike it out.

訴:  accusation.  Words that thoroughly reject.

斥訴

余: it's all just too much

余 means remainder or too much.  Maybe it's a broom sweeping out a shed, and there's way too much dirt remaining.  It helps my story here if I focus on it being too much dirt, so:

除:  remove.  Remove the hills of dirt from that shed.  (掃除機, sweep-remove-machine, is a vacuum cleaner).
斜: diagonal, slant.  Put too much dirt in the dipper and it'll slant diagonally.
途  route, road.  Move the dirt you swept up down the road.
徐: gradually.  Don't want to get caught dumping, so I gradually let dirt spill as I travel the intersection.
叙: confer/describe.  I'll put my hand on the dirt before conferring it on... you.
塗: paint.  Liquid black dirty stuff that looks like earth.  (The earth radical at the bottom is also in ink 墨).

余除斜途徐叙塗

The clear brightness of 奐

奐 is a 表外漢字, hyougai (rarely used) kanji.  But it's got two commonly used descendants.

奐（かん）：clear/bright.  Looks like a lamp on a table, with the bulb clear/bright enough to see the wiring.
喚 （かん）：yell.  Which is what you'll do if you stick your hand on that hot bulb.
換 （かん）：interchange/convert/replace.  That's what your hand can do to a light bulb.

喚換

且 and friends: story of a cairn

Kanji related to 且.  Since many can be pronounced ソ in on-reading, I'll mark the ones that can.  The story to link them:  The community builds a cairn, up past the hills, to reverence our ancestors.  Eventually we build it a roof 宜.

且 (ソ).  Moreover:  3 rocks stacked in a cairn, ソ put more over the ones already there.
租 (ソ).  Tax:  Moreover, there's a tax on the rice harvest to pay for the cairn.
粗 (ソ).  Coarse:  Moreover, the rice grains ground on the cairn (yuck) are coarse.
阻 (ソ).  Hinder:  Moreover, the hill is a hindrance to getting to that cairn.
祖 (ソ).  Ancestors:  ソ we built an altar at the cairn to reverence our ancestors.
狙 (ソ).  Aim:  Moreover, we aim the animal at the cairn as part of our sacrifice/celebration.
査 (サ).  Investigate:  Moreover, we investigated putting a wood covering on the cairn, but...
組 (ソ).  Assemble/group:  Moreover, we assemble threads in a group at the cairn instead
宜.  Kun includes よろ as in 宜しく(よろしく), best regards).  Best regards:  We honor the cairn with a ceremonial roof.  (Of threads thus assembled 組).

畳 tatami has the same root, but I can't fit it into my story.  So I'll say the square mat 田 fits as a covering (horizontal line in middle), more over the floor than was there before.

且租粗阻祖狙査組宜畳

Well, that was クール

I said I wasn't going to do much more Anki.  Takes the joy out of it.

But something else put the 嬉しい back in.  I picked up my print copy of ライオンと魔女, picked a random spot, and read:

「魔女は、ものすごくおそらしいひとなの。じぶんではナルニアの女王だといっているけど、ちっともそ権利がないひとでね、フォーンもドライアードもナイアードも、小人たちも動物たちも、いいほうのひとたちはみんあ、魔女のことをからってるわ。

Admittedly there are parts I'm not getting.  But I get witch, person, self-of-as-for, Queen of Narnia, is saying, but ("She calls herself 'Queen of Narnia,' but..."), faun, dryad, naiad, dwarf, animal, people of the good way, everyone, dislike, and the closing "wa" particle meaning it's a girl or woman talking.  ("She calls herself 'Queen of Narnia,' but ... the fauns and the dryads and naiads, the dwarfs and the [talking] animals, all the good people, they just hate her." -- I remember a little from the book, too, which helps.)

So I'm popping 権利 and 小人 and 魔法 and some other terms into Anki.  Maybe if it's fun terms I won't be so mind-numbingly bored.

好きじゃない

Not liking it.  Here's how it's working out:

I put all the vocabulary from a Reading Japanese with a Smile story into Anki.  It's nontrivial.  Since there are still kanji I don't know, I copy them into Kanji Study.  Then I do what I usually do with kanji, when I get time:  I find other kanji with the same radical using The Kanji Map; make up mnemonics or steal Henshall's; stuff them into Kanji Study as well.  OK, this is still fun.

The Anki flashcards look like this:  correct spelling (front), phonetic spelling and mnemonic (back).

大晦日

おおみそか, last day of the year

Big day, dark as miso soup, at year's end

Without mnemonics, I'm hopeless.  (Except on the easy ones.  It's unpredictable what's easy, but I always know.)

Thing is, I'm finding what draws me to Japanese was the beauty of the language, especially its written form.  Memorizing weird squiggles without understanding them robs me of that beauty.  So I have to get the kanji and understand them, to have an interest in going on.

It helps that Reading Japanese with a Smile is quirky and fun.  Not sure it's going to be enough.  I may have to go back to my old way of doing it, despite the drawback that I'm not piling on vocabulary that way.

A totally new tack: Anki

This study method is a work in progress.

I found I was reading ライオンと魔女 and the new words, I'd forget as soon as I looked away from them.  How do I get myself to remember new vocabulary?

On reddit, Anki the online flashcard program is a god only rivaled by the almighty Genki. I tried it before on my desktop computer.  It was clunky; I couldn't find things easily.  It was bossy.  "You want to look over this deck again?  Sucks to be you, huh?  NO."

But if it's designed for remembering things, and I'm not remembering things, and I'm not ready to get out index cards and a Sharpie... Anki's promise includes "spaced repetition," which is supposed to get you learning things appropriately.  (You see a flashcard when you've almost forgotten it but not quite, essentially, and Science Has Revealed that this is the best way to cram things in.)  Well, I like science.

So I took the first short story in Reading Japanese with a Smile -- nine stories from Japanese weekly Shuukan Asahi, with almost everything defined and discussed for language learners -- and put all the vocabulary I didn't know into an Anki deck.

Now instead of looking at the book and forgetting the word instantly, I can look at the deck and forget it instantly.

So I put in mnemonics.  It's helping some.  だいこんげき , "deeply moved," I remembered when I woke this morning based on "The key to deeply moving Gaye is a daikon radish" -- ack -- but mostly I'm forgetting the mnemonics too.

One reason is the kanji:  despite work in Kanji Study, I don't know them all.  So today I put them all into Kanji Study.  Several reasons this is annoying:

• I can't just select all and put 'em on the clipboard.  I have to go to each individual card and highlight what I want.  Can't just swipe between cards, either; go into a card, highlight and copy, go to Kanji Study, select +, select Add from Clipboard, go back to Anki, get out of the card, do it all again.
  
  There may be a way to export the deck to CSV, load it in Excel, and then put it into another program; IDK.
• I can't browse the cards for an individual deck; I can only browse all cards in the database at once.  (This is Android version.)  This is going to be a pain when I add the next deck for story #2.
• It doesn't match with the way I've been using Kanji Study:  learn kanji by common component, rather than by occurrence in a particular bit of text (!).  Oh, well, this was going to happen eventually, no matter what methods I use.

---

OK, it's been a few days.  I am getting the flashcards eventually.  It feels like very shallow learning -- I see a word and guess how it's pronounced and I'm right, but I don't know why I'm right and I'm sure I'll forget in a couple of days.

But I've got to get vocabulary expanding or I'll never get anywhere.  So I'll give it a fair shot.