Goroawase System - Japanese Mnemonics! Real fun !!

In our school days, we had a really tough, yet fun time while remembering the order of the Solar system in Geography("My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine" for remembering - Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc etc in that order), or remembering the colors of the rainbow in Science(VIBGYOR). Apart from these commonly known mnemonics, we prepare our own mnemonics to memorize some things in our curriculum.

When it comes to Japanese, they have a peculiar system called as Goroawase(語呂合わせ).
Goroawase is a common form of Japanese wordplay whereby homophonous words are associated with a given series of letters, numbers or symbols, in order to associate a new meaning with that series. Goroawase is mostly used as a mnemonic technique, especially in the memorization of numbers such as dates in history, scientific constants, phone numbers, exam numbers, etc.

Here are some of the popular Goroawase:
As mnemonics:
1492 (the year of discovery of America) can be memorized as: iyo! kuni ga mieta! (derived as follows: i (1) yo (4)! ku (9) ni (2) (ga mieta)!), meaning: "Wow! I can see land!"
23564 (23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds, the length of a sidereal day) can be read "ni-san-go-ro-shi", which sounds very similar to "nii-san koroshi" (兄さん殺し), or in English killing one's brother.
Other examples:
4649 "yoroshiku" (derived as follows: "yo" (4) "ro" (6) "shi" (4) "ku" (9)) means: "Nice to meet you."
18782 can be read "i-ya-na-ya-tsu" (いやなやつ) – meaning unpleasant guy
893 can be read "ya-ku-za" (やくざ) or Yakuza. It is traditionally a bad omen for a student to receive this candidate number for an examination.
573 stands for "ko-na-mi" or Konami. This number appears in many Konami telephone numbers and as a high score in Konami games.
.59 "ten go ku" is the title of a song from the Konami game beatmania IIDX.
3923 "san kyu ni san", or "Thank you Nissan!"(Nii-san means elder brother, so it more like "Thank you, brother."). Found in the Online Comics of NBC TV Show Heroes, for which Nissan is a sponsor.
More recently, a popular book by name 1Q84(Ichi Kyuu Hachi Yon which is read as 1984) has been published in Japan and is a best seller already.

Happy reading and happy exploring Japanese language to all !!
Till then, 39(san kyuu = Thank you) from me !! :)