A mnemonic is a short, deliberately ridiculous scene, built to be hard to forget. Who appears in it and where it takes place are how the pronunciation is stored; the objects in it stand for the parts the character is written with. That is the Marilyn Method, and the comic below is the same scene, drawn.
Mnemonic symbol: an excavator. A plow and a shovel are both tools for moving earth, and an excavator can be used to dig up dinosaur bones.
Maud Younger (y) is digging for dinosaur bones (丨) in the elevator’s living room (e3). First she used a plow (㇆) to destroy the floor, then she used an excavator (也) to pull out the dinosaur bone surrounded by lots of earth. Finally she uses a shovel (乚) to remove the remaining earth manually so as to not damage the precious dinosaur bone. (The stroke order is ㇆丨乚)
Shoutout to cyberscooty for uploading this to https://permaclipart.org/clipart/excavator/. Thanks!
Matthias, about 2 years ago
MandarinBanana teaches pronunciation with the Marilyn Method: every Pinyin syllable is one initial plus one final, the initial becomes a person, an animal or a deity, and the final becomes a place in your memory palace — with the tone deciding which part of that place the scene happens in. Remember the little story below for each half and the whole syllable comes back with them.
Chinese characters are built out of smaller characters. Each component carries a mnemonic symbol - one concrete object that stands in for it - and a mnemonic story hands those objects to the person and the place that stand for the pronunciation. Learn a component once and every character that reuses it gets easier.
Make it your learning target and MandarinBanana works out the shortest route to it: the two sounds its syllable is built from, then the components of the character itself, one short step at a time. No account needed to start.
(adverb) also; both ... and ... (before predicates only) / (literary) particle having functions similar to 啊[a5]
The excavator is a heavy-duty hydraulic excavator with a weathered yellow paint finish, featuring visible scuffs and minor rust spots. The machine has a rotatable cab with tinted glass windows and a black protective metal grid over the roof. It is equipped with thick, muddy black rubber tracks and a reinforced triple-jointed hydraulic boom arm. The large toothed steel digging bucket is dark charcoal grey with polished silver edges from use. Dual hydraulic cylinders are visible along the arm, and a small red fire extinguisher is mounted to the exterior of the cab.
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