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: 甲 just looks like a protest placard.
It’s the first (甲) time Joan of Arc (ji) is protesting against something using a protest placard (甲). Inside of the ashram (a3), she is protesting against the many dinosaur bones (丨) lying around. She does not only have a protest placard, she also uses a microphone (曰) to deliver raging speeches.
I tried this follow-up prompt (using ChatGPT these days): "Nice! Have her hold the microphone in one hand and the protest placard in the other. No third arm please." But no luck, it came out exactly as this one, lol
Matthias, over 1 year 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.
first of the ten Heavenly Stems 十天干[shi2 tian1 gan1] / (used for an unspecified person or thing) / first (in a list, as a party to a contract etc) / letter "A" or roman "I" in list "A, B, C", or "I, II, III" etc / armor plating / shell or carapace / (of the fingers or toes) nail / bladed leather or metal armor (old) / ranking system used in the Imperial examinations (old) / civil administration unit in the baojia 保甲[bao3 jia3] system (old) / ancient Chinese compass point: 75°
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