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: I take “eye” and “tree” as resembling an ent, an alive tree. Xi Shi (xi) portrays (相) an ent (相) in the anglepod’s bathroom (ang4). Unfortunately she’s really bad at painting, and her portrait resembles more a Christmas tree (木). The Eye of Providence (目) enters and, just from the shape of the Christmas Tree, instantly recognizes its own portrait (相).
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.
2 translations
The Ent is a towering, bipedal humanoid Ent with a torso made of thick, gnarled English Oak bark. His face is deeply recessed into the trunk, featuring a wide, flat nose formed by a horizontal burl and deep-set eyes that glow with a soft amber light. He has a long, braided beard made of hanging grey Spanish moss and thick lichen. His fingers are elongated, tapering willow branches with small, budding emerald-green leaves at the tips. He wears no clothing, but his shoulders are overgrown with a dense shelf of bright green forest moss and small white fungal caps.
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