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.
There have been reports of illegal sleepovers in the aorta’s bathroom (ao4), so Joan of Arc (ji) wants to get to the bottom of it. She plans to film the intruders with a surveillance camera (见), but at the same time she may not be discovered, so she hides under a saucepan lid (冖) which is in turn covered up with catnip (⺍) as camouflage. However her attempt at filming the sleepovers fail: as the night comes, she falls asleep (觉) herself in her hideout, cuddling with the many cats attracted by the catnip.
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
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