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.
Hamlet (h) fills his bowl of cereal (禾) in the elevator’s kitchen (e2) straight from a Christmas tree (木): he shakes it, and grain rains down from its branches instead of needles. Then he peels the banana (丿) drooping from the treetop like a ripe ear of grain, slices it on top, and raises the bowl like Yorick’s skull.
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.
cereal / grain
The bowl of cereal is a wide white ceramic breakfast bowl with a thin blue rim, heaped to the brim with golden wheat grains and crisp toasted cereal flakes, a few loose grains scattered at its foot.
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