within / among / in / middle / center / while (doing sth) / during / (dialect) OK / all right
中
=
丨
+
口
:
Mnemonic symbol: a dart board, because you always try to hit the center.
Julian Giant Squid (zhu-) is throwing dinosaur bones (丨) as darts on a dart board in front of the engine ((e)ng1). To make it a bit more difficult he's throwing mandarins (口) into the air as well and skewers them up right in the center (中 is a mandarin skewered on a dinosaur bone) in mid flight with the dinosaur bones. He's still able to consistently hit the center (中) of the dart board.
小
=
八
+
亅
:
Mnemonic symbol: a small daisy. 小 looks like the stem 亅 of the flower is pushing aside the earth 八 as it grows out of the seed in the ground.
Xi Shi (xi) is decorating her hair with lots of small (小) daisies (mnemonic symbol for 小) in the aorta's living room (ao3). She wants to have lots of daisies in the future as well, so she plants new daisies. She found that the perfect substrate for planting daisies is made by crushing eight-balls (八) with a crow bar (亅).
to learn / to study / to imitate / science / -ology
学
=
小
+
冖
+
子
:
Xu Xian wants to study scienceology and learn more about daisies. Just inside the elevator's kitchen, he put some daisies into a prize cup and covered them with a cooking top. He wants to study the growth rate of the daisies depending on the pH of the water in the prize cup.