The Chain Method

[cypherpunks2]

Has anyone had a look at the Chain Method, but with Mandarin? It's a method for learning Japanese Kanji as well as their pronunciation.

As far as I can see, it's based on mnemonics and story-building (like Heisig), but uses longer stories featuring several kanji in each story. Furthermore, each story corresponds to one pronunciation (like "カ"), so the story contains all characters with this pronunciation, and bigger stories are better. Also, characters with a phonetic radical appear next to each other in the "chain" of the story. There is also something about non-standard pronunciation (like how "今日" is "きょう"), which perhaps is less applicable to Mandarin.

See the article: http://www.susi.ru/kanji/ChMethod.html Is this method effective at all? I think it seems quite promising.

Now, I wonder how this method would work for Mandarin. How does the fact that Mandarin has more sounds than Japanese (especially if one includes the tones) affect the effectiveness of this method? Remember that larger groups of characters are supposedly better.

How could one handle the tones? One story per tone-pronunciation-pair seems quite ineffective. Should stories instead be for one pronunciation, regardless of tone? (Then how would tone information be coded?) Perhaps one could put some pronunciations into the same story somehow?

Has someone used some similar method for Mandarin?