Mneumonic Memory Places Techniques?

[wschlender]

Hi!

 

I'm fairly new to Mandarin and was wondering if anyone had used mneumonic techniques for remembering word and character pronunciation (including the tones) before?

 

Here's a couple of links to people who've written about these techniques.

 

http://countryoftheblind.blogspot.tw/2012/01/mnemonics-for-pronouncing-chinese.html

https://mullenmemory.com/blog/2015/9/24/learning-chinese-with-memory-techniques

 

I took a class from a U.S. memory champion once which makes me think that these techniques could really work. I'm wondering what all of your experience has been...

 

 

 

 

[Cake]

I'm not an expert but there are definitely hints within the characters that can help you remember. It's pretty cool in my opinion.

 

I'm not going to say you should outright focus on memorising a list of the radicals, but rather notice which radicals are in the characters you're learning. It's fair to say it happens very often. A radicals meaning connected to anothers meaning, a radicals meaning connected to anothers radicals sound.

 

Before you know it you can kind of guess at the possible meaning or sound of characters you haven't learned yet and you have a great way to remember the characters you've already studied.

 

Finally, download Pleco if you haven't already. it has a character tab which will show you the components of each character. The app is really the best, read the reviews of it.

[Xiao Kui]

memory palace techniques are not without their merit, but i think time could be better spent just learning words in their context. Sometimes the character or word just naturally suggests a mnemonic like 福 fu  reminds me of the English for fortune and 快 kuai sounds a bit like quick.  I second cake's suggestion to learn radicals - it's amazing how quickly you'll begin to think of 月as a moon and begin to associate it with body parts and organs :), as unlikely as those associations may seem at first glance.

[Shelley]

I am not a fan of this style of learning, for me it is like have an extra step in the process, cut out the middle man and just learn the characters, meaning and tone. I don't think of the tone as separate from the pronunciation. I just learn that x is pronounced like this including the tone. There are occasions when the tones change, you will learn about this but again it is when certain combinations of characters are together so just learn those two sound together. Its good to learn what the rules are but mainly go by your ear.

 

I really don't like the mnemonics that create a story around the character to help remember it, again an extra unnecessary step.

 

The best help to remembering the characters is to learn their component parts and the etymology of the character. There are many posts by OneEye about this. if you get Pleco (which i highly recommend, no student of chinese should be with out it) you can get the addon dictionary by Outlier which OneEye is part of.

It is also really good to start writing them, practising writing helps with the muscle memory and getting it in your brain

 

If you would like more info about how I learn chinese and the tools and resources I use, have a read of my blog (see my signature).

 

Welcome to the forums, this is a great place for help and advice.

[trevorld]

I've never used method of loci (i.e. memory palace) before with Chinese but I personally try to create a (ideally vivid) mnenomic story whenever I learn a new character using the character components and (at least) one of the character's meaning.  It is much easier to do this with some characters then others.  Sometimes (but not usually) the character's genealogy provides such a good story, regardless learning and using the characters components is usually considered pretty good practice.  Spending time to inject as much vivid memorable meanings and emotions to a character and also spending time to recognize and linking it with its components should help you to learn and remember the character and I personally don't think it is a waste of time.   Don't be surprised that over time that you'll remember the characters pronunciation and meaning but will forget the (all but the most memorable) mnemonics (which is fine).  Don't rely only on mnenomics, learning characters in context (including some high-frequency words they are in), and some (perhaps spaced) repetition practice and extensive reading will do wonders on retaining characters (and words).

 

I know some people put in different backgrounds for their story to remember tones (at least for the ones they have difficulty with) but I personally don't.  I do look carefully at the phonetic component's pronunciation (if it has a phonetic component) and see if it is the same and if not examine carefully how it differs.  If you really want to inject an emotional link in your brain to the pronunciation of a word (and hence its character) in order to remember it you can try to find a memorable context such as a scene in a podcast skit (popupchinese is pretty good for fairly memorable skits) or a movie or tv show that uses a word that includes the character which will make it harder for you to forget it.  For example in popupchinese they have a scene in their absolute beginners series where a beggar grabs a woman's hand to try to get her to give her money and she repeatedly says ”放手！“ (fàngshǒu) to demand he let go.  That scene is implanted in my memory and I won't forget the pronunciation of those two characters.  You could also try to create a memorable personable experience (i.e. use your new words to pick a fight or make love to a Chinese person and you probably won't forget them).  For example I asked my Chinese friends for some nice things to say to a Chinese woman I was courting (who I am now married to), they drilled some suggestions with me, and I used them with good effect on my now wife.  Over a year later I learned the characters of what they taught me and didn't have a problem remembering the pronunciation of such words like 漂亮 (piàoliang).

 
Another link on Chinese character mnenomic strategies:

 

http://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/

 

Besides the before mentioned pleco some other good resources to determine the components of a character (note they don't always agree on the best way to divide certain characters):

 

https://characterpop.com/

http://www.hanzicraft.com/

https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary  (click on double arrow and use scissor tools and question mark tools)