Comments on: Don’t use mnemonics for everything when learning Chinese

By: Chinese characters with the same components in different places | Hacking Chinese

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 04:24:27 +0000

[…] argued elsewhere, there is little point in doing this just because you can. Don’t use mnemonics to remember things you don’t need to remember. Will native speakers care if you write 夠 instead of 够? Will they misunderstand if you write 鸭 […]

By: How to use mnemonics to learn Mandarin tones and pronunciation | Hacking Chinese

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 05:16:01 +0000

[…] Even though it’s possible to devise a system to memorise all syllables in Mandarin (it’s actually quite easy, just create pegs for all initials and finals), I think that’s massive overkill. Don’t use mnemonics for everything. […]

By: Are mnemonics too slow for Chinese learners? | Hacking Chinese | Hacking Chinese

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 06:52:34 +0000

[…] Don’t use mnemonics for everything […]

By: How to learn Chinese characters: My best advice | Hacking Chinese

How to learn Chinese characters: My best advice | Hacking Chinese — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:09:14 +0000

[…] Don’t use mnemonics for everything – When introduced to the fantastic world of memory hacking and mnemonics, some people go all-in and want to use them to learn everything. However, this is not really necessary and will create a lot of extra work. Chinese is still a language, not a list of abstract things to memorise. Use mnemonics when you need to, not as the default solution to remember things you’d probably remember without them. […]

By: Should you use an efficient method for learning Chinese even if you hate it? | Hacking Chinese | Hacking Chinese

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 17:20:39 +0000

[…] Similarly, if you don’t like creating fanciful mnemonics to memorise characters but realise that this can be useful in some cases, then don’t create mnemonics for every part of every character you learn. This is not even a good idea if you like mnemonics! […]

By: Donny

Donny — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 18:03:35 +0000

In reply to Tyson. There is no difference, to plunder and to pillage are the same thing

By: Sean

Sean — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:44:18 +0000

I tried Heisig’s book but it was so much work to remember the mnemonic that I quickly dropped it. Now I just try to remember some aspect of the character that’s a trigger and will hopefully help me remember the rest. But the more characters I learn, the harder that gets. Spaced rote repetition, besides actual real-world use, is the only way I’ve found to learn them.
(Learning to write characters is especially hard because no one hand-writes much anymore, and Chinese keyboards use pinyin to find the characters, so there isn’t a lot of opportunity to actually write Chinese characters in real-world use. I’ve talked to college educated Chinese who say they can’t remember how to write a lot of characters anymore because these days they just type them. It’s like how my teen daughter’s English spelling is terrible because she’s become totally reliant on spellcheck and never writes stuff by hand anymore anyway.)

By: Eemeli

Eemeli — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 11:16:46 +0000

In reply to Olle Linge.

I agree with Olle. For me, many of the characters’ pronunciations are easy to remember without any extra effort. That’s because I see them often enough in context. The tricky cases often involve remembering the wrong tone, in which case you could just add a simple element to the story (e.g. color, or I like to add feelings: calm: tone 1, wondering/confused: tone 2, nuisance/annoyance: 3rd, anger: 4th). For the rest, you can just develop something else. Those characters will account for less than 10% of all of them.

A good way to see which tones you know and which not is to read some easy texts aloud. I often notice that the text I could understand 100% was hard to read aloud, meaning that I should focus a bit more of the pronunciation.

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:38:50 +0000

In reply to Brendan. Yes, I have read that article and for me personally, it's a very good example of using nukes to kill the chicken. Most students don't need that and would be much, much better of learning more about phonetic components and simply studying characters more in general. You could use something like that for tricky cases, but doing that for all characters is exactly what my own article tells you not to do!

By: Brendan

Brendan — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:33:40 +0000

Thanks for the heads up. My biggest problem with learning Chinese at the moment is that I can’t memorise lessons just by reading through them. Currently I’m reading Assimil Chinese With Ease which provides cool little dialogues with translations and explanations, but when I try to sit down and read through them I get bored because I can’t remember anything the moment I shut my eyes. Mnemonics such as in Heisig’s book have been awesome for me since it makes me visualise a scene rather than gaze at the paper. The infinitely best way for me to learn something is to explain it to someone else, so perhaps I could imagine explaining each sentence in my head to someone…

Anyway, have you seen this: http://countryoftheblind.blogspot.hk/2012/01/mnemonics-for-pronouncing-chinese.html ?
Could you please provide any comments on if you think it would be a good idea. It seems impressive to me, but requires an investment.