{"id":3311,"date":"2013-01-22T13:23:58","date_gmt":"2013-01-22T05:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=3311"},"modified":"2026-02-17T21:53:02","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T20:53:02","slug":"how-to-create-mnemonics-for-general-or-abstract-character-components","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/how-to-create-mnemonics-for-general-or-abstract-character-components\/","title":{"rendered":"How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Baker_Oslo\"<\/a>As anyone who has tried using mnemonics to learn something knows, some concepts are easier to link together than others. In general, the more abstract a concept is, the harder it is to associate to something else, most likely because it’s hard to form vivid pictures of abstract concepts. Thus, concrete nouns and action verbs are fairly easy, while abstract nouns, adjectives and adverbs might be really hard. Since we have no control over what Chinese character actually mean, we need to be able to handle this kind of characters or character components if we want to use mnemonics successfully.<\/p>\n

Here are the other articles published in connection with the sensible character learning challenge:<\/p>\n

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  1. Chinese character challenge: Towards a more sensible way of learning to write Chinese<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. You can\u2019t learn Chinese characters by rote<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Remembering is a skill you can learn<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Sensible character learning: Progress, reminders and reflections<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components<\/a> (this article)<\/li>\n
  6. Don’t use mnemonics for everything<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Turn general concepts into specific ones<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The first thing we need to pay attention to is the danger of being too general. This is especially true if you rely on other people’s mnemonics (including those I mention on Hacking Chinese). For instance, when you encounter characters with very common components such as \u77f3, \u6728 or \u5c71, don’t simply say “stone”, “tree” or “mountain”, because these are all general concepts. Instead, think of a specific (imaginary or real) stone, tree or mountain. If you can’t come up with anything, search for a picture on Google. In short, make concepts as concrete as you can.<\/p>\n

    This is in fact related to a famous experiment in memory research (mentioned in Remembering is a skill you can learn<\/a>). If you tell a group of people to remember than someone is a “baker” (the profession), and another group that they should remember that the person’s name is “Baker”, it turns out that the first group is more likely to remember the word, even though the word is the same! This is because “baker” is something concrete you can visualise, whereas “Baker” is an abstract concept. Thus, we should try to be as specific and concrete as possible.<\/p>\n

    Turn the general into something concrete<\/strong><\/p>\n

    This is extremely important when you deal with characters that are similar to each other. If you use concrete representations for these, it might suddenly become very easy to remember which character is which. For instance, there are at least three common components which depict some kind of ancient Chinese weapon (the definitions are from Zhongwen.com<\/a>):<\/p>\n