Memory is a skill that can be practised, learnt, and mastered. By using the right method, remembering even abstract things like tones and pronunciation in Mandarin becomes possible, even easy!
Contrary to common belief, you don’t need to be endowed with a “good memory” to learn thousands or even tens of thousands of words in Chinese.
You do need constant, meaningful and extensive exposure and engagement with the language, however, which will teach you most of what you need to know.
To learn this effectively as a foreign adult, you also need to learn how to remember things effectively. This is easier than many people think! People who win memory championships do so because they’ve practised, not because they were born with an extraordinary memory.
When exposure and engagement are not enough
While it’s possible to learn Chinese relying only on exposure and engagement, that’s not always the best approach.
The most obvious one is writing Chinese characters by hand. Using mnemonics (a fancier word for memory techniques) to learn characters is popular and something you have probably heard of, even if you might not have tried it.
For example, assuming that you know the character for “horse”, 马, and the character for “woman” 女, it’s trivial to remember the character for “mother”, 妈, by associating the two components with each other in a memorable way, such as picturing your mum being ridden by a horse.
This is of course not how the character came about, but by associating the building blocks in such a bizarre and memorable way, it becomes easier to recall.
For more about understanding Chinese characters and using mnemonics to remember them, check the series starting with this article: The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell.
The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell
Using mnemonics to learn tones and pronunciation in Chinese
In this article, we’re going to have a closer look at using mnemonics to remember not characters and their components, but tones and pronunciation.
These are more abstract and require a different approach. I wrote about learning and remembering abstract things with mnemonics in this article, so this article is a deep dive into tones and pronunciation specifically.
How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components
Why some things are easier to remember
Before we get there, though, let’s back up a bit and examine why mnemonics work better to remember some things than others. To understand why, we need to look closer at the methods.
In essence, most memory techniques boil down to associating what we want to remember with something we already know. In the case of compounds, such as the character for “mother”, 妈, it’s also about associating things you already know in memorable ways.
This is easy if the things you want to memorise are concrete nouns, such as “horse” and “mother”. It’s less obvious if you want to memorise something more abstract, such as “the third tone” or “the initial zh-“.
A general example: using mnemonics to memorise numbers
I can look at a number just once and remember it for at least a few months without ever using it. The process takes a few seconds and is effortless most of the time.
I can also look at a scrambled Rubik’s cube and memorise everything I need to know to solve it blindfolded in roughly one minute.
Now, if you’re not into mnemonics or Rubik’s cube, this sounds fantastic, but if you know a thing or two about memory techniques or realise that to solve a Rubik’s cube blindfolded, and know that you only need to memorise roughly a phone number’s worth of information, it’s not as impressive.
Let’s assume for a moment that you think that remembering long strings of numbers without writing them down is impressive. How can we use mnemonics to memorise something as abstract as phone numbers?
The answer is something called “pegging”, a kind of infrastructure for memory. Memorising random numbers is very, very hard without a system, so we need to create some infrastructure to help us.
How to build infrastructure for your memory
This is what it looks like in principle:
- Identify what needs to be memorised – This could be anything. In this case, I will talk about numbers first, but I will return to tones and pronunciation in Chinese later. The important thing is to analyse what it is you need to memorise.
- Create concrete substitutes for what you want to memorise – A basic strategy for numbers would be associating each number with a person or an object. One is Neo from The Matrix, two is Tupac, three is the Three Musketeers, and so on. Naturally, it’s better if there’s a natural connection between the numbers and the people, as you can see in my examples. This helps with the initial learning but isn’t strictly necessary.
- Use the substitutes when you memorise – Assuming you want to memorise a number, use the people from step two instead of the numbers. Thus, if you want to remember the number 312 for some reason, picture the Three Musketeers using rapiers to fight Neo, but Tupac interrupts the fight to sing a ballad.
- Refine and develop the system – If you’re going to memorise large numbers (or Rubik’s cubes), having one person or object per number won’t be enough. I have unique images for the numbers 0-99, which allows me to memorise a Swedish phone number using a chain of only five pictures. My own number is coal + coal + jackal + Tarzan + sun, for example.
This is an example of how you can use pegs to memorise numbers. In my system, certain consonant sounds are used for each number and I then combine these to two-syllable words. For example, /t/ is 1 and /s/ or /z/ is 0, hence “Tarzan” is 10.
How to use pegging to remember tones and pronunciation in Mandarin
This example with numbers was just that, an example. I chose numbers because it’s never a bad idea to be able to memorise phone numbers, PIN codes, logins, and serial numbers. A similar system can be designed for almost anything.
The point is that in some cases, we need to add infrastructure before we can make full use of the power of mnemonics. I’m now going to give you two examples of how this can be applied to learning Chinese, first tones, then the rest of pronunciation: initials and finals.
Note that this is meant to help you remember the tones, not pronounce or perceive the tones. These are all distinct challenges that I have covered elsewhere:
- Learning tones in general, including how to pronounce them
- Perceiving tones and sounds in Mandarin
- Different kinds of tone problems and what to do about them
Using mnemonics to remember Mandarin tones
If you’ve followed the above reasoning, the process of creating mnemonics for tones is simple:
- Create a concrete substitute, a peg, for each tone
- Include this substitute as an element in your mnemonic
The first step can be done in any number of ways. In cases like this, prefer to use pegs that aren’t easily confused with other things you might want to learn, such as the components in a compound character.
For instance, you can use one of the existing colour schemes** to link** each tone to an element:
- First tone → red → fire
- Second tone → yellow → light
- Third tone → green → vegetation
- Fourth tone → blue → water
Whenever you want to remember the tone of a character, include the above elements in the mnemonic to set the scene.
For example, everything in the image or story is burning when it’s the first tone, dazzlingly bright when it’s the second, taking place in the deep jungle when it’s the third, and underwater when it’s the fourth.
Using mnemonics to remember Mandarin initials and final
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.
Instead, I think it’s smarter to create mnemonics only for those syllables we have problems with. Few people mix up the initials sh- and p-, but z- and zh- are trickier. Create infrastructure only when you need it!
Differentiating tricky syllables in Mandarin
Again, there are many ways of doing this. For instance, associate z- with a word you’re 100% sure starts with z-, such as 子 (zǐ), which means “son” or “child”. Then associate zh- with something else, like 蜘蛛 (zhīzhū), “spider”. Whenever you need to distinguish between these two, incorporate either a boy infant or a spider into the story.
You can also create completely arbitrary pegs and use a person for the initial and an object for the final, but again, I think this is often overkill; you’ll end up spending more time creating mnemonics than engaging with the Chinese language.
Avoiding interference
Some readers might ask themselves if all this won’t interfere with their ordinary mnemonics. If you have memorised 美 (měi), “beautiful”, as a fifty-foot sheep winning a beauty pageant, won’t it cause trouble if you also add a jungle background to remember that it’s the third tone?
If you have memorised 政 (zhèng), “politics”, as beating people to correct their behaviour, won’t putting the entire scene underwater make things confusing? Perhaps you’ll invent new characters that have a tree 木 beside 美 or water 氵 next to 政?
Not really. There are two ways to get around this. One is to always include the tone substitute in the same way. If the fourth tone means that everything takes place underwater, that is very different from using water in other ways in a mnemonic.
If the first tone means that everything is on fire, fire can still be included in other ways (candles, bonfires, torches).
Another way to avoid confusion is to make sure you have clear pictures of your pegs and use them consistently. If you think of the third tone as a verdant jungle, you won’t confuse this with 木 if you have a picture of an oak for that character component.
I wrote more about this in the article about remembering abstract components: How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components.
How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components
Mnemonics are personal
Although you can get inspiration from other people, you can’t borrow their systems directly and expect them to work as well for you as they do for their original creators. You might not like the way I handle tones or my example for how to separate z- and zh-.
This further highlights the insight that remembering is indeed a skill you can learn. Study what works for others, try them out yourself and tweak your system. In doing so, you will not only be able to remember Chinese vocabulary, but also learn more about your memory and how it works!
18 comments
I am trying to create a mnemonic system for the pin-yin syllables. I hope this will help me remember words more easily. For example the pinyin syllable, ta = tar (the black stuff on the road. (not for pronunciation,just to give a me a clue)
However, for certain syllables, I am having trouble coming up with good images, especially where there is no approximate English sound.
Any suggestions?
Since you’ll have to learn all the sounds in Chinese fairly soon anyway, I think you might as well go with words in Chinese, just be sure to pick common ones. Like I said in the article, you could use 蜘蛛 (spider) for zh 氣球 (balloon) for q. I think it will just be confusing if you try to achieve this using English words.
“Learning Chinese Characters” by Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews has a mnemonic system for remembering the 800 most common (HSL level A) characters and their pinyin. It is quite effective.
Before reading this post, I came up with a similar framework approach to tones and pronunciation. I took the pronunciation part a bit further than this article, so I thought I would share the details here. I hope it’s useful.
For the tones, I associate them with a season/location for the mnemonic. There are 4 main tones and 4 seasons, so:
1 = Spring = Meadow full of flowers
2 = Summer = Beach
3 = Autumn = Forest with colorful leaves
4 = Winter = Snowy mountain
5-neutral = None = Moon
For the pronunciation, I remembered reading an article about how to memorize a deck of cards and one of the most successful techniques is to make a list of 52 celebrities, because our brains are hardwired to remember people more easily than objects or concepts.
So I made a list of celebrities/characters to link to the first letter of each Chinese character/word:
Initial Consonant Celebrity
– Invisible Man (The Invisible Man)
b Brad Pitt
p Peter Griffin (Family Guy)
m Matt Damon
f Frank Underwood (House of Cards)
d Drew Carey
t Mr. T
n Nick Nolte
l Lil’ Kim
g George Clooney
k Kim Kardashian
h Homer Simpson (The Simpsons)
j Janet Jackson
q Q-Tip
x Xi Jinping
zh Zhang Ziyi
ch Chewbacca (Star Wars)
sh William Shatner
r Rebecca Romijn
c Catwoman (Batman)
s Sylvester Stallone
w Walter White (Breaking Bad)
y Ylvis (“What does the fox say?”)
z Zach Galifianakis
Of course, I encourage everyone to customize this list of celebrities if others are more relevant to you. I tried to make a similar list for all of the finals (ou, e, iang, iaou, ing, etc.) but it was too difficult to make a connection without a consonant. Anyway, I think just having the tone and first letter is 80% of the benefit for 20% of the work. And now that the framework is there, it’s much faster to create mnemonics.
When I create a mnemonic, they usually focus on some action based on the radicals of the Chinese character. So instead of making the action more elaborate and abstract to include pronunciation and tone, the appropriate celebrity becomes the person doing the action, in the location according to the tone.
Example
Character: 设
Pinyin: she4
Meaning: to establish, found
Radicals: word, club
Mnemonic: William Shatner established a Scrabble (word) club in a mountain ski resort.
I would be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.
Thanks for sharing! I was thinking of doing something similar but I don’t think it was as simple as yours.
I like the first letter-only approach to remembering the pinyin pronunciation.
Perhaps remembering only that will help one remember the rest of the pinyin 80% of the time. As for for the other 20%, one could always add to the mnemonic. As said in another article, only create mnemonics when you need it.
Just to be clear, your system follows the following format, right?
[Pinyin’s 1st letter] + [Word’s meaning] + [Radical(s)] + [Tone Location]
I think this will help one remember verbs, but what about regular nouns or adjectives?
I find that verbs and nouns are quite easy to work into mnemonics, but you might need another approach for more abstract/advanced words, possibly rote or phrase memorization.
It would be the first 1-2 letters of pinyin, i.e. the initials as shown here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table. You are right about the order. Start with the pinyin to identify the subject of your mnemonic sentence, then use the meaning to choose the verb, then the radicals for the object(s), and then the tone for the location. And I typically only use mnemonics when I find a character difficult to remember, not in the first round of learning new vocabulary, maybe more around the 3rd or 4th pass through the SRS.
Thanks for the advice!
After I transition my Anki cards to a different format, I will try this out.
do you have them in anki? if yes could you send me ?
Clever. I will customise a kind of celebrity list (v hard, as I don’t do TV or cinema), and try it out. Thanks for sharing!!
Great advice. I am using actions for each tone and as well a list of celebreties for the first letter of the pin yin. Plus for the rest of the pin yin I use nouns. Additional I brake up all Chinese characters into components. Out of all these elements I create a unique story. I might add the color idea to it.
Thanks for teaching us how to use mnemonics to learn tones, but if you don’t use them to learn tones yourself, then what do you do to remember tones? I think learning how to read and write is relatively straight forward, especially after reading your articles, but tones on the other hand…. ouch.
I assume you mean what I do to remember the tones? Learning here is a bit ambiguous because it could refer to both learning to pronounce tones and combinations of tones, as well as remembering which tone is which. I’ve just seldom had a problem with that, not sure why. Lots of listening probably helps too, so you start feeling what’s right and what isn’t. I did use mnemonics though, but only when I really needed to.
I am mildly dyslexic and I often reverse the order of a word (詞). I use mnemonics to remember which character is first and which is second. I developed a list of mnemonics for each of the 400-odd sounds in Mandarin. It takes a bit of time when I learn a new word, but it’s worth it.
Sounds interesting! Would you mind giving us an example or show how you go about this? It might be helpful for others, too. I’m not dyslexic, but I also mix up the order of words in Chinese sometimes (especially rarer words where both characters mean sort of the same thing).
I’ve basically been using a personal adaptation of the Mandarin Blueprint “Hanzi Movie Method”. They’ve basically rearranged the initials and finals in such a way that there are only 13 finals, and 50-something initials (yi- is considered an initial for instance, and if you had a character that was just ‘yi’ you’d use the ‘yi-’ initial + a “Null” final. And if you had a word like 用 ‘yong’ you’d use the ‘yi’ initial, knocking off the ‘i’ and using the -ong final.)
They did this because they use finals as locations (“sets”), and initials as people/characters(“actors”). And most people know way more people than they do locations. So rearranging the initials and finals make it easier.
The tones are different ‘rooms’ in the sets (1st tone is outside the entrance, 2nd tone is kitchen or inside the entrance, etc.)
And the components are “props” aka objects. (or ppl or animals)
And basically you imagine scenes including all of these elements.
It sounds like a lot, but it just takes a bit to get started and then it makes things much easier. Because if you happen to forget one element of a character, it’s very easy to remember it again. Rather than the whole thing falling apart, it’s just like one element falls off, but the rest of the mnemonic structure helps you retrieve it fairly easily on your own, w/o having to look things up again.
Of course you also don’t need to stick to it so strictly all the time, but overall it’s a good system.
One of the ways I deviate from their method though is that they actually categorize the initials, so some of them you choose specifically a female “actors”, some specifically male, some specifically real people, and some fictional. They have a reason for this, but I don’t make this distinction. I don’t consider it too important, and it’s much easier to come up with whatever fits.