For what it’s worth, I’ve also been incorporating pronunciation in my mnemonics, and I would recommend it to others because I actually find it very easy. I assigned the tones colours, and giant/fairy/dwarf/teddy as in Tuttle. I also link it to either a similarly pronounced English word, or hanzi with the same pronunciation (note – if you do this make sure you keep the tone cue separate from the sound cue or you might end up in a confused mess!)

No, I’m like you–I’m celebrating my 10th year with these characters. I totally agree with you, but I’m trying it Heisig’s way just to see if it works. If not, then I’ll ditch it and go back to “the part of the body that sounds like ‘yi’” (which makes much more sense).

So far Heisig’s method has played with my head quite a bit. “Elementary” for example, just confuses me, but then I think through his story (cloak and dagger / “Elementary, my dear Watson”) and I find myself writing the character I know well, 初. Since I’m doing this because it’s easy characters like 初 that I find myself forgetting how to write and feeling like an idiot for it all the time, I’m inclined to believe that ditching the phonetics in remembering the strokes may be a good thing. Or it may just mess me up. Only time will tell.

I do feel it’s helping though. The color-coded characters by tone is amazing useful. Now I always think of 辉 as bright orange (my 1st tone) and 守 as dark purple. (Incidentally, I think they have to be ugly colors, else they’re harder to remember.) I may start putting the colors in the stories, too.

I don’t think it would be hard to do this starting from scratch. I mean, Chinese kids learn tones and writing simultaneously, so how hard can it be?

Noooo problem. I have a friend from 奈良 that I’ve been talking to, and she’s indirectly forced me to pick up some Kansai dialect. ^ ^

In my case, I had started studying Hanzi long before I even heard of Heisig, so I ran into quite a few characters whose sounds I was very familiar with and it helped me to remember with much more accuracy than any story I could think up. I remember staring at 胰 and trying to think of a story. Flesh/Moon + Barbarian = Pancreas. Huh.

What’s the pronunciation of 胰 in Mandarin? Yi2. And, from past study, what’s the pronunciation of 夷? Yi2.

At that point, I ended up writing in the ‘story’ column: ‘You aren’t coming up with a good story about the fleshy barbarian pancreas anytime soon. The sound is ‘yi2′, like barbarian, and the flesh radical indicates meaning. Remember those two and you’re set.’

I don’t know, though. This may be a situation unique to those, like me, who had already spent many long hours desperately banging our skulls against what seemed pre-Heisig to be the impenetrable, unconquerable wall of Hanzi needed for fluency. Maybe, if starting from scratch, sound-based mnemonics would be too much of a pain. I couldn’t say for certain.

–People who suffer from synthaesia–confusing sensory information so all Ts are blue and all 2s are red to them (or whatever)–apparently have better memories for text because this excess information is so consistently coded to the thing they want to remember. So I’m assigning colors to tones, so all 4th tone characters are red, for example.

–As Heisig points out, the more detailed your mental picture, the better. So I’m also encoding the tones into the little story I learn for each character. For 享, xiang3, for example, I’m learning Heisig’s story about a tall child who jumps up to look at birds nests, talk to people in second story buildings, see giraffes at the zoo–but I’m adding the words “jumps up *and down*” to signal to me that I should be thinking of up-and-down motion when I imagine the character. Adding these little bits into the stories is almost always easy (go up the road, go down the hill, etc.). Of course, it may not pan out–so far this is just an experiment. Obsessive listening is still the best way to learn tones, but every bit helps.

–Aromatherapy may be unscientific, but studies show that “aromamnemonics” (my word–no respectable scientist would say this) is totally the way to go. If you smell something when learning and then the same smell is around when you’re trying to remember, you’re likely to remember between 10-30% more than if the smell wasn’t involved. I’m thinking jasmine tea is pretty ubiquitous in Chinese culture, so I’m keeping that around when I study.

If anyone else has some insights into how to tweak Heisig for Mandarin, I’d love more ideas. Thanks so much to Khaz to spreading the word–I’m telling everyone I know to get the new Heisig. But I’m frustrated the new book’s not coming out any time soon (apparently). I guess we’re on our own for the rest of them in the near term.

Saber sin Estudiar / Knowing without study

Admiróse un portugués / A portuguese man was surprised
de ver que en su tierna infancia / when he saw that since childhood
todos los niños en Francia / Every little kid in France
supiesen hablar francés. / could speak Feench.
«Arte diabólica es», / “Wicked art, this is”,
dijo, torciendo el mostacho, / He said, twisting his moustache.
«que para hablar en gabacho / “That to speak “gabacho” (slang for French).
un fidalgo en Portugal / a gentleman in Portugal
llega a viejo, y lo habla mal; / grows old, and barely speaks it,
y aquí lo parla un muchacho». / and here a little boy speaks it swiftly.”

The rhythm and rhyme is lost in translation, but I found it pretty funny. It’s by Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, an 18th Century Spanish poet.