How to not memorise Chinese characters: The anatomy of bad mnemonics

Mnemonics are clever memory techniques that leverage how the brain works to make it easier to remember everything from PIN codes to Chinese characters.

When used correctly, mnemonics can make both everyday life and learning Chinese easier.

When used incorrectly, however, they are a distraction, or in some cases, even make learning harder!

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How to not memorise Chinese characters: The anatomy of bad mnemonics

In this article, we’re going to look at how not to use mnemonics to learn Chinese characters by examining a few examples, discussing why they are bad, and explaining what you should do instead.

• Remembering is a skill you can learn: The fundamentals of mnemonics
• Mnemonics: Telling your brain to pay attention
• Most Chinese characters are compounds; make use of that
• How to not memorise a Chinese character: Bad mnemonics
• 1. Ignoring the real story behind the character, even when it’s helpful
  • Ice cream is not a common component in Chinese characters
  • Learning high-frequency components makes learning subsequent characters easier
• 2. Violating or hiding the structure of Chinese characters
  • The true origin of a character is often more useful than a cute picture
  • A mnemonic should have the same number of components as the character
• 3. Not matching the shape of the character with the shape of the image
  • 冂 doesn’t look like a cat
  • How to cretae a good mnemonic for 冂
  • Mnemonics for kids and adults
• Conclusion: Don’t use bad mnemonics

Remembering is a skill you can learn: The fundamentals of mnemonics

Before we talk about how not to use mnemonics for learning Chinese characters, it’s perhaps a good idea to explain what mnemonics are and how they can be helpful.

I don’t want you to come away from this article thinking that mnemonics are bad. That’s not what this article is about. In general, mnemonics can be great for learning Chinese characters!

I will go through the basics below, but for a more in-depth look, see: Remembering is a skill you can learn: Mnemonics for Chinese learners.

Remembering is a skill you can learn: Mnemonics for Chinese learners

Mnemonics: Telling your brain to pay attention

To give you a very simple example of a mnemonic, take the character 秋 (qiū), “autumn”. You could learn the character by rote, simply writing it over and over until it sticks in your memory.

You could (and should) also learn more about the character. For example, the left component is 禾 (hé), “grain”, and the right component is 火 (huǒ), “fire”. Just knowing that this is a compound is useful because these components appear in many other compounds, too.

Most Chinese characters are compounds; make use of that

This is actually not too far away from how this character came about, something I wrote more about here: The building blocks of Chinese, part 4: Learning and remembering compound characters

The building blocks of Chinese, part 4: Learning and remembering compound characters

To really remember this character, though, you can create a vivid mental image of setting fire to a field of grain, ripe for the autumn harvest. By combining the components in a memorable way, you tell your brain that this is noteworthy, making it more likely to stick.

I think it’s a waste of time to use this kind of technique for every single character you want to learn, but it’s great when you struggle to remember a specific character, or when you really need to remember something.

As I said, this article is not meant to focus on how to create mnemonics, but rather to discuss some examples of how not to use mnemonics. For more about mnemonics on Hacking Chinese, see the following articles:

• Using memory aids and mnemonics to make Chinese easier
• How to use mnemonics to learn Mandarin tones and pronunciation
• Don’t use mnemonics for everything when learning Chinese

How to make Chinese easier by using mnemonics and memory techniques

How to not memorise a Chinese character: Bad mnemonics

It could be argued that a good mnemonic is one that works, i.e. one that allows you to remember the character successfully.

I would like to argue that there are objectively bad mnemonics, which is what I want to discuss in this article.

Sometimes, it’s just a matter of a mnemonic not being very helpful, but sometimes it’s about the long term. Even if a mnemonic makes it easier to learn a given character, it can still be bad if it makes it harder to learn subsequent characters.

Your goal is not to learn one character after all, but to learn many.

Let’s have a look at some bad mnemonics and see what we can learn from them!

1. Ignoring the real story behind the character, even when it’s helpful

Chinese characters weren’t created randomly by chance. There is a logic behind them.

Sometimes, this logic is not very helpful today, or it’s so convoluted that it’s hard to understand. But sometimes, it’s immediately obvious and helpful.

Ignoring the real story behind a character can lead to mnemonics that are okay if your goal is to learn a single character, but really bad if your goal is to learn more.

How to look up information about characters is out of scope for this article, but please refer to:

1. Review: The Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters
2. Zi.Tools: A powerful free resource for exploring Chinese characters

Ice cream is not a common component in Chinese characters

Take a look at this mnemonic for 吃 (chī), “to eat”. This looks okay if we’re only considering shape mapping. 口 kind of looks like an ice cream, for example, and 乞 matches the shape of the boy’s mouth and nose.

The issue here isn’t that this mnemonic will make 吃 harder to learn, but that you ignore the building blocks of the character.

Learning high-frequency components makes learning subsequent characters easier

口 (kǒu) “mouth” is an extremely common character component. Its origin is quite obvious if you look at it, and also easy to remember.

Are you going to let an ice cream represent 口 in all other characters with 口 in them too?

If so, fine, but why? This doesn’t help you understand these characters.

Are you going to draw a horse eating an ice cream for the question particle 吗 (ma)? What about 喝 (hē), “to drink”?

In contrast, thinking of it as “mouth” does help, because most characters that have this component are related to the mouth (eating, speaking, and so on). This both makes sense and makes it easy to draw pictures if that’s what you want to do.

So do look at the origin before you make stuff up. If the real story behind the character isn’t helpful, feel free to come up with something yourself. Using your imagination is not bad, but it won’t teach you anything about the Chinese language you didn’t already know.

5 levels of understanding Chinese characters: Superficial forms to deep structure

2. Violating or hiding the structure of Chinese characters

One of the biggest problems with treating Chinese characters as pictures, something I’ve covered in this article, is that the pictures sometimes violate the internal structure of characters.

I don’t say that that’s a problem because I’m a purist who thinks that Chinese characters are holy and their integrity is sacrosanct, but because it makes them harder to learn.

Take a look at this mnemonic for the character 猪 (zhū), “pig” from Chineasy (which I talked more about in Learn to read Chinese… with ease?)

The true origin of a character is often more useful than a cute picture

The real story behind this character is that it has two components: 犭, “dog”, relating to the meaning, indicating that it’s an animal, and 者 (zhě), indicating the sound. The sounds (zhū and zhě) are not the same (but similar) because the character is old, and spoken Chinese has changed a lot over the centuries

In the picture, however, 猪 is treated as a single unit. The problem here is that your goal isn’t to learn just this character, but to learn hundreds or even thousands of characters.

For example, when you later encounter 猫 (māo), “cat”, wouldn’t it be useful if you knew that 犭 is used to indicate animals?

Or are you going to draw a picture of a cat and superimpose 猫 on the picture too, as I did when I created the cover image for this article (displayed on the right)?

A mnemonic should have the same number of components as the character

This doesn’t help. In this case, it doesn’t even help with this particular character, but it also hides the structure of the character.

In general, your mnemonic should have the same number of functional components as the character does.

If you’re not sure what a functional component is, it’s one that does something in the character, such as providing sound or meaning. Why you should think of characters in terms of functional components

Why you should think of characters in terms of functional components

3. Not matching the shape of the character with the shape of the image

The whole point of having a mnemonic for a Chinese character is to recall how to write the character by remembering the mnemonic, or perhaps the opposite, recognising the character by the mnemonic.

For example, if we take the grain + fire = autumn I mentioned earlier, we either need to be able to think “autumn → grain set ablaze”, which will help you remember how to write the character.

Or the opposite: you see the components grain and fire and can recall that this combination means “autumn” because of the image of an autumn harvest set on fire.

For this to work, there needs to be a strong connection between the mnemonic and the character, otherwise seeing or thinking of one won’t lead to the other.

冂 doesn’t look like a cat

Here are three examples for remembering the Zhuyin character 冂, which would be “m” in Pinyin. You can find the original on Caste of Costa Mesa here.

Look at the top picture with “little sister” written under it. Let’s say you use it to remember 冂. What would the thought process be like?

1. Connect 冂 with “little sister” via the pronunciation in Mandarin, mèimei.
2. When you need to write 冂, think of “little sister”, then write 冂.
3. When you need to recognise 冂, the shape makes you think of “little sister”.

Step 1 (using the pronunciation of the word) is fine; nothing odd there.

Step 2 and step 3 (linking the shape of the picture to the character and vice versa) are problematic, however. Why would thinking of “little sister” enable you to recall the shape 冂? Or why would seeing the shape 冂 make you think of “little sister”?

The shape is just arbitrarily written on top of the drawing; the two have nothing in common. The second example is the same. How is 冂 connected to cat? It isn’t, beyond the sound.

How to create a good mnemonic for 冂

The third example is not as bad, and in fact points us in the right direction.

To begin with, it kind of looks like a hat! I mean, there is some overlap between the two shapes. In fact, it superficially looks like 冂 is part of 帽 as well, even if this similarity is accidental (巾 is unrelated to 冂).

This is not bad, but we can do better. If I wanted to conjure up a mnemonic myself, I would use 门, “door”, which both looks like 冂 and is pronounced with an m (mén).

The actual origin of 冂 is 冖, which is still used as a radical today, even if it isn’t used as a standalone character. Its meaning is usually given as “lid”, but it’s a common abbreviation of 宀, used to mean “building” or “roof”. It actually looks like the roof of a building, too. It’s also pronounced mián.

Mnemonics for kids and adults

I understand that these mnemonics are created for children to play around with and familiarise themselves with the Zhuyin symbols. I also realise that the pictures have been chosen only for their sound. Still, these are the types of images you often find when searching for mnemonics online!

If you want to learn Zhuyin properly, including good mnemonics, check out Skritter’s Zhuyin video course, which is completely free!

How to learn Zhuyin (Bopomofo) in two hours

Conclusion: Don’t use bad mnemonics

The point of this article is that mnemonics can be very useful, but many mnemonics you’ll find online are outright terrible, making it harder to learn Chinese characters rather than easier.

Mnemonics are created for many reasons. Maybe they look cute, maybe they highlight something the artist liked, maybe the designer simply doesn’t know any better. Who knows?

I want to repeat that my goal here is not to say that you can never use your imagination and invent things, nor that you should always stick to the true story behind the character.

Far from it! You should, however, check the true story before making something up. You should also be aware of the structure of compounds and the concept of functional components and building blocks.

Beyond that, feel free to invent stories or images if you find them helpful. Good luck!

All articles about mnemonics and memory techniques on Hacking Chinese

Here’s a complete inventory of articles about mnemonics and memory techniques for learning Mandarin, beginning with two introductory articles you should read first:

1. Remembering is a skill you can learn: Mnemonics for Chinese learners
2. How to make Chinese easier by using mnemonics and memory techniques

Once you know what mnemonics are and how they work in principle, it’s time to look at specific aspects. You don’t need to read these in any particular order, just choose topics you find interesting.

• How to use mnemonics to learn Mandarin tones and pronunciation
• Don’t use mnemonics for everything when learning Chinese
• Are mnemonics too slow for Chinese learners?
• How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components
• Chinese characters and words that refuse to stick: Killing leeches
• Cultivate your Chinese flashcard garden… or burn it down and start afresh