(These days there does not seem to be a Chinese subforum, so I'm not sure where to post this. In any case this probably is relevant for Japanese too to some degree)

When memorizing the words that consist of two characters a natural thing to do seems to build on the acquired RTH/RTK knowledge and make a mnemonic using RTH/K keywords for constituent characters. The biggest problem here it seems will be interference with the characters' mnemonics. We could add something to the picture to make it clear that it's a word and not a character, for example make everything happen at sea (not a good idea since it will be a problem when some of the compounds are "water", "river", "sea" etc), or make everything blue (I guess it will get old after a few dozens of such mental pictures). So, has anybody developed a useful memorization technique for compounds, how did you mark your word-pictures?

Are you talking about making stories for all the 2+ character words you encounter? If so, I think that could be a good deal harder than merely assigning stories for individual characters. I've heard people suggesting to make stories for troublesome words, but never for such a large percentage of them.

Granted, my experience with Chinese is extremely limited, but... this seems to be something that could be better dealt with with Anki.

Many words "just stick", especially when there's a clear logical connection to the component characters' meaning, so there's no need for special techniques. But for the others it'd be nice to use our tried-and-true method.

I think it's worth noting that the wiki seems to be a place where people post various things Chinese related.

I personally put two character compounds to show on-yomi and the kun-yomi if it exists in every entry I worked on for the Japanese side. Eventually the goal is to go back and associate every RTK character with a RTH character a RSH character, and the meanings for all. But I have gotten nowhere with it, and with the change to how the forum displays my old style is actually less useful as the current forum display shows different things than it used to.

I understand the reason for wanting to list and remember two character compounds, since modern Chinese seems to use very few characters as single characters when they are nouns, but my Chinese is so limited as to be zero.

I can gloss sentence meanings with New Tong Meng and such, but since I do not know how really to do tones, I kind of want to get a handle on them before I spend any time learning to to input them.

Hmm, most words I learn through simple repetition, either reading them in context or adding them to Anki. A few words I make up some silly wordplay mnemonic (sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English, sometimes mixing both together often using superficial pronunciation resemblances.)

Only in the very most troublesome of words do I normally use Heisig-style story method. Or, you know, when a story absolutely jumps out at me ... 甲冑 for example is a bit of silly word play (ka-choo, the sound of a sneeze) along with a Heisig-style 'image story' of a knight in full armor sneezing violently. かっちゅう!

In any case, I've never felt a need to create any special distinction between word and character stories, especially because my character stories are production focused (given a keyword, can I draw the character?) whereas my word stories are recognition focused - either meaning or pronunciation focused (or rarely both). As a result I've really never had any trouble keeping the story types separate. Perhaps it's more difficult in Chinese as it must certainly have a greater number of compounds. Only a handful of words in the average sentence are compounds in Japanese, but I vaguely understand that almost everything in Chinese is a compound.

Thanks for the replies, it seems that mostly people don't feel the need to go to such length as create Heisig-style stories.
Well, maybe still some ideas as to how I can keep word-stories separate from the character-stories? I've read about some memorization techniques that imagine everything being blue (or some other color) but that does not seem to be very memorable to me, my color memory isn't that great.

(2015-11-16, 3:40 am)zonius Wrote: Thanks for the replies, it seems that mostly people don't feel the need to go to such length as create Heisig-style stories.
Well, maybe still some ideas as to how I can keep word-stories separate from the character-stories? I've read about some memorization techniques that imagine everything being blue (or some other color) but that does not seem to be very memorable to me, my color memory isn't that great.

Probably I would have a set of characters that are specific to word stories. If you use Mr. T and Spiderman in character stories, for example, maybe you would use MacGyver and Batman in word stories. Obviously that's not a single element, but it can be limited to a small set. Or if you -didn't- use Spiderman... maybe you didn't use any superheroes and could use all the superheroes for words.

If you have a particular show or series that you know in detail and yet didn't use in character stories, perhaps you could use that. Somehow I didn't use any Star Wars -or- Harry Potter in any of my stories, despite being quite familiar with the original SW trilogy and the whole Harry Potter universe, but you'll have to draw on your own background for your stories of course. The advantage of using a specific fictional universe is that you have not just characters but also places and objects specific to those universes.

Using a specific universe sounds like a very interesting idea! Not sure if I know any fictional universe well enough to use for a even a hundred words, but I'll give it a try.