Well, I am using mnemonics for radicals, initials and finals, all that with the intent to learn the 3000 simplified hanzi along with their most common reading. The problem is finding a hole in the stories for the tones. Anyone has any ideas?

Try using a different color for each tone and then for each story imagine that the main element of the story is that color.

I have found colourizing the hanzi / pinyin using anki's Chinese plugin, when learning vocab and sentences, helps me remember them. I now remember certain words are certain colour combinations through sheer repetition.

Of course practicing speaking and listening is the best way to learn them, but as a beginner this is not practical (as i still find it hard differentiating tones aurally).

Color?, that sounds cool, alright.

Hi turvy,

There was an article about tones tricks on sinosplice.
Pasden used to associate tones with emotions.
It is described here : http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/...one-tricks
Then it should be straightforward to associate a color with an emotion and hence a tone as aphasiac suggested earlier.

@+,
Dunki

What colors are you using and how do you use them exactly? Do you make up stories or just hope the color will help a bit with the memorization itself. I am kind of hoping for the latter. After so much mnemonic effort I think I am ready for some brute force sheer repetition let's write them until we bleed systematic approach.

I settled for red, orange, pink and blue. Green and blue are too similar for me so I didn't want to mix them and pink I just like it. I have something like red is war, rage; blue is wisdom, science; orange is earth, nature and pink is dreams, magic and/or fantasy.

I don't know how useful this will be but it will surely make it more fun to review and plow through the interminable stack of hanzi.

Rather than using colors you other things you can try are countries ( see KBurchfiel shared stories) or different characters (See "Learning Chinese Characters" by Matthews). Experiment a bit if needed to find something which will keep the stories distinct from each other.