The Marilyn Method for Memorizing Chinese Character Pronunciation

Kevin Kevin \\

The Marilyn Method is a mnemonic method for memorizing the meaning and pronunciation of Chinese characters. HanziHero, our application for learning Chinese characters uses a modified version of the Marilyn method to power our own Chinese character mnemonics to help our users easily memorize thousands of Chinese characters.

In this article, we’ll go over exactly what the Marilyn Method is and what makes it so powerful for memorizing Chinese characters.

Chinese character basics

In order to understand how the Marilyn Method works and the problems it solves, we must first cover the basics of Chinese characters.

Every character has meaning and pronunciation

Every Chinese character has a primary meaning and pronunciation associated with it. For example, the character 好 hǎo has the pronunciation hǎo and the meaning good.

Each time we see a character, we need to recall its meaning and pronunciation that we outlined above. We do this by looking at the appearance of the character, and mapping that appearance to those meanings and pronunciations that we previously learned.

This is harder than it seems.

First, there are thousands of characters we need to memorize. This makes remembering the 26 letters of the alphabet as a kid seem like nothing in comparison.

Second, many of those characters look the same. For example, the characters 情 and 清 look quite similar. In fact, they only differ by one component.

Chinese characters are composed of character components

Every Chinese character is composed of one or more Chinese character components. For example, the character 好 hǎo is composed of the components 女 woman and 子 child.

These components, which are broken down into four types, usually relate to the meaning or pronunciation of the character.

Character mnemonic basics

So for each character, we need to see its appearance and use that to recall the meaning and pronunciation of the character in order to be able to read and understand the character.

The simplest way to do this is just brute force. Write out the character, meaning, and pronunciation again and again and again until it is seared in your head. It’s mind-numbingly boring, and not necessarily effective.

The recommended way to do it is to use Chinese character mnemonics instead.

How character mnemonics work in practice

A character mnemonic is a story that weaves together the appearance of a character (it’s components) and the meaning and/or pronunciation of the character. Once that easy-to-remember story is memorized, using it is easy:

  1. Come across a character you cannot immediately recall the meaning or pronunciation of.
  2. Look at the components in the character, and try to see if those jog your memory of any mnemonic story you have for it.
  3. Once the story is recalled, you can look within it for clues about the meaning or pronunciation of the character, because the story will contain that information.

It seems a bit involved, but trust me: it works! This is because the human brain is great at remembering interesting stories. It isn’t that great about memorizing thousands of characters, meanings, and pronunciations in an austere boring list.

Character meaning mnemonics

The most basic form of character mnemonic is a character meaning mnemonic. As the name indicates, it is a mnemonic that helps only with recalling the meaning of the character.

Demonstrating briefly for the character we mentioned earlier, a meaning mnemonic for it would look like so:

It is 好 good for a 女 woman to be with her 子 child.

As you can see, the story contains the meaning of the of the character along with the names of the components within it.

Remember the story from the components, and you can get to the meaning of the character, which is good.

The problems pronunciation mnemonics

So we have the basics of characters, along with a way to remember the meaning of a character via a meaning mnemonic.

But what about pronunciation? How could we expand our meaning mnemonic above to include that information within it?

Simply adding pinyin doesn’t work

If we simply add pinyin to the mnemonic, it doesn’t really work well:

It is 好 good for a 女 woman to be with her hǎo 子 child.

Huh? What? Exactly! This doesn’t help us at all.

Pronunciation needs to be made memorable

The reason this doesn’t work is because pinyin to our foreign ears isn’t memorable. In fact, if you are a new student to Chinese, you may not even know how to sound the pinyin out!

This stands in contrast to the English name of components which often reflect how they look, or the English meaning of the character which we can understand.

In other words, in order to add the pronunciation or pinyin of the character to our story without diminishing the story itself, we need to make it more human, more memorable, more familiar to us.

The Marilyn Method makes pronunciation memorable

If there is one thing to get from this long (hopefully helpful) article, it is that the Marilyn Method is just about making that pronunciation part memorable. That’s it.

It does this by offering a way to encode pronunciation into the mnemonic in a way that does not diminish the root meaning mnemonic. And that is accomplished, in turn, by breaking up the pronunciation pinyin.

Decompose pinyin into initial, final, tone

Every syllable in standard pinyin has an initial, final, and tone. For the syllable hǎo, it has the initial h-, the final -ao, and the third tone.

Now, splitting it up with this isn’t that helpful by itself. Including those three elements within the mnemonic is hardly better than including hǎo directly.

But, by splitting it up, we can fit them into a broader mnemonic system that will make those each memorable.

Any system would work, so long as it can encode that information in a human-friendly way. The Marilyn Method is a specific system for doing that encoding.

Assign personas to each initial

First, each initial is assigned a persona. A fictional character that corresponds to the sound. So, for the initial h-, we can assign the persona Harry Potter. After all, they both start with the same h- sound.

There are around 55 initials in pinyin, so you will need to assign 55 different personas. Or, if that is too many, you can just use HanziHero which does all this work for you.

Assign a setting to each final

For each final, a setting is assigned. So for the final -ao, we can assign a barn. This is because that final is pronounced like “ow”, which rhymes with “cow”. And cows are found in barns. It’s a stretch, but it’ll work for now.

There are around 28 finals in pinyin, so you will need to assign 28 different locations. HanziHero, of course, does this all for you.

Assign a location to each tone

Lastly, the tone should be associated with a location in a setting. In pinyin, the third tone is also known as the low tone. The lowest location I can think of is a basement, so that will represent the third tone.

Putting it together into a complete mnemonic

This was all a bit abstract. Let’s pull it together to see how it actually works.

Harry Potter (h-) is in the cellar (third tone) of the barn (-ao) that his parents once owned. He comes across a picture of himself as a child (子) with a woman (女) whom he recognizes as his mother. He chokes back tears and mutters: “Voldemort stole everything good (好) from my life…”

This mnemonic includes the three pieces of pronunciation information: initial persona, final setting, and tone location. It also includes the meaning of the character and the names of the components within it, which we got from the earlier meaning mnemonic.

Using a complete mnemonic in practice

Once the mnemonic is memorized, using it is similar to how we used the meaning mnemonic before:

  1. Come across a character you cannot immediately recall the meaning or pronunciation of.
  2. Look at the components in the character, and try to see if those jog your memory of any mnemonic story you have for it.
  3. Once the story is recalled, you can look within it for clues about the meaning or pronunciation of the character, because the story will contain that information.
  4. For the pronunciation, you will need to piece together the initial, final, and tone together to get the actual pinyin syllable.

When you remember the story associated the a character happens with Harry Potter in the cellar (basement) of the barn, then you know that the main pinyin pieces are h-, -ao, and the third tone. Combine those and you get hǎo: the pronunciation of the character!

Using the Marilyn Method

Now that we know the Marilyn Method works, you may be wondering how to use it. As far as we are aware, HanziHero is the only platform that offers a full Marilyn Method powered system that is free to start. So trying HanziHero for free is a great place to start!

We’ve gone through the trouble of assigning associations to each of the ~100 pinyin parts. More than that, we’ve broken down over 3000 Chinese characters and made a story to each. Of course, you will also learn over 500 Chinese character components as well.

That comprehensive curriculum is bolstered and supercharged by our built in spaced repetition app. We also teach thousands of vocabulary words to help you best understand the meaning and pronunciation of each character and how they combine to form real words that Chinese speakers use.

If you have any questions or want to learn more, you can contact us directly via email or the chat widget .

Best of luck on your character learning journey! 😀

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