I’ve been up all night doing Chinese, because I couldn’t tear myself away.

Because I am memorising all these characters, using the Heisig method (I’m nominally up to 250 characters now), I’m very interested in memory aids and techniques. Some people use a coded system of four colours to remember the different tones (dīng versus dǐng, or mó versus mò).

I don’t usually have a problem remembering tones as there aren’t many of them and they are quite easy to append some meaning to, for the purpose of latching on to existing mnemonics. First tone signifies brightness or clarity, second tone is a question, third tone is something that happens over a long period of time and fourth tone is assertive or even angry.

Something I do have more trouble with, though, is remembering consonants. Sometimes I get confused between shi and zhi or between xiao, shao, zhao and chao. The sounds of Mandarin syllables are unfamiliar to an English-speaking beginner and there isn’t much in my existing memory or library of mnemonics that can attach itself successfully to linguistic fragments such as zh-.

I wondered if I could use a colour coded system for consonants. I looked up how many there are in Chinese and there are 24, if you include words that don’t have a consonant.

I have a pretty retentive memory and I can remember 24 colours. So I started to categorise all the characters I’ve learned so far by assigning a colour to each consonant and this was the result.

I am so excited by this, the colours fix themselves in my mind with only the slightest encouragement and I am optimistic that it will help me to retain many more characters as I work through Heisig. I made some character maps in Powerpoint, I can move the characters around on the page and grouped them together in a rudimentary fashion where I can see they have things in common.