I've recently been using the Dominic System for creating tone mnemonics, and it seems to be quite helpful.

For those who aren't familiar with it, the Dominic System creates mnemonics from two-digit numbers by associating each digit with a letter and each two-digit number with a person (typically someone with those initials). See

http://www.ludism.org/mentat/DominicSystem

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_dominic_system

for more details.

I am using this as follows: each tone is a number 1-5, so to remember the tones in 有期徒刑 yǒuqītúxíng "set term of imprisonment" I have to remember 3122, which is CABB translated into letters. For me, CA is Christina Applegate, while BB is Mr. T (B.A. Baracus), so this becomes the mnemonic "*Christina Applegate pities the fool* as she _sets_ his _term of imprisonment_". (The Dominic System is actually overkill for tones, as you only need the digits 1 through 5, but I'm using it for other things as well.)

Just like using character composition mnemonics, this helps mostly in the initial phase when you're learning a brand-new item. However, it's unfortunately quite personal as the Dominic System requires everyone to invent their own mnemonics for the numbers 0-99, so I can't share these mnemonics.

James

Interesting. What kinds of other things are you using the Dominic System for? I prefer just doing tone reviews as fast as possible, but I'm also interested in memorizing all sorts of other knowledge, which this sounds useful for.

I'm using it to remember credit card numbers, bank routing numbers, my wife's Social Security number, the passcodes for various doors, anything that can be encoded in numbers really.

Maybe it has to do with my lack of conversation practice, but I find I have to repeat the tone prompts quite a few times to learn them initially, and the mnemonics drastically speed up that phase.

James

I will have to bookmark this as another thing to check out when I actually have a some spare time. Looks interesting!

Ah, that's better than my system of just trying to memorize them straight up in Anki! I can get most of them eventually, but it would probably be much faster with mnemonics like you describe.

Is there a system whereby you do triplets of numbers instead of pairs?

@nick I haven't seen one. The problem there is you'd need to memorize 1,000 associations. I think it's easier to memorize a smaller number and then combine them.

If someone really wanted to have a system specifically for tones, they would probably be better off using something a little more specifically oriented towards tones. Since there are five tones, you need at least 125 combinations to memorize three-tone sequences. I would probably do it by making up mnemonics for the numbers 1 through 5, 11-15, 21-25, etc. up to 51-55 (30 mnemonics in all), each with a person, action, and object. (You could still use the Dominic System's idea of initials to help you remember who goes with what number.) Then you could handle three- and four-tone sequences with combinations of one- and two-tone mnemonics.

James