I had a problem with remembering if i should use long or short version of final with parentheses.
The idea is if i need to use the short version for example like in 休 xiu1 xi + (o)u i modify the mnemonic using words like ‘short’ or ‘small’ to remember that i need to use shorter version.
Xena is resting under ‘small’ tree
Slenderman has a ‘short’ baguette
The rest is only ‘short’
I hope it will help
Another problem that I haven’t solved yet is when we use the Home -_ final, we add letter ‘u’ or ’i’ to the initial.
Nice tip! I would be curious of others’ experience – I think over time you get a feel for the conversions implicitly, e.g. when combining xi- + -(e)ng you just know it converts to xing after enough exposure but I can see this tip helping you become familiar a lot more quickly!
You can view the cases when this occurs on the pinyin chart. I think you can boil it down to two cases
The initial terminates with an h – e.g. ch-, zh-, sh-
It’s a single letter initial which doesn’t have an ‘i’ sibling – e.g. y-, z-. c-, r-
The only case where the initial + -_ ends with u is the w- sound item. it’s just an exception. Our pinyin system has gone through some changes since we made w- + -_ = wu. One of those changes was in fact the -(o)u final, it was previously -ou (no parentheses).
So I can see an argument for getting rid of this w- + -_ exception! There can either be another pinyin initial to capture this odd case, so we split it out into w- and wu-, or we instead make it w- + -(o)u = wu. It would require changing roughly ~50 characters. We’ll give it some thought
but I can see this tip helping you become familiar a lot more quickly!