Take this with a grain of salt, as I have only encountered two examples so far: 休克 and 卡通. Why does the mnemonic not mention that these are loans from english ‘shock’ and ‘cartoon’? I understand wanting to consistently employ the meanings of characters in mnemonics but I think it merits at least a mention. It’s not always obvious that something is an English loanword in Mandarin, but once it’s pointed out the connection is more clear and can be used as a memory aid.
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Yeah, knowing they’re loanwords definitely helps in remembering the pronunciation and evening the meaning there may be some loanwords which don’t have this, but sometimes we add a note to point out when it is a loan, such as in the case of humor – putting it in the mnemonic could be a valid way to do it, but calling it out like this in the note section hopefully helps enough!
We’ll scan through and see if there are any other loanwords we can similarly add a note to
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