Learn Chinese 

with comics and movies

Learn Chinese characters with comics

Mnemonics are one of the best ways to learn and remember Chinese characters. Mnemonic comics take the concept to the next level!

The challenge: The character "勺" is proncounced "shao2" and is translated as "spoon" or "ladle". It's made up of the characters "勹" and "丶". That's a lot of information to remember!

The solution: All of this information is encoded in a ridiculous, cringy comic. If you can remember a comic panel, you can remember Chinese characters!

Find out how or Visit the first comic

Most recent mnemonic comic: 西

Translation for 西, pronounced xī = xi + Ø1: the West / abbr. for Spain 西班牙[Xi1 ban1 ya2] / Spanish

Mnemonic story: Mnemonic symbol: for "the wild west" I choose a cowboy hat. To me, 西 also kind of looks like a cowboy hat: 囗 looks like the brim and 兀 looks like the crown of the cowboy hat. Xi Shi (xi) went crazy from the loneliness in outer space. In front of the space station (Ø1), she sits inside of a large plastic enclosure (囗), wearing a cowboy hat (西) and playing a 胡兀尔 (兀) fiddle, thinking that she's participating in a square dance in the wild west (西).

Visit the most recent comic

Learn Chinese characters with movies

New information is best learned in context. Reviewing Chinese characters in isolation does not provide any context on how to use a character. Instead, watch movies with sentences showing you how to actually use a Chinese character!

MandarinBanana tracks your learning progress for each Chinese character. If it's time to review, MandarinBanana prefers to show you a sentence containing the character instead of just the character in isolation.

Go to the movies

Review effectively

Spaced repetition is one of the key elements of remembering Chinese characters. There are some basic principles you'd want to follow when reviewing Chinese characters:

• Review due components before due characters they appear in.
• Review due characters before due words they appear in.
• Prefer reviewing characters in sentences instead of in isolation.

If you forget a Chinese character, you'd probably want to follow these principles:

• Review all the components it's made up of.
• Review all Chineses characters you know that use this character as a component.
• Review all compound words you know this character is used in.

MandarinBanana takes care of all of this for you.

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