alexpgp | In medias res...

From Jonathan D. Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci:

One can sense a reason for Ricci's emotional language: if Chinese had "as many letters [i.e., ideographs] as there are words or things" and if one could learn quite swiftly to subdivide each ideograph into component parts, each of which also had a separate meaning, then it would be easy for someone well trained in mnemonic art to make each ideograph into a memory image. This process was speeded by the fact that Chinese made an encouraging contrast with Greek grammar, which Ricci had been unhappily trying to teach for some years in India. Unlike Greek sentences, which had to be remembered in all their detailed complexity, a Chinese sentence could be presented in sharp detail as a series of images: as Ricci observed, "What is of help in all this is that their words have no articles, no cases, no number, no gender, no tense, no mood; they just solve their problems with certain adverbial forms which can be explained very easily."

Just so one doesn't get the wrong impression, Spence immediately goes on to say it took Ricci another dozen years of focusing his prodigious mental powers on learning Chinese before he got to the point where he could explain his methods in Chinese.

Still, Spence's is an interesting observation about both mnemonics and the Chinese language.

Cheers...