The Cantonese pronunciation trainer asks, "What's an example Hanzi that uses this primitive?" We often get two questions related to this:
- If the Hanzi uses the primitive or radicals that you haven't studied yet, would you just skip until the missing part comes about or try to learn it anyway
- Would you try to remember the Jyutping at this stage, or add cards to help with this, or treat it a bit more as an illustration in the background and not focus on that part?
Building up even super loose associations between the radical and some practical use of that radical can be really helpful in retaining it and seeing how it can fit into a larger character. So we’d say that it’s worth spending a little time thinking about/memorizing one association. That definitely doesn’t mean that you should spend time trying to memorize that entire Hanzi character – but if you can remember that 水 (water) shows up in 尿 (urine), even if you can remember the upper, corpse character, then that’s all you really need to help cement 水.
In relation to the second question, no, we wouldn't. When learning radicals, that’s just an illustration in the background that might become more active as you start learning that same vocabulary, later on. Don’t worry about memorizing that at this stage.
We’d use POA stuff (probably an object mnemonic, specifically, since objects tend to link best to basically all word types).