I've been trying my best to combat this sort of thing recently but I couldn't really find a good way to solve this sort of problem I have when memorizing Chinese characters whose original meaning is completely unrelated to the modern one, or characters with phonetic loans (e.g. 不 "ori. calyx, borrowed to mean no/not", 叚 "ori. whetstone, borrowed to mean borrow; false", 又 "ori. right hand, borrowed to mean again", 它 "ori. snake, borrowed to mean it; other").
An example that I can think of is 各 (gé/each, individually, every, all; originally depicting a foot (夂) entering an opening/entrace (口)), in which the original meaning for that character is "to arrive" and was later phonetically borrowed to mean "each, every".
With keeping that in mind, I tried many ways to memorize this kind of thing. For example, I've tried making my own semantic extension attempting to connect the meanings together:
(Original meaning is in italics, Modern meaning is in bold)
- to arrive -> guests arrives at the building -> each/every (guest that arrives)
Here I don't think this personally works because if I go for this kind of method, then I would just be making stuff up on the spot basically creating folk etymology.
Another one I've tried for example is the classic mnemonic story method:
- When the guests arrived, each/every guest was greeted by the host.
In which this one kind of doesn't work for me since I like to keep all my mnemonics sort of logical and things that make sense in a way. I tried this classic mnemonic story method for other characters with the phonetic loans but the stories most of the time doesn't make sense when I use this method.
So if anyone has any recommendations, is there a way I could memorize the original meaning and connect it to modern meaning?
P.S: I know for a fact I always study the modern meaning first before the original one but I'm asking here since I like to study my characters with their actual glyph origin.