The logical solution, then, is to use a mnemonic system not totally based on etymology. There are two approaches to this. One could take the “semi-etymological” approach to mnemonics by using the real Chinese meanings of the character components in mnemonic devices. For some characters, this is not hard to do at all. Your mnemonic may very well be very similar to the logic of the character etymology. In this case, etymology is your ally. For other characters, however, this proves quite ineffective.

I think that this concept of devising a self-consistent mnemonic system for remembering Chinese characters is the holy grail of Chinese character pedagogy.

Best regards,
John from Mnemonic Devices – The Revision Guy

I understand your frustration with this phenomenon, but I would like to submit that there is hope. One of my colleagues in Kunming did quite a lot of work with his students’ intonation and it seemed to help many of them. Your comment inspired me to try to find some intonation resources for students of English to add to my burgeoning English Tools website, but alas, I haven’t found any good ones yet.

This has the effect of making the speaker sound unatached to what they are saying, worse still making the speaker seem permanently pissed off.
When an Italian learns English it often sounds sexy because of the way they bring their speech patterns from Italian to English. When a Chinese person learns English it just sounds shite.
Trying to explain that they will sound more fluent if they learn the tones is like trying to convince the Chinese not to slurp soup or clear their nose out with the aid of a hankerchief…. Not going to happen.

Slurp, slurp, Chinese have tone, Engrish no tone, sluuuurp!