Synesthesia And Learning Chinese

I have synesthesia.  Specifically, I have associative color-grapheme synesthesia.  That means that when I envision letters and numbers (graphemes) in my head, they are colored.  A is red, B is purple, C is grey, D is blue, 1 is white, 2 is orange, 3 is light green, 4 is red, etc.  The colors have remained the same over time, for as long as I can remember.  "Associative" means  that I don't see the colors superimposed on written letters with my physical eyes, but they appear in my mind's eye.

I think one of the reasons I did well in school (reading was easy, math wasn't a total mystery, languages are fun to learn) is because I have a mnemonic device built into my brain!  Not only are letters and numbers formed of a bunch of little lines, but they are color coded!  When I do my job at the museum, for example, I take advantage of this, usually subconsiously.  I'm an art handler, so I'm always looking for objects and locations by number and letter.  If I have to find bracket 3B, for example, the colors light green and dark purple come to mind.  Scanning over the rows of brackets, my eyes will catch on the 3B because those graphemes almost immediately shoot my brain color signals which match the colors I was looking for.  (When I put it that way, it sounds more complicated than people who just see little clusters of lines, but whatever.)

Words work the same way.  A word is a collection of letters (obviously) and my brain picks out certain "dominant" colors or the colors of "dominant" letters from a word.  Thus a word like "phone" creates a mainly orange-brown impression from the "ph" combo at the beginning even though the "n" is quite green.  The "o" and the "e" hardly register at all since they are neutral colors; creamy yellow white and palest yellow green, respectively.  The word "rose" is handily colored like an actual rose, since "r" is fushia red and "s" is deep green.  The word "drink" is odd because the "k" sticks out, even though the "dr" is mostly dominant.  It becomes a veritable rainbow of blue, red, green and brown, though if I think about it quickly, the d's blue stands out the most.

Numbers are unique because each number has an Arabic numeral and a written-out spelling of that numeral.  "5" and "five".  The colors of the numerals are dominant over the words.  "5" is very clearly a bold, almost-navy blue, and so is the word "five", even though, when I think carefully about it, "f" is a forest green, and "v" is a shade of silver (again, the vowels are nondescript).  Not sure why the numbers are dominant.  Maybe I learned them first as a kid?  Maybe because they are mono-graphemic.

This has all come to the forefront of my mind recently because I've been learning Chinese.  It's a really hard language to learn.  Like, really really hard.
Firstly, the grammar is really easy.  Which is hard!  I'm used to all kinds of rules and structures!  I learned German, for heaven's sake.  Conjugations, declensions, AND genders.  It was marvelously complicated!  Chinese is confusingly simple.
Second, Chinese has four tones that you must vocalize as you are speaking the words.  First tone is a straight high pitch, second is rising, third dips down and back up, and fourth is an almost staccato downward sound.  These tones change the meanings of words.  Like a lot.
The final difficulty to Chinese is reading and writing Chinese characters.  Who ever thought that a non-phonetic system where each symbol stood for a completely different word was a good idea???  I can't read anything unless I have memorized the symbol.  I can't sound anything out!  You just have to already know!  Or have a dictionary handy.  So far, this first semester of Chinese, I think I have learned about 300 words.  That's 300 sound combinations + differentiating tones + UNIQUE characters!!!

It's hard.

And my synesthesia hasn't caught up.  I'm so used to seeing words and letters in color, that Chinese characters throw me for a complete loop!  I don't have associated colors for the thousands and thousands of unique non-phonetic identifiers!  How am I supposed to learn things without colors to help me?!?!

Chinese characters, as I mentioned, are not phonetic, but there is a system of romanization of the words to make learning easier for Chinese children and foreigners alike.  It's called "pinyin".  Pinyin is written with the familiar Latin alphabet, so it is colorful in my head!  Will Chinese characters remain black and white to me?  I'm already detecting hints of color when I picture them, so I can't quite imagine that happening, but how will it work??

My questions are these:

• Will my brain come up with colors for the four tones?  
• Will it come up with colors for the characters and the radicals (building block characters that go together to make other characters)?
• If radicals have their own colors, will characters made of combined radicals be multicolored?  Will they, like words, have "dominant" colors?
• Or will the colors of the pinyin spellings "bleed" onto the characters so that they are colored phonetically?
• For numbers, will my Arabic numeral (1, 2, 3, etc) colors "bleed" onto the Chinese numerals?  Or will the pinyin of the Chinese numbers determine the color of the characters for the Chinese numbers?

I am fascinated.  I'm going to check back in a couple months and see what my brain has been up to.  Don't mind me if this is boring.